Page:The Bengali Book of English Verse.djvu/17

Rh materials to help us in our struggle for existence. This has led to an active conflict in Bengal between the Old and the New, a constant shifting of her outlooks upon life and an unrest owing to her groping for something positive, by which she can win for good her own true place in the world.

Our present age of renaissance began its career with an exaggerated faith in the foreign and the external, to find out at last that life is a process of constant self-unfolding, whose impulse comes from the centre of its own being. In Bengal we meet with all the different stages of this development, and therefore, more than in other parts of India, it is here that love of imitation of the West runs to excess, pompously proud of its tawdriness and incongruity. On the other hand in Bengal have been originated all the recent movements for the seeking of truth that is our national heritage. The West, which at first drew us on to itself, has forcibly flung us back upon an intense consciousness of our personality. The breath of inspiration, coming from the West, has kindled the original spark in us into a flame that lay smothered in the ashes of dead habits and rigidity of traditional forms. This has been illustrated by the course our literature has taken, almost completely abandoning its earlier foreign bed, finding its natural channel in the mother tongue. The following collection of English poems written by Bengali authors also proves it, in which the earlier writings are timorously imitative, while the later ones boldly burn with their own fire, daring to challenge time's judgment with their claim of immortality. I believe foreign readers, while reading this book, will find much to think of in the fact that Bengal's response through literature to the call of the West is something unique in the history of the modern East. It has a future, for it is quickened with life, and it carries within itself a hope that