iS2 RENAISSANCES

to revert to a reanimated dead language which had been shown, by
the great Humanist's performance, to be a superb medium for convey-
ing all the thoughts and feelings that Erasmus's contemporaries in the
Western World might be moved to express in prose; it inspired them
with the ambition to develop their divers living vernaculars into ade-
quately massive vehicles for carrying a Ciceronian load, and, a fortiori,
to refine them, into adequately subtle instruments for catching, from a
Horace or a Virgil, strains that could find a convincing echo only in some
language that was still alive on the lips of a latter-clay Western poet.
An Erasmian Latin prose found its metier, and kept it for some two
hundred years, as the lingua franca of an early Modern Western Re-
public of Letters; but, when, towards the end of the seventeenth century
of the Christian Era, the Humanists' cult of Hellenism suffered its
decisive defeat in the controversy between the respective champions of
'the Ancients' and 'the Moderns', even this limited function of serving
as an oecumenical linguistic medium for Western philosophy, science,
and scholarship was captured from Erasmus's Latin by Bossuet's
French. The transition may be caught in the act in the table of contents
of the collected works of Leibnitz (vivebat A.D. 1646-171:6).

These incidents in a Modern Western reaction to a. Late Medieval
Italian renaissance of Latin and Greek were Antaean indeed; but they
were also Antaean with a vengeance. A living French vernacular which,
in the grand siecle of Modern French history, came to be elevated above
its peers to an invidious eminence, in order to play a discarded Latin's
oecumenical role, had neither the literary prestige nor the political
neutrality that had made Latin so apt an instrument for this indispen-
sable Western cultural purpose. The failure of French fully to fill the
formidable linguistic vacuum produced by the abandonment of Latin
was the first symptom, in this cultural encounter between the Modern
West and a ghost of Hellenism, of the stiffening of an Antaean rebound
into an Atlantean stance; and this tragic peripeteia declared itself un-
mistakably when, in a Late Modern chapter of Western history, the
local vernacular languages of the Western World began to prostitute to
the political service of a parochial nationalism the literary gifts that had
accrued to them in double measure from the Humanists' cult of the
Hellenic classics and from the Protestants* cult of the Bible.1

This Atlantean aspect of the sequel to a fifteenth-century renaissance
of Hellenism in the Western World was, however, relatively incon-

* Down to A.D. 1952 it looked as if the Hindu World miffht succeed in avoiding a
corresponding aberration. There seemed to be little sign of any tendency for a polyglot
Hindu Society's sense of oecumenical solidarity to disrupt itself into parochial national
movements animated by the perverse ideal of manufacturing so many political father-
lands out of the areas in which the divers living vernacular languajjCH of th« Hindu
World happened respectively to be current. If it were indeed tru« that the Hindus had
not reacted in this unfortunate Western way to the literary cultivation of local living
vernaculars un4er the stimulus of a classical language and literature derived from an
antecedent civilization, the Hindus' happier record in this respect waa perhaps the con-
sequence of external pressure rather than the fruit of innate virtue, Whex'eaB tne Modern
Western World had been virtually free from external pressure from A.D, 1(683, when the
Osmanlis had met with their second, and decisive, reverse before the walk* of Vienna,
down to A.D. 1917, when the Bolsheviks had entered into the heritage of a Petrinc Rui-
sian Empire, the Hindu World had been under Muslim pressure since the tenth century
of the Christian Era, and under Western pressure since the eighteenth.