LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 71

of the linguistic and literary renaissance of Hellenism in the West and
the uninterrupted progress of the corresponding renaissances in Greek
Orthodox Christendom and in China; for the interruptions of the
importunate activity of a ghost of the Hellenic culture in the West
were so many opportunities for an original literature in the living
vernacular languages of the Western peoples to spring up too high to be
overshadowed, and strike root too deeply to be overthrown, when a
temporarily banished spectre returned to try once again to captivate the
Western World after a spell of quiescence following the failure of its first
attempt. The new native Western poetry in the vulgar tongue had dis-
carded an Hellenic mode of versification based on the quantitative value
of syllables in favour of a mode, based on the accentuation of words, which
was the natural mode for poetry in the living Romance1 and Teutonic
languages of the Western Christian peoples; and this native Western
accentual verse had been enriched by the adoption of a contemporary
Arabic poetry's device of rhyme, which was alien to the literary tradition
of the Hellenic World and Western Christendom alike.2 Yet, revolution-
ary as this Western new departure was, its triumph was portended in the
success of the rhymed accentual Proven9al poetry of the troubadours,
and was assured when Dante made his historic decision to indite his
Divina Commedia, not in Latin hexameters, but in rhymed accentual
poetry in which he correctly took the troubadours' cue by using as his
linguistic medium, not the troubadours' Provensal, but a Tuscan that
was his own mother tongue.

It is true that the moral courage and aesthetic imagination here dis-
played by Dante had their counterparts, in the history of another civili-
zation, in Ikhnaton's decision to discard, in favour of a living New Egyp-
tian language, the long since dead Classical Egyptian which, down to
Ikhnaton's day, had continued to be the obligatory medium of literary
expression in the Egyptiac World because once, some 1,500 years before
Ikhnaton's generation, this had been the living language of that world
in the Age of 'the Old Kingdom*. It is also significant that, of all the
sweeping reforms that Ikhnaton tried to impose upon the Egyptiac
Society of his day, this linguistic reform alone survived his death.3 Yet

1 The natural bent of the Romance languages towards accentual, as opposed to
quantitative, verse was part of their heritage from Latin. The 'Saturnian' verse of the
oldest surviving specimens of Latin literature had been based on accent, not on quantity;
and, although part of the price of the Romans' 'reception.' of the Hellenic culture had
been the banishment of this pristine native mode of Latin verse from the 'high-brow'
Hellenizing Latin poetry of the Classical Age, the constriction of so strongly accented
a. language as Latin in the strait-waistcoat of a quantitative verse, reflecting the alien
genius of Ancient Greek, could never—even in a Virgil's masterly hands—be anything
but a tour de force. The unnaturalness of this imposition of an Ancient Greek prosody
upon a Latin linguistic medium received its conclusive exposure when, some four cen-
turies after the 'Saturnian' mode of versification had been driven off the field, an
accentual prosody reasserted itself in a Christian Latin popular poetry produced by
poets who were more keenly concerned to express themselves in a way that would be
congenial to their public than they were to uphold any exotic literary canon.

2 While a Medieval Western vernacular poetry adopted from a contemporary Arabic
poetry the device of rhyme, which could be applied to accentual verse as readily as to
quantitative, it is noteworthy that the Medieval Western vernacular poets were not
inveigled by their admiration for their Arabic models into doing violence to the genius
of their own mother tongues by going on to borrow from the Arabic a quantitative basis
of versification which was common to the Arabic school and the Hellenic.

3 See V. v. 496, and cp. IV. iv. 413.