73	RENAISSANCES
these points in common between Ikhnaton's act and Dante's bring out
all the more sharply the contrast between the respective relations in
which these two men of genius stood to their social milieux,
Ikhnaton was spiritually at war with the ethos of the Past-ridden
society into which he had been born; and, in this milieu^ the weight of
the incubus was so crushingly heavy that a would-be saviour of society
could not afford to compromise. If he was to win any relief from pressure
for his contemporaries and for Posterity, he could only hope to succeed
by rejecting the Past in toto. By contrast, Dante was not faced with this
desperate choice between two extreme alternatives. Living, us he had the
good fortune to live, in an age of Western history in which the pressure
of a resurgent Hellenism happened to be down in the trough between
the sundered crests of a Carolingian wave that had already receded and a
Medicean wave that was still beyond a fourteenth-century1 Florentine
poet's temporal horizon, Dante was able to achieve his life-work as an
exponent of the Zeitgeist instead of being forced, as Ikhnaton found him-
self forced, to resort to the hazardous ultima ratio of declaring war on it.
Dante was able to express the spirit of his world and age by combining
the cultivation of a vernacular poetry with a cult for a resuscitated Hel-
lenic cultural past. He contrived—and this without strain, because with-
out selfconsciousness—to be the exponent of a renaissance and of a new
life simultaneously. And his ability to achieve this magically creative
harmony was at least partly due to the auspicious fact that, in the Italy
of his age, at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the
Christian Era, the influence of a resuscitated Hellenic culture was not
overwhelmingly potent.
The impotence of this ghost to stifle the growth of a new and original
culture that was springing up under its shadow is revealed in the success
with which the living creature turned the tables on the rmwtant from
a dead world; for in this case the spectre was dexterously captivated by
its intended victim. When we examine the poetry composed in Latin in
Western Christendom from the turn of the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies onward, we hear the accents of Jacob's voice while we are feeling
the hands of Esau.1 This medieval Latin poetry, as it was written from
the twelfth century to the fifteenth, may be described not inaptly as
vernacular poetry masquerading in a Latin dress. Though the words are
Latin, the rhythm, rhyme, sentiment, and je~ne-$ai$~quoi of this osten-
sibly Latin poetry have all been breathed into it by the creative spirit of
a contemporary Western literature in the vulgar tongue*—as Man be-
came a living soul when the breath of life was breathedby the Lord God
into a receptacle that he had formed of the dust of the ground.3 And,
when fifteenth-century Italian Humanists, in their injudiciously pedan-
tic enthusiasm for a genuinely Hellenic article, proved clever enough to
1	Gen. xxvii. az.
2	Pn thi? P?"* see H- °; Taylor: The Mediaeval Mind (London xyii, Mirmill*n,
a vols.), vol. a, p. 154. In thxs connexion it is signiacant that the quarter of W«J»tem
Christendom m which the finest works of Medieval Latin poetry were produced wa* *
region lying to the north of the Loire, in what had been the north-western fringe! of an
Hellenic World of the Imperial Age, and not any of the Rom»nce-«petkin« etnmtrJet
adjoining a Mediterranean Sea that had once been the Roman Empir«'i mart nostrum
(see ibid., p. i2a).	**    ,, Gen jj  7