5a RENAISSANCES

literatures which provide these 'dead' langnages with their librettos
for catching the eye of the audience of clciif unites that confronts them
when they reappear on the stage of History. l)o\vn to tin* time of writing,
the hard labour of recapturing a 'dead' language hjul seldom been under-
taken except for the sake of regaining access to monuments oi literature
in which this language had been enshrined;1 and the usual course of a
literary renaissance had been a series of steps towards a ^>al which
was not the interpreter's tour deforced speaking a dead lanjj;u;i^« us it
had originally been spoken, but the scribe's tour deforce of writing it as
it had originally been written.

The first step in this arduous and unpromising enterprise was to
retrieve the dead literature's remains; the second step was to remaster
their meaning; the third step was to reproduce them in counterfeits
which might be mistaken for maliciously adroit parodies if they were not
patently inspired by a superstitious reverence for the- originals which
convicts them of being solemnly clumsy tributes of admiration.* In our
survey of renaissances in this field, it will be convenient to follow
gradatim in the footsteps of the literary necromancers whose procedure
is the present object of our curiosity; but, as we investigate the three
stages of this procedure in their historical order, it will become evident
that they overlap with one another in the Time-dimension, and also that
they are distinguished from one another by differences that are not mere
corollaries of their chronological sequence.

For instance, when we corne to look at the attempts to reproduce a
'classical' literature, we shall find that these imitative works of art,
uninspired and uninspiring though they may be, do genuinely have at
least one thing in common with their originals. Like these, they are the
personal creations of individual human beings, not the mechanically
assembled products of collective man-power. On the other hand we whall
find team-work counting for more, and individual enterprise for less, in
the execution of the preliminary and preparatory tasks of scholarship.

It is true that, here too, we shall meet with culture-heroes who have
performed prodigies single-handed. The type is well exemplified in
Photius (vivebat circa A.D. 820-91), the pioneer Orthodox Christian
explorer of an Hellenic literature which, fora nascent Orthodox Chris-
tian Society, had been a terra incognita during a social interregnum that,
on the cultural plane, had held the field continuously lor two eenturiea
down to Photius's own generation. The failure of the historical record t»
name anyone who was Photius's teacher is as eloquent UH is its catalogue
of his goodly company of pupils,3 His Library (Vwlwthlki) or Ifast ttf
Books (Myriovivlori) became a mine of information for later Orthodox

1 It is true that in(the Modern Western World there htul hwn Ncvfral HUrmptt—
which, down to the time of writing, had met with tUymt* tlrnrwM itf utuvm -1«> re-
animate a 'dead' language viva vpce as well fl» in th« virtual medium of Kvriju, Sttmr «f
these experiments have been noticed in this Htudv already in V, vi, 6gt -71,

* In the realm of the Fine Arts the faculty of rmmfisjH is, of t'ourmt,«twti»tulK?tt aworti
which can be mad<2 to serve either as the swcpreat form of flattery or AN thr ilrtttlUeitt
form of exposure. The choice between thes« opposite use* in tlctrmunnl, u«t Uy my
variation in the nature of the weapon, but by a UttTerciwe in th* temper *>f its wit*Ul?r,

3 This point is made by Krumbacher, K,: Getchichte tier tiyxttntifiw'hvn Mtfratw*
znd ed. (Munich 1897, Beck), p. 515.