Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/87

 INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT 63 of the influence of European ideas on Bengali thought. We ean indeed dismiss, without much Contact with the serious loss, the early European writers, West, and influence of western ideas on modern literature. objects in their assiduous study who had certainly their own ulterior of the vernacular and whose writings, considered as literature, possess little or no intrinsie merit. But we cannot dismiss so easily those immaterial immigrants, known as influences, which came in with the first European settler in the land and brought on by degrees a conflict and a revolution in our ideas and modes of life. When necessity had brought the East andthe West side by side, it would be idle to quote Kipling’s famous dictum of the unchanging East or assert ourselves independent of all contact or influence What the Enropean of western ideas. The pioneer efforts ০০৬ of the missionary 2100 116 ১০110০0]- of these ideas. master for diffusing knowledge and culture through the medixm ০01 Bengali had surely a more wide-reaching effect thau that of giving temporary impetus to dormant intellectual or literary activities; for the literature which had been brought into being through the influence of western ideas was only one effect of a vaster revolution in thought, manners, and religion which had taken place in this country through our contact with the West. It is out of this conflict of the eastern with the western ideals that our modern literature has grown; and the rude early efforts of the missionary and the school-master, by propagating western ideas, had paved the way for this peculiar development of culture and literature in Bengal. It is with the missionary and the school-master, therefore, that we must begin our study of the history of this national progress as reflected through the vernacular literature. It is they who have laid the