Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/350

 326 BENGALI LITERATURE were men of high natural endowments but they moved less freely within a narrow and degenerated sphere of thoughts and ideas. The mental attitude of their audience and submission to its inflaence no doubt proved unwholesome to the growth of their poetry ; but they themselves were incapable of interpreting life in any large and original way and therefore limited themselves, wisely or unwisely, to ministering chiefly unto the curiously uneritical habits of the time which demanded nothing more than the transient excitement of cheap rhetoric and cheap ideas. In the period in which they flourished, men had been deprived of a free political and social life, a central capital, the peace and security of an ordered existence and other conditions adequate to the intellectual requirements of an expansive literature. The old style having fallen into decay, the literary ideal could never be very high nor were the opportunities abundant enough for unfolding whatever potentialities this poetry possessed. The Kabi-literature, therefore, among its crowd of agreeable poems, had produced very few master-pieces, very few works of superb genius destined to immortality. There is a carelessness, a want of balance, a defect of judgment in the choice of materials Artistic inadequacy. and their management, a_ sloven- liness of execution throughout the work of this period. Care and grace of style can be expected in the literary craftsman who writes down his thoughts at leisure, for be can rewrite his sentences, recast’ his phrases, remould stanzas, thus achieving the proper art of style; but the Kabiwalas, who were hardly a lettered class of leisured writers, could never find abundance of time or patience to court the lugubrious muse. They made use of whatever poetic talents they