Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/414

 390 BENGALI LITERATURE not speak of Bidya and Sundar or of Radha and Krgna. The poet looks into his own heart and writes; he sings of his own feelings, his own joys and sorrows, his own triumph and defeat; he does not seek the conventional epic or narrative framework for the expression of what he thinks and feels nor does he take refuge under the cloak of parakiya bhab. which earlier poets thought essential. The exquisite lyrie ery becomes rampant and universal. Ancient literature is mostly 7 the objective, if not always narrative and epic ; the inward feeling seldom or never out-tops the outward.vision ; and whatever the poet speaks of himself he expresses through his suitable mouth- pieces. With the tappa-writers came an outburst of the per- sonal element, an overflow of sensibility, an enfranchisement of the passion and the imagination: for the universal heart of man must be touched through what is most personal and intimate. The sense of the difficulty and complexity of modern problems is, no doubt, absent in them nor do they possess the finish and refinement of modern lyrics,’ yet the tappa-writers foreshadow in their own way that. ins- trospective element which has since developed itself in such great measure—some think out of all measure—in modern poetry. The tappa-writers, therefore, possess originality at an epoch in which nothing of great value was being produced in poetry ; they attempt at simple and natural, though not colloquial, diction and write with an easy and _ careless vigour; they are truthful to nature and avoid frigid conventionality and classicality. But they had as much of the new spirit as their readers 4 07782 were then fit for; and though their dern. work éontained the seeds of the im- pending change of taste, it is an