Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/436

400 They cover a varied field and contain the finest examples of poetry that are to be found in our language, and are no less important for their lofty spiritual tone inspired by the great personality of Chaitanya Deva than for the influence they have exerted on our language in all its different channels.

In the literature dealt with in the last chapter, we marked the hand of classical writers, who had recast the earlier recensions of rustic poems after Sanskritic models. This literature of renaissance is permeated by a taste for classical figures and classical allusions. Words were recovered from the loose Prākrita to which they had degenerated, and restored to their original Sanskrit forms. Reformed Hindus took up subjects of Buddhistic origin, cast them into the mould of their own new ideas, Hinduized their spirit and Sanskritized their language. The Vaiṣṅava Literature, however, is essentially a literature of the people. This ‘people’ should not be identified with those rustic folk whose language was the hated patois and the subjects of whose songs were fables and stories in which facts were distorted or over-coloured without any artistic sense. The people who created Vaiṣṅava Literature had warred against orthodoxy and priest-craft. They had risen out of the stupor of ignorance of ages and become conscious of a new strength. A god-man had lived in their midst and in the living example before them, they had witnessed the fulfilment of the spiritual ideal of their country, greater than what scholars could teach or poets represent with all the inspiration of their language. The freedom and latitude of their literary attempts