Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/345

 KABIWALAS 321 of intensity and earnestness to the love of Radha as the type of a heroine who foregoes all for love. In the poetry of the Kabiwalas these elements severed from their natural context and regarded by themselves assume the somewhat repellent intensity of impertinent-interest. Having real- ised full well that the depth and beauty of Baisnab poetry were beyond themselves or their audience, they had selected and isolated for representation only those portions of it which would appeal more directly by their effective but transient vulgarity. The Kabiwalas therefore give, consciously or unconsciously, more prominence to salanha and chhalan& over anything else of Baisnab love-poetry ; and these elements in their incongruous context are often presented with such unadorned boldness and repulsive relief and with such ill-suited lightness of touch that they become in the end thoroughly inartistic. Krsna’s wantonness is carried to a frivolously forbidding extent and Radha’s sense of the affront, thus dealt out by the unfaithful lover, is marked by a singular lack of self- respect and sense of dignity, The process is the process of dethroning a god for the purpose of humanising a scoundrel. Radha and her companions are eternally complaining, with all the silliness of plaintive sentimentality, of the endless amours of the ever deceitful lover; but after all, she takes them very lightly and no great persuasion is necessary to reconcile her in the end to her lover. She laments, she weeps; but her laments are hollow and her tears are idle. The apologist may contend that all these are mere forms of divine sportiveness (cal, 2 or 4a ) and that we must not judge them by secular standards. But we must guard against bringing in spiritual considera- tions in extenuation of artistic inadequacy, although we cannot, it is true, altogether steer ourselves clear of the 41