LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 63

of the Christian Era.1 By contrast, the Modern Western renaissance of an
Hellenic literature represented by the surviving remains of the Greek
and Latin Classics was exorcized by the native genius of the Western
Civilization, without the help of any alien cultural ally, in a Kulturkampf
between the respective champions of 'the Ancients' and 'the Moderns'
which resulted, before the close of the seventeenth century of the
Christian Era, in a decisive victory for an anti-Hellenic 'Counter-
Renaissance'.2

The abortive first attempt at a literary renaissance of Hellenism in
Western Christendom was coeval with the birth of the Western Chris-
tian Civilization itself. The insular prophet of the movement in Northum-
bria3 was the Venerable Bede of Jarrow (vimbat A.D. 673-735); its con-
tinental apostle in Carolingia was Alcuin of York (vivebat A.D. 735-804) ;4
and, before it was prematurely extinguished by a blast of barbarism
from Scandinavia, its exponents had not only begun to revive the Hel-
lenic literary culture in its Latin dress, but had even acquired a smat-
tering of the original Greek.5 Alcuin had dared to dream that, in
partnership with Charlemagne, he would be able to conjure up a ghost
of Athens on the soil of Frankland;6 but this Carolingian vision was as
fleeting as it was splendid; it had no sooner made this first momentary
epiphany than it vanished again without giving its dupes the time to
test it; and, when, after a seven-hundred-years-long night-watch,7 it was
recaptured at last, at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of
the Christian Era, by an exultant band of sanguine-minded Italian
Humanists,8 their longer hold upon it merely served to demonstrate that
its fabric was baseless, and that, in persistently clutching at this elusive
wraith of Hellenism, Homo Occidentals-WSLS courting the poignant frustra-
tion that Aeneas brought upon himself when he thrice endeavoured to
embrace the shade of Creiisa.9

1 See IX. viii. 182-4 and 324-30.

2 This Modern Western cultural civil war has been noticed in IV. iv. 363, with n. a.

3 An appreciation of this Northumbrian renaissance and a notice of its propagation

_______ .-,, ,_____......,_____-„ _______0... ,____Ion 1952,--------------

s The Carolingian Hellenists, such as they were, may have been the Irish Hellenists
teachers. At any rate, the Irish scholars who are known to have had some acquaintance
with Greek seem all to have been ninth-century Irish residents in Continental Western
Europe (see II. ii. 327, n. i).

6 Alcuin: Correspondence, Letter No. 170, addressed to Charlemagne (see Dawson,
op. cit., p. 71).

7 In a thirteenth-century University of Paris that was given over to the study of the
Aristotelian philosophy, the arts and belles lettres were despised; and, in a thirteenth-
century University of Oxford, Robert Grosseteste and his disciple Roger Bacon studied
Ancient Greek (see pp. 133—5, below), not with a view to gaining any wide acquaintance
with the Hellenic literature, but solely with an eye to a more accurate understanding of
the works of Aristotle and the Scriptures of the Christian Church. This was a revulsion
from the aftermath of a Carolingian literary renaissance which had left Western scholars
destitute of any source of knowledge beyond the Latin belles lettres that had been pre-
served in the West to serve as textbooks for grammar and rhetoric; but a shift of interest
from literature to metaphysics that was so marked in a twelfth-century and thirteenth-
century Transalpine Western Christendom had no counterpart in a contemporary Italy,
where, as we have seen (on pp. 31-34, above), the academically ablest minds turned in
this age to the study, not of the Aristotelian philosophy, but of the Civil and the Canon
Law {see Taylor, H. O.; The Mediaeval Mind (London 1911, Macmillan. a vols.),
•vol. ii, pp. 1x8-31). 8 See IV. iv. 375, n. i, and 363, n. i.

» Virgil: Aeneid, Book II, 11. 794-5.