Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/309

 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 285 Isvar Gupta’ whose tone and temper allied him with the Kabiwalas, was indeed the last of that blessed race over whom the confusion of Babel had not yet fallen. It must not be supposed here that we are advocating purism in the matter of language or lamenting over the prevalence of Sanscrit, Persian or other influence. “Purism” to quote the words of a learned writer in the Ca/evtta Review? “is radically unsound and has its origin in a spirit of narrowness. In the free commingling of nations, there must be borrowing and giving. Can anything be more absurd than to think of keeping language pure when blood itself cannot be kept pure? No human language has ever been perfectly pure, any more than any human race has been pure. Infusion of foreign elements do, in the long run, enrich languages, just as infusion of ” But in the beginning foreign blood improves races. of the last century, the conflict of foreign elements under which Bengali prose came fora time proved a source of confusion to many a writer of the period. Lexicographers and grammarians like Halhed, Forster and Carey are eternally complaining, in their bewilderment, of the confusing variety and the exceedingly corrupt state of the vernacular due to its subjection to various foreign influence,*> for the ‘many political revolutions the country had sustained and its long (4) The European e¢ommunication with men of diffe- writers. ai L rent religions, countries and manners 1 But here of course we are speaking of [évar Gupta’s poetry and not his prose which perhaps exhibits the modern tendencies better than any other prose of the period. ® See Halhed’s and Forster's remarks quoted at pp. 86-7 and 92 ante respectively.
 * Syama Charan Gafguli, Calcutta Review, 1878.