710 RENAISSANCES

The consequent coexistence of two competing literatures in the same
language was bound to cause friction between their respective votaries,
and such friction duly made itself felt when this situation arose in a mori-
bund Sinic World in the Age of the Posterior Han and in a moribund
Hellenic World in the Age of the post-Diocletianic Roman imperial
regime. Thereafter, when a once dominant minority by whom the secu-
lar literature had been kept alive had been wiped out, as it was in the
former domain of the Hellenic Civilization, or, short of that, had been
driven into a corner, as it was in the former domain of the Sinic Civiliza-
tion,1 the friction diminished as the cultivation of the secular literature
dwindled towards vanishing point, leaving the religious literature tem-
porarily in almost unchallenged possession of the field; but, if and when
a neglected and half-forgotten secular literature recovered its vitality
through a renaissance of it in the history of an affiliated civilization—as
happened in the Far Eastern World in and after the Age of the T'ang, in
Greek Orthodox Christendom in and after the generation of Photius,
and in the Western World in and after the fifteenth century of the Chris-
tian Era—the friction was bound to recur.

In its recurrence as the sequel to a renaissance, as well as in its original
occurrence in the last days of an antecedent civilization, this friction
between two literatures conveyed in one language was apt to be accen-
tuated by any appreciable difference of nuance between the particular
forms of the common language in which the secular literature and the
religious literature were respectively embodied. We have already noticed2
that, in Greek Orthodox Christendom by the fifteenth century of the
Christian Era, when a school of Byzantine imitators of Hellenic his-
torians had been at work for not much less than four hundred years,
at least two of their number had become sensitive to the difference be-
tween a post-Alexandrine Attic KOLVT) and the undiluted Attic Greek of a
Thucydides and Ionic Greek of an Herodotus; and, although, as we have
also seen, a Khalkokondhylis and a Krit6poulos flew ambitiously higher
than a Leon Dhiak6nos or a Nikitas Khoniatis, only to fall ludicrously
lower, their dawning glimmer of a finer aesthetic sense lit the way for
more sure-footed Italian and Transalpine Western followers in these
Greek Orthodox Christian pioneers' shambling footsteps. So far from
coming to grief, these Modern Western literary mountebanks achieved
an amazing virtuosity in keeping their precarious footing on a slippery
path, thanks to an infinite capacity for taking pains which a nineteenth-
century Western vernacular poet was to immortalize in his fantasy of A
Grammarian's Funeral. But, the more accurately these Western Human-
ists performed their self-imposed tour de force of aping the styles of
Ancient Greek and Latin classical authors, the more exquisitely were
their over-refined aesthetic sensibilities excruciated by the barbarism of
a 'Low Latin* that was the sacrosanct language of the Vulgate version of
the Bible, the Roman liturgy, and the works of the Latin Fathers of a
Western Catholic Christian Church.

'Joannes Petrus MafTeus, S.J., (vivebat A.D. 1536-1603) was one of the

1 See VI. vii. 357, n. 4, 367, and 370-3; and pp. 649-81, above.

2 On pp. 60-61, above.