ANTAEUS AND ATLAS	153
spicuous by comparison with the portentousness of the Atlantean re-
action to a ninth-century renaissance of Hellenism in a Greek Orthodox
Christendom; for here, as we have seen, the recultivation of the Ancient
Greek classics stifled, instead of stimulating, the growth of a literature
in a living Modern Greek language. The few stunted shoots that had
succeeded in forcing their way up in competition with the choking
thorns1 of a resurgent Hellenism would hardly have survived if the field
had not been drastically ploughed up again by aggressive Western
trespassers. A Modern Greek vernacular literature held its own—as far
as it did hold its own—against Byzantinism at the price of following a
Western lead; and, in the latest chapter of the history of this Graeco-
Occidental cultural intercourse, the archaizing Romanticism in which
the indigenous vernacular literatures of a Late Modern Western World
had proclaimed their self-enslavement to the service of a parochial
Nationalism was caricatured in a new-born Kingdom of Greece by the
perpetration of the KaQapevovaa. A Modern Greek people that had just
liberated itself from an Ottoman political ascendancy promptly used its
newly won powers of self-determination to put its Modern Greek
mother tongue in Ancient Greek irons.
If this Atlantean reaction to a renaissance of Hellenism in Greek
Orthodox Christendom carried to extremes an Atlantean tendency that
is likewise discernible in the Western response to a challenge from the
same revenant, the whole-heartedly Antaean rebound of the living
vernacular languages of the Hindu World from their contact with a
maternal Sanskrit is offset by the hyper-Byzantine stance of the Chinese
main body of a Far Eastern World under the petrifying Gorgon stare
of the resuscitated Sinic classics. It will be seen that the field of Language
and Literature, like the field of Religion, was a debatable ground on
which an Antaean-minded Ivanov and an Atlantean-minded Gershenson
had fought inconclusive battles.
When we turn to Politics and the Visual Arts, we here find the
Atlantean reaction holding the field, save for one or two cases of am-
bivalence.
The classic political examples of the Atlantean stance are the avatars
of an antecedent civilization's universal state in the shapes of the Sui
and T'ang Empire in the Chinese main body of a Far Eastern World,
the East Roman Empire in a Greek Orthodox Christendom, and the
Cairene Caliphate in an Arabic Muslim World; and, if the Danubian
Hapsburg Monarchy, the Carolingian and Timurid empires, and the
caricature of a Chinese T'ang regime in the Far Eastern Civilization's
Japanese offshoot failed to play the same disastrously momentous part
in the histories of the Western Christian, Iranic Muslim, and Japanese
societies, this was merely because the Danubian Monarchy never suc-
ceeded in making itself more than nominally oecumenical,2 while the
* Matt, xiii, 7; Luke viii. 7«
3 See V. v. 325-7. The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy had been called into existence
after the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary in a.d. 1536 to serve as a carapace for
protecting the south-eastern land-frontier of the Western World against Ottoman aggres-
sion (see II. ii. 177-88); a union of the remnant of Hungary with the lands of the
Bohemian Crown and with the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg proved