LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 75

gulstic policy, they dared not live up to the ideals of the Western cul-
tural faith to which they had formally declared their allegiance. They
could not summon up the moral courage to take their own language as
they found it and to rely on their own literary genius to fashion this
language into a worthy instrument for conveying whatever they might
prove to have it in them to express. They chose the untoward alternative
course of taking refuge in the cultivation of a linguistic Archaism; and,
though they refrained from carrying this folly to the lengths to which
it had been carried by Byzantines who on paper had discarded their
living Modern Greek mother tongue altogether in favour of an artifi-
cially resuscitated Attic,1 the nineteenth-century Westernizing Greeks
did the next worst thing when, like callous manufacturers oifoie gras,
they set themselves to denature their mother tongue by grouting into it
as gross an infusion of the Attic Greek vocabulary, inflexion, and syntax
as they could compel a tortured living language to swallow.2

Thus, on the linguistic and literary plane, the Greeks' 'reception' of a
Modern Western culture, whose distinctive gift was to use living verna-
culars as its literary vehicles, had the paradoxical result of fettering a
living Greek language instead of liberating it.

The Sinic Classical Incubus on a Chinese Vernacular Literature

In the Chinese heart of a Far Eastern World, as in Greek Orthodox
Christendom, a popular literature in the living vulgar tongue had suc-
ceeded in springing up, under the shadow of an antecedent culture's
classical language and literature, before an expanding Western Civiliza-
tion had appeared on the scene. A living 'mandarin' lingua franca? had
become a vehicle not only for folk-songs4 but also for drama since the
thirteenth century of the Christian Era,5 and for novels in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.6 In China, again, the same

1 See pp. 73-74, above.

* This Modern Greek linguistic and literary Archaism and the Kidturkampf to which
it gave rise have been noticed in V. vi. 68-70. Though the anti-archaistic movement in
favour of the living language was abortive, it managed to keep the field in just sufficient
strength to condemn a politically reunited Modern Greek people to live in a state of
chronic cultural schism between the respective adherents of the Kadapevovaa. and the
SyiJLOTtK'q. Either school of Modern Greek linguistic doctrine could cite on its own behalf
the authority of a Modem Western Civilization whose example was law for Modern
Greeks of both schools alike. The 817^0™*:^ answered to a Modern Western dogma,
begotten by a sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, that a national language ought
to be 'understanded of the people'; the Kadapevovaa answered to another Modern
Western dogma, begotten by a nineteenth-century Romantic Movement, that a national
language ought to have roots in the national past. In the native social milieu _ of the
Western Society in which this pair of dogmas had originated, they did not conflict; for
the local Western vernaculars—Italian, French, English, Dutch, German, and the rest
—answered to both dogmas alike, in opposition to a Latin that had been the linguistic
vehicle of a Western chrysalis-church. When, however, the same two dogmas were
applied in the alien social milieu of a Modem Greek Orthodox Christian community
which had "received* the Modern Western culture by an. act of conversion, the two
dogmas here proved irreconcilable owing to the success previously achieved by a Byzan-
tine renaissance of a dead Attic Greek in blighting the literary cultivation of the living
Modern Greek language in an earlier chapter of Modern Greek cultural history.

3 See V. v. 5x2-14.

•+ See Hu Shih: The Chinese Renaissance: The Jffaskell Lectures, 1933 (Chicago 1934,
University Press), p. 60. The quotations from this book have been made with the per-
mission of the author and the publishers.

s See Hu Shih, op. cit., pp. 45 and 53. 6 See ibid., p. 51.