It is idle for any wideawake observer to deny that a certain antipathy exists between the French and the Italians.  Both, I think, generally prefer the British to their Latin brothers, and I have heard both say unjust and absurdly untrue things about the other.  Their antipathy is rooted partly in temperament, partly in history, and partly in that ignorance and lack of understanding which accounts for nine-tenths of all international antipathies.  As Charles Lamb said, in an anecdote which President Wilson is fond of quoting, “I cannot hate a man I know.”  It is sometimes said that the French and the Italians are too much alike to be in perfect sympathy.  The Frenchman has at times an instinct to be what an Englishman would call “theatrical,” which instinct the Englishman himself hardly possesses at all.  But in the Italian this instinct is even stronger than in the Frenchman, and he gives it freer play.  Thus the Frenchman often notices the Italian doing and saying things which he himself dislikes, but which it needs a deliberate effort of self-repression on his part not to imitate.  The Englishman has no inclination to do and say such things, and is, therefore, more tolerant of them than the Frenchman, thinking them either charming or merely “queer,” according to his temperament.

If the French are the more admirable, the Italians are the more lovable; if the French are the more creative, the Italians are the more receptive.  In the French, though not so much in the Italians, one does find that “sheer brutality of the Latin intellect,” which, since the French Revolution, has dethroned many previously dominant ideas and institutions.  One finds in the French a tradition of limpid precision, of concise and ordered logic, while the Italians are still groping rather turgidly among those great abstract ideas which the French handle so easily.  The spirit of France shines with the hard splendour of the noonday sun, of Italy with the soft radiance of the light of early mornings and late afternoons.

The French are proud and sometimes intolerant, the Italians tolerant and often diffident.  It has been truly said that in every modern Frenchman there is still something Napoleonic, however subconscious it may have become.  One could never be surprised if, in the midst of conversation, a Frenchman should suddenly draw himself up and cry “Vive la France, monsieur!” But one does not expect an Italian in like circumstances to cry “Viva l’Italia!” In general, the French are the more tenacious and clear-visioned in adversity, but none are more irresistible in success, nor more conscious of its drama, than the Italians.