Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/68

 Ad BENGALI LITERATURE These enormities in the existing schools of poetry cer- _ tainly indicate the close of the literary age. Excess of folly in poetry, like excess of injustice in political matters, lead up to and foretell revolutions. Besides, the course of ancient Bengali itself as a whole suffered from many draw- backs which hampered its growth eruelly and which might by itself have led to its ultimate extinction. Inherent drawbacks f in the old literature Of these drawbacks, the monotony of itself which retarded its prowtli subject and the limitation of form were the foremost and engage the critic at once. Itis true that the social and political conditions under an alien rule were never wholly favourable to the quiet development of national culture ; that the contempt with which vernacular literature had been universally held always retarded its growth ; that the Baisnaba movement, even though it had wrested the monopoly of learning from the Brahmans as a class, was more a sectarian than a wide-spread national tendency and it only intensified the devotional ardour which had very few opportuni- ties for complete secularisation ; and that literature, at least in the vernacular, was seldom cultivated for its own sake in those days when a leisured class of literary or scienti- fie men had never arisen ; yet even these cireumstanecs do not wholly explain the absolute limitation of subject to religion in the main, and out of reli- Limitation of subject. gion to a little legend, a little contem- porary social song, and the thinnest surplus of other matters. Glorification of gods and goddess- es seems to be the ultimate object of all the poets, who could not venture to publish anything except under the borrowed garb of religion. The marvellous results aecom- plished even within this limitation show that there was surely nothing wrong with the genius of these poets but something was wrong in the literature itself, that its