Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/320

 CHAPTER IX INTERREGNUM IN Porrry rrom 1760. The closing years of the 18th century and the begin- ning of the 19th form a period of transition from old Bengali to modern Bengali literature; and in this period, as in every period of transition, while access was obtained to new ideas and new methods, the old traditions in lite- rature still lived on. In the light of the Europeanised literature of to-day, prominence must be and_ has been given to European activity in Bengali Literature of this period, yet from the death of Bharat-chandra in 1760 to the death of Isvar Gupta in 1858, flourished a class of Bengali writers, chiefly poets, who were un-influen- ced by English ideas and who main- A body of indige- tained, even with declining powers, nous literature the literary traditions of the past. Literary history, as a rule, is studded with such ‘ survivals ” or ‘relics,’ if we may use these terms; but it is hardly correct to regard these outbursts of purely native inspira- tion as mere empty echoes of the past or flickering reac- tionary movements which the historian of literature may safely ignore. The tendencies of European or Euro- peanised writers may, ina sense, be described as exotic; but these inheritors of the literary traditions and _ instinets of the angient race, on the other hand, See were essentially national in sentiment of the Europeans, a and expression, and as such, repre- ০১ 2 sent, apart from all question of intrinsic excellence, a phase of lite- rary development which we cannot very well pass over.