Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/51

 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GREEK. 29 lighten the people. This led to an excited lin- guistic war. This war lasted long, and was carried on with much zeal and animosity, but it is all over now. The first party did not succeed because it fought against the spirit of the time, which did not ap- prove of such a separation of the descendants from the ancestors, and because the language of its literary productions, written in various provin- cialisms not understood by all, could not possibly be accepted as the general idiom. The second party failed because the archaism which they wrote was not intelligible enough to the mass of the people. Since neither of the two extremes succeeded, and neither the written nor the spoken tradi- tion would suffice, a middle way was found and accepted ; both forms were united, the one com- plementing the other ; a mixture of old and new elements was established. This procedure was by no means new to the Greeks ; it was planned by history itself. From its very inception the x(>t>^ has not been used in its original purity ; dif- ferent concessions were made to the demands of the time — that is, a mixture of the old and the modern was formed. That such a mixture was nothing extraordinary or anything like a dis-