Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/347

 him — cheapness and excellence — was incompatible with the hurry and cost of a daily newspaper.

Mr. Tilak and the Kesari were convertible terms. Their careers have been synonmous with the history of Maharashtra during the last 30 years. It has been a period of storm and stress. It has witnessed a vast transformation and has been the era of action and reaction — ^political and social. Through rocks and shoals, Mr. Tilak steered the Kc^sari, not caring for favour, nor afraid of frown, with a grim S3nse of duty. He was always bold but uniformly wary. His is one long record of intellectual and moral intrepidity, sustained by breadth of vision and depth of insight. The Kesari has been a castle for national fight, reared under the very nose of the Bureaucracy, proving impregnable even under shells of repression. Truly, it has become a national asset.

The style of Mr. Tilak's Kesari was, like the physiognomy of its illustrious editor, plain, blunt, and aggressive. It was " reason fused and made red-hot with passion." It despised mere literary garnish and was the very negation of the soft suppleness of an intellectual epicurean. It had nothing of the flowing humour of Mr. N. C. Kelkar's style, the sweatness of Mr. Pangarkar's,* the grace of Mr. Agarkar's or of the subtle suggestiveness, dehcate irony and arrcstive coquetry of Prof- S. M. Paranjpye'st style. It reminds you, not of a cloister


 * Editor o£ the Mumukshu and tho author, among other books, of the life oE Moropant and the life of Tukaram. He is an eloqueat exponent of what may be called Nco-Orthodoxy.

^ Editor of the now defunct Kal, which by its amazingly bold articles had created (1899) quite a panic in Congress circles.