If we look deeper, what reveals itself to us in this? A characteristic which is to a certain extent distinctive of many of the French Romanticists, and which may be most briefly expressed thus: French Romanticism, in spite of all the elements it has in common with general European Romanticism, is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product of classic French rhetoric. Words undergo strange vicissitudes in this world of ours. When the word _romantic_ was introduced into Germany it signified almost the same as Romanesque; it meant Romanesque flourishes and conceits, sonnets and canzonets; the Romanticists were enthusiastic admirers of the Roman Catholic Church and of the great Romanesque poet Calderon, whose works they discovered and translated and lauded. When, a century later, Romanticism reached France, the same word meant exactly the opposite thing--it meant the German-English tendency as opposed to the Greco-Latin Romanesque tendency; it meant Teutonic. The simple explanation of this is, that whatever is strange and foreign produces a romantic impression. The art and literature of a people of a homogeneous civilisation and culture, like the ancient Greeks, are classic; but when one civilised, cultured nation discovers another civilisation and culture which seem to it strange and wonderful, it is at once impressed by it as romantic, is affected by it as by a landscape seen through coloured glass. The Romanticists of France despised their own national excellences, the perspicuity and rational transparency of their own literature, and extolled Shakespeare and Goethe because these poets did not, like Racine and, to a certain extent, Corneille, break up human life into its separate elements, did not represent isolated emotions and passions which offered dramatic contrasts, but, without any rhetorical recurrence to the fundamental elements, flung real human life on the stage in all its complex cohesion. The Frenchmen determined to follow this great example.