Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/296

 272 BENGALI LITERATURE the study of which can be ignored with greater danger, none the study of which is repaid by a fuller understanding, in regard to the rest. Although it was a stage necessari- ly unproductive, it was yet the great period of germination, and an acquaintance with it is helpful for the understanding and enjoyment of the rich harvest which our literature had subsequently borne within the last half of the century. With the old caution about the constant overlapping of tendencies, 1t would not be wrong to state that this was chiefly a period of Huropean activity in Bengali literature. It is true indeed that there was a strong and unmastered counter-current of বল না Euro- native energy which expressed itself in the songs of the Kabiwalas and other products of purely native genius, not the least affected by the new spirit, and that in an_ historical survey of the literary achievements of this period we cannot very well ignore the significance of these forms of indigenous literature; yet when we consider the Juropeanised tendency of modern Bengali literature, : its new literary method and new Counter-currents of — mode of expression, we cannot but native energy, how related to it. give a greater prominence to [uro-
 * pean activity and spread of European

ideas. ‘The older traditions still continued to live on, and an antagonism between the old and the new spirit is traceable throughout the literary history of the 19th century ; for the mental progress of a nation cannot prove itself altogether independent of the fatality of hereditary transmission. But we give greater impor- tance to the Europeans because it is the spirit of their work, aided no doubt by the inexorable hand of cireum- stances, which was to dominate in the end and determine