Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/339

 KABIWALAS 315 biraha, pirbarag, milan and the like, is treated no doubt with emotional directness but they subside into agreeable formulas and dogmatic shibboleths. Leaving aside indi- vidual independence of trait so marked in poets like Bidyapati, Chandidas or Jiiainadas, when we come to the legion of lesser lights we find that, although these minor poets share more or less in the general poetic spirit pervading the age, there is yet a monotonous sameness of characteristics, inevitably suggesting a sense of artificiality. In spite of its romantie charm and lyric affluence, the themes and subjects of this poetry lacked variety and exuberance of inventive thought. We meet over and over again with the same tricks of expression, the same strings of nouns and adjectives, the same set of situations, the same group of conceits and the same system of emotional analysis. In the greater poets, the sentiment is refined and the expression sufficiently varied ; in the lesser poets, they degenerate into rigid artistic conventionalities. When the Kabiwalas came to inherit the spiritual estate of their poetical ancestors, Baisnab poetry had এ been reduced almost to a mechanie art; its conceptions had become stereotyped and its language conventional. But its faith, its religious enthusiasm, had by that time filtered down through all the crudities of its surroundings into a simple unquestioned and habitual form of religiosity. Its spiritual essence alone survived ; its commonplaces and conceits, its pedantry and formalism had lost much of their force and had become effete conventionalities. Although Kabi-poetry, in its theme and diction, is generally conventional and mechanically reproductive, yet it concerns itself chiefly with the essential significance of Baisnab poetry, its devotional fervour, its emotional appeal and not directly with its metaphysical or psychological banalities. It is