lao RENAISSANCES

in A.D. 645, of a copy of the Sinic Han imperial regime, that had just been
reinstated in China, was designed to foster the planting out of the Far
Eastern Civilization, de toutes pieces, on the virgin soil of the Japanese
Isles;1 and the corresponding purpose of taming German, Scandinavian,
and Slav barbarians beyond the north-eastern frontier of Western
Christendom was likewise one of the motives for the evocation of the
Holy Roman Empire.2 The ghost of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic city-
state was revived in a Medieval Italy, and the ghost of a post- Alexandrine
Hellenic absolute monarchy in the Modern Western World at large, in
the hope of thereby enabling a potentially progressive Western Society
to achieve its own latent possibilities on the political plane beyond the
limits of the modest capacity of the clumsy native Western institution of
Feudalism. The ghost of a Roman Law was evoked first in Orthodox and
then in Western Christendom in the hope of providing a native economy
that was rapidly increasing in complexity with a correspondingly
elaborate legal framework which could not be pieced together out of
a juvenile Christian society's rudimentary native law derived from
Christian and Judaic sources. Aristotle's ghost in the West, and Confu-
cius's ghost in the Far East, were evoked in the hope of enabling a Western
and a Far Eastern intellect to break out of the shell of a Christian and a
Mahayanian Buddhist patristic theology. The ghost of a Sinic Literature
was evoked in the Far East, and a ghost of an Hellenic Literature in a
Greek Orthodox and a Western Christendom, in the hope of thereby
irrigating an arid native vein of literary genius. The ghosts of an Hellenic
Sculpture and an Hellenic Architecture were evoked in a Modern
Western World which was painfully aware that the medieval school of
native Western and borrowed Syriac visual art had no more arrows left
in its quiver.

A renaissance is thus always deliberately produced for a consciously
conceived purpose by a living agent who is awaking the dead from their
sleep ; and, if the living party to the relation did not thus deliberately
take the initiative, an encounter of this kind could never occur; for a
ghost cannot raise itself on its own initiative, to haunt the living un-
invited; nor can the dead and the living meet one another by chance, as
two or more living individuals or societies can, if they happen to be alive
simultaneously on the face of the same planet.

(Ill) THE PLOT OF THE DRAMA OF
RENAISSANCES

The distinctive feature of a renaissance that determines its occasion is
also the_key to its plot; and pur inquiry into the occasion has shown us
what this distinctive feature is. In an encounter between a necromancer
and a ghost the dramatis personae can never exchange their roles,
because, in contrast to the dramatis personae in an encounter in the
flesh between parties who are all alike alive at the time, the parties to
a renaissance are not 'of like passions'3 with one another.4

I SS?.1!:.]!' Is8~9' a See n «• « 66-70. > Act*xiv. «.

* This difference between an encounter in the flesh between contemporaries »nd an
encounter between a necromancer and a ghost is analogous to the difference between *