But Lisbon is a country in itself, divorced in many ways from the rest of Portugal. The Portuguese provinces present many differences of character among their inhabitants, from the lively chattering algarvio in the south to the duller, quietly poetical and dreamy minhoto on the border of Galicia, unfairly described by Oliveira Martins as “without elevation of spirit, dense, the Dutch of Portugal,” the fervent, hardy beirão mountaineer or the stolid farmers of Alemtejo.
Taking the character of the Portuguese as a whole, its main feature seems to be vagueness. Their minds are not inductive.
General Character.
They think in generalities and abstractions, and their deductions often have a closer relation to these than to the facts of life. No doubt the dreamy climate (King Duarte in the fifteenth century noted the effect of climate on character), the misty blue skies and wide sea horizons have exercised as much influence on the character of the inhabitants as the many foreign ingredients, the uncertain land boundaries, the fear of attacks from the sea, the indefinite dangers of earthquake and plague. Everywhere in Portugal is this lack of precision evident, in the fondness for abstractions and unsubstantial grandeur, the counting in réis (most transactions continue to be made in réis, which though apparently clumsy is really simpler than the new system of centavos—10 réis—and escudos—1,000 réis), the love of the lottery, the perpetual tendency to exaggerate, the inexhaustible and vague good-nature which some more direct minds find so trying, the facile criticism which encourages the existence of too many poets, politicians and other nonentities, the absence of discipline, the belief in the efficacy of words and rhetoric, the idle expectation of better things, the sebastianismo which looks for the return of the ill-fated king—a later Arthur—“on a morning of thick mist”—the universal cult of undefined melancholy and saudade. The French saying, “Les portugais sont toujours gais,” should be rendered—
Nos labios chistes,
No coração tristes.
(On their lips a smile,
Sad at heart the while.)
“Saudade.”