Herder indeed expands primitivism along these lines into a whole philosophy of history. The romantic notion of the origin of the epic springs out of this soil, a notion that is probably at least as remote from the facts as the neo-classical notion--and that is saying a great deal. Any German who followed Herder in the extension that he gave to Rousseau’s views about genius and spontaneity could not only see the folk soul mirrored at least as naïvely in the “Nibelungenlied” as in the “Iliad,” but by becoming a mediæval enthusiast he could have the superadded pleasure of indulging not merely personal but racial and national idiosyncrasy. Primitivistic mediævalism is therefore an important ingredient, especially in the case of Germany, in romantic nationalism--the type that has flourished beyond all measure during the past century. Again, though one might, like Hölderlin, cherish an infinite longing for the Greeks, the Greeks themselves, at least the Greeks of Schiller, did not experience longing; but this fact came to be felt more and more by F. Schlegel and other romanticists as an inferiority, showing as it did that they were content with the finite. As for the neo-classicists who were supposed to be the followers of the Greeks, their case was even worse; they not only lacked aspiration and infinitude, but were sunk in artificiality, and had moreover become so analytical that they must perforce see things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.” The men of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, as F. Schlegel saw them, were superior to the neo-classicists in being naïve; their spontaneity and unity of feeling had not yet suffered from artificiality, or been disintegrated by analysis.[68] At the same time they were superior to the Greeks in having aspiration and the sense of the infinite. The very irregularity of their art testified to this infinitude. It is not uncommon in the romantic movement thus to assume that because one has very little form one must therefore have a great deal of “soul.” F. Schlegel so extended his definition of the mediæval spirit as to make it include writers like Shakespeare and Cervantes, who seemed to him to be vital and free from formalism. The new nationalism was also made to turn to the profit of the Middle Ages. Each nation in shaking off the yoke of classical imitation and getting back to its mediæval past, was recovering what was primitive in its own genius, was substituting what was indigenous for what was alien to it. The person who did more than any one else to give international currency to the views of the Schlegels about classic and romantic and to their primitivistic mediævalism was Madame de Staël in her book on Germany. It was with special reference to Madame de Staël and her influence that Daunou wrote the following passage in his introduction to La Harpe, a passage that gives curious evidence of the early attitude of French literary conservatives towards the new school: