LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 51

subject to the distorting gravitational pulls of Date or Locality. Under
these conditions the odds are even. The ghostly invader has just as good
a chance as the living defender of an open city to be awarded the crown
of victory by the suffrages of the living generation of the society in whose
life the combat is taking place. In the emotional depths of their spiritual
experience, in which they are citizens of a Commonwealth of the Sub-
conscious which has likewise been the spiritual home of every other
human being who has ever lived—whatever may have been the parti-
cular time and place of his conscious volitional life on the surface of
human existence- the voters in the forum have no closer affinity and no
more compelling obligation to the literature or visual art that they hap-
pen to have created for themselves out of the Primordial Images than
they have to the arts which their predecessors, in their day, have created
out of the same abiding and ubiquitous psychic hyU, On the plane of the
Subconscious it is incontestably true that nihilhumanum is alimum from
any human soul,1

The considerations which we have just set out will perhaps suffice to
explain why it is that rwenantes literatures and visual arts present such
markedly ambivalent appearances an4 arouse such bitterly violent and
stubborn controversies; and we may now pass on from this preface to a
review of the facts to which it applies.

The Resuscitation of a Classical Literature in an Anthology, Thesaurus, or

Encyclopaedia

A survey of renaissances of languages and literatures that require
resuscitation because they are 'dead', and demand it on the score of being
'classical*,* is in one respect easier to undertake than our foregoing surveys
of those living languages that have served as linguefranc/w* or as the official
languages of universal states4 or the liturgical languages of churches,5
and than our accompanying surveys of living literatures which have used
those living languages as their media. A living language has a life of its
own; for it is not only ex hypothcsi 'a going concern1 before the birth
of any literature that may eventually employ this living language as its
medium; it may also continue thereafter to go its own way in the vocal
and audible realm of the tongue and the ear on lines independent of its
literary career in the scriven and legible realm of the penman's hand and
the readers eye into which it has now been translated, This original
relation between a literature that uses a language and the language that
is used by this literature is inverted when the gliosts of the same litera-
ture and same language are raised from the dead; for the ghost of a
language can haunt the living woVld only as a parasite on the ghost of a
literature which will originally have been an excrescence on the language
in the days when the two have both been alive; and therefore, in surveying
the renaissances of languages and literatures, we need not, and indeed
cannot, deal with the revcntintes languages apart from the revenantes

* Terence: ffaut(mtimorwnetmst Act I, scene I, lin« 25,

a An attempt to define the tlintinctivc characteristic* of a 'dfumlcal' language and
literature in made on pp. 705^-17. below, * Hee V. vi, 65-83,

4 See VI, vii, «3y~S3. * &*«« VI, vii. a$3~s.