Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/422

 398 BENGALI LITERATURE soi-disant, insipid and incomplete. The distinction drawn by modern critics between ornate and grotesque manner, between gothic and classic art, though over- worked and often misunderstood, is one of the funda- mental distinctions applicable to a certain extent to this case also. It may be a matter of taste whether a man prefers jagged angularity to harmonious roundness; but what is angular, what is gross, what is grotesque is nearer life in its primal sensations and in its terrible sincerity. It is like the ore fresh from the mines with all its dust and dross yet pure and unalloyed. In the songs of the Kabiwalas and in the tappas of Nidhu Babu, we enjoy these rugged sensations of the natural man, if you will, who regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not pretend to domesticate them or present them under an ideal glamour. Their outward ruggedness isa mark of inward clarity. It is partly for this reason that these gross and chaotie songs possess so much appeal for the robust and keen perceptions of the masses but are entirely inaccessible to the decent, com- fortable and self-righteous attitude of the bourgeoisie or the refined gentlemanliness of the aristocrat. These poets were, therefore, in a sense realists or in- terpreters of real and natural emotions; and their songs are in the legitimate tradition of nature, although not always acceptable to the refined palate of the literary taster. It would, however, be absurd at the same time to suppose that these songs do not possess any touch of that idealism without which no poetry is poetry; they have enough of idealism but they do not deal with ab- stractions or live upon the air. Take ini realism of for instance the intense realism of their idea of love. With them, Love is not a cold white ideal rising moon-like over the rapt