76 RENAISSANCES

negative, unintentional, and unconscious, yet^ none the less valuable
literary service had been performed by Mongol invaders us had been per
formed in Greek Orthodox Christendom by the Frankiah conquerors o
an East Roman Empire. Here, as there, an irruption of militant barbarian;
had been a cultural and social as well as a political and military catastro-
phe; here, as there, it had hit a small highly cultivated official class more
severely than it had hit the uncultivated merchants, artisans, and peasan-
try;1 here, as there, the shock dealt to this classically educated officialdom
had broken 'the cake of custom'2 which this governing class had imposed
on the lower strata of society; and, since, in a resuscitated Sinic and a
resuscitated Hellenic universal state alike, the linguistic and literary
custom hitherto upheld by the now crestfallen pandits had been the
cult of a dead classical language and literature at the expense of a living
vulgar tongue and the popular literature conveyed in it, the cultural
effect, in China as in Greek Orthodox Christendom, was to liberate this
popular literature from the incubus of a classical ideal and thereby give
it a chance to invigorate itself by gaining access to the air and to the light.
While the Chinese popular literature had the same history as its
Modern Greek counterpart in these respects, it gave proof of a greater
vitality by emulating the Medieval Western vernacular literature's feat of
'haunting the haunter*. As Hu Shih tells the story of how his own eyes
were opened:

*I found that the history of Chinese literature consisted of two parallel
movements: there was the classical literature of the scholars, the men of
letters, the poets of the imperial courts, and of the $itc; but there was in
every age an undercurrent of literary development among the common
people which produced the folk songs of love and heroism, the1 songs of
the dancer, the epic stories of the street reciter, the drama of the village
theatre and, most important of all, the novels. I found that every new
form, every innovation in literature, had come never from the imitative
classical writers of the upper classes, but always from the unlettered class
of the country-side, the village inn and the market-place. I found that it
was always these new forms and patterns of the common people that, from
time to time, furnished the new blood and fresh vigour to the literature of
the litterati, and rescued it from the perpetual danger of fossilisation, All
the great periods of Chinese Literature were those when the master minds
of the age were attracted by these new literary forms of the people and
produced their best works, not only in the new patterns, but in close
imitation of the fresh and simple language of the people, And such great
epochs died away only when those new forms from the people had again

* After the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in A,D. 1204, aotne of the pre-
viously well-to-do Greek refugees from the sacked city -were ill-treated by the Greek
rural population in the hinterland, who forcibly relieved them of the money that they
had been able to' bring away with them, and gloated over the apectacle of grandees
reduced to an equality with themselves on a common level of destitution, Th« poorer
Greek inhabitants of Constantinople, who did not take flight, enriched themaelvea by
buying from the Latin conquerors, at derisory prices, valuable articles of property that
the Latins had plundered from the Greek purchasers* wealthy fellow-citteona (see the
indignant comments on these proceedings in Nikitas Khoniatia* Khronihi Mfyisis,
Epilogue on the Aftermath of the Catastrophe, chap. <, on no. *84»tf of I. Bekker'a
edition (Bonn 1835, Weber)).

* Bagehot, W.: Physics and Politics, roth ed. (London 1894, Kegan Paul), pp. a? and
35, quoted in II. i. 193, **' * /»W /