Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/343

 KABIWALAS 319 have got a literary tradition behind them the banalities of which they cannot always transcend and overstep into true democratic poetry. But this literary tradition they had modified in their own way, particularly through circumstances and conditions under which they composed and over representing @ phase which they had no control and partly of decadence of the ‘ earlier art. through an inherent lack of a thorough grasp upon the realities of old poetry. The themes which they handled had possessed, in the hands of older poets, qualities capable of evoking a great art ; but the less exalted treatment of the Kabiwalas could hardly work them up into new shapes of beauty with sufficient power and subtlety. It was their misfortune to represent an essentially decadent art. Every literature, to speak in metaphorical language which must not be strained, passes through the necessary stages of birth, growth, decline and death. In these metrical exercises of the Kabiwalas we see not the adult manhood of old litera- ture but its senile decrepitude. The poetry is reminiscent rather than spontaneous: it is reproductive and imitative rather than, in the true sense, creative. It is true that most of the songs which the Kabiwalas extemporised were unsought and unpremeditated : yet in their homage to old- world conventions in style, theme, and literary treatment, they belonged to a decaying dynasty the prestige of which, in spite of their belated efforts, had been fast vanishing. But even in their imitativeness, they could not always reproduce the fine shades and graces of old poetry, its weight, its elevation and its profun- Its inability to repro- ; ; duce the finer ghades (ity. There are many things, no ae of earlier doubt, in Baisnab padabalis which are not in any sense commendable but in their places and as a part of the whole they may pass