8a RENAISSANCES

Tulsi Das' happy experience of an immortal Sanskrit epic's genially
fructifying effect on the literary use of a living vernacular language
would assuredly have given him no inkling of the hardness of the battle
that a Hu Shih would have to fight in order to liberate a living 'mandarin'
lingua franca from the tyranny of the Sinic classics.

(e) RENAISSANCES OF VISUAL ARTS

The renaissance of one or other of the visual arts of a dead civilization
in the history of an affiliated civilization of the next generation is a not
uncommon phenomenon. Among the more familiar instances of it we
may mention the renaissance of 'the Old Kingdom's' style of sculpture
and painting, after a two-thousand-years-long lapse, in a latter-day
Egyptiac World of the Sai'te Age in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. ;*
the renaissance of a Sumeric style of carving in bas-relief—of which the
finest specimen retrieved by Modern Western archaeologists was the
stele of the Akkadian war-lord Naramsin (dominabatur circa 2422-2367
or 2358-2303 B.C.)—in a Babylonic World of the ninth, eighth, and
seventh centuries B.C. in which this resuscitated Suiucric art was prac-
tised with the greatest virtuosity in Assyria; and the renaissance, in
miniature, of an Hellenic style of carving in bas-relief, of which the
most exquisite exemplars were Attic masterpieces of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C., on Byzantine diptychs—carvedj not in stone but in ivory,
in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries of the ChriHtian Km3 —in
which the folds of the drapery of the Theotokos are nostalgically 1 lellenic
in the beautiful severity of their lines. These three visual renaissances,
however, were all left far behind, both in the range of the ground covered
and in the ruthlessness of the eviction of the previous occupants, by
a renaissance of Hellenic visual arts in Western Christendom which
made its first epiphany in a Late Medieval Italy and spread thence to the
rest of the Western World during a Modern Age of Western history.
This evocation of ghosts of Hellenic visual arts was practised in the three
fields of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting; and, in every one of theae
three fields, the revenant style of art made so clean a sweep of the style
that it found in. possession of the corresponding sector of a Western
artistic arena that, by the time when the aggressive ghost had spent his
formidable force, Western Man had become so thoroughly used to living
his aesthetic life under this alien ascendancy that he did not know what
to do with a liberty that was not recovered for him by hia own exertions,
but was reimposed upon him by the senile decay of a pertinaciously
tyrannical intruder. When the evaporation of an Hellenic apcctre pre-
sented Western souls with an aesthetic vacuum, they found themselves
at first unable, for the life of them, to say what was the proper visual
expression for the West's long-suppressed native artistic genius.

The same strange tale of a house swept and garnished3 by the drastic
hands of ghostly visitants has to be told of each of the three provinces of

1 See V. yi, 61-63. The peculiar relation of a post-HykaoB epilogue to an EjryptUc
history which had reached its natural term after the dissolution of 'the Middle Empire'
makes it hard to know whether to label the artistic revival of the Suite Ago « nuMimuiea
or a manifestation of Archaism.

2 See IX- viii. 103. 3 Matt, xii, 44; Luke xU «5*