156 RENAISSANCES

an indigenous style of Western painting in favour of a resuscitated
Hellenic Naturalism. The aesthetic petrifaction to which a Western
school of painting had condemned itself in adopting a dead Hellenic
style in place of its own indigenous Western aesthetic ideals is attested
by the frustration of the genius of a Dhomfnikos Theotok6poulos (vwebat
A.D. 1541-1614), who tried to bring to the rescue of his Hellenizing
Western contemporaries the aesthetic ideals of a Byzantine culture that
had been tardily relieved of the incubus of the East Roman Empire. As
we have noticed in another context,1 the vista which a Byzantine Greek
Theotok6poulos had opened up for Western painters was obstructed for
no less than three centuries by the wraith of an Hellenic Greek Apelles,
until the eventual exhaustion of an artificially administered Hellenic
stimulus at last enabled latter-day Western eyes to sec through the
mirage by which Giotto had been bemused.

In the field of Philosophy the same ironic denouement was the sequel
to the renaissances of a Sinic Confucianism in the Far Eastern World
and an Hellenic Aristotelianism in Western Christendom. In the epi-
logues to both these tales the immediate effect was an Antaean outburst
of intellectual energy, and the eventual eifect a stiffening into the
Atlantean stance of a dogmatic scholasticism.

The intellectual petrifaction which was the ultimate effect of an
intellectual renaissance in the histories of both these societies is attested
in either case by the frustration of a creative genius. In China in the
Sung Age, Wang An-shih (vivebat A.D. 1021-86), who had foreseen that
the Sung Empire would succumb to a barbarian onslaught unless it
quickly put its house in order, and who had gone on to work out and
translate into action the social reforms required in order to rally the
people to the support of the Sung regime and the Far Eastern way of
life, lived to see his work undone—with immediate catastrophic conse-
quences—by Confucian litterati in whose eyes he had committed the
unpardonable offence of breaking away from preconceived ideas in
wrestling with unprecedented problems.* In Western Christendom in
the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, Wang An-shih's frustration
in the field of Public Administration had its counterpart in Roger Bacon's
in the field of Physical Science. The vista which Bacon (wwbat circa
A.D. 1214-94) opened up by looking at Nature as she waa, with the
unprejudiced eyes of an empirical observer, was obstructed for no less
than four centuries by the straw-stuffed skin and bones of a dead Ari-
stotle posted by the Schoolmen between the jambs of the door which
Bacon had unlocked and opened. The obstruction was not removed by
the fifteenth-century Italian Humanists* jeering exposure of the truth
that this imposingly resuscitated Hellenic figure was a corpse; and
Western Man had to wait for admission into a realm that was his own
peculiar discovery till an obsolete Hellenic frame of mind was blown
away at last by a mine laid and exploded by Ren<£ Descartes (vivebat
A.D. 1596-1650). While philosophers may question whether Descartes

* In IV. iv. 360-1.

a See Williamson, H. R.: Wang An Shih (London 1935-7, Probsthain, a voU.)i
the present Study, V, vi. 306, with n. 6.

and