Page:Twelve men of Bengal in the nineteenth century (1910).djvu/259

Rh wide field was open to enthusiastic musical revivalists. By developing a new system of concerted music, by examining the different theories of music and by comparing English and Indian methods, he set Hindu music on a sounder and higher basis.

Succeeding his father in 1858, he found himself at the age of twenty-seven in possession of one of the most splendid inheritances to which any young man in Bengal has succeeded in modern times. Eight years later the death of his uncle Prasanna Kumar Tagore, who had bequeathed the bulk of his vast property to his brother, who predeceased him, still further added to his great wealth. A splendid career lay before him. Devoted to literature and art, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, the bearer of an honoured name and the head of a distinguished house, immense possibilities opened out before him. From the first he thrust resolutely aside the innumerable temptations that his great possessions inevitably brought with them. Inducements to ease and indolence, to self-indulgence and personal enjoyment, must assuredly have come to the man to whom it might well have seemed that there was nothing else left to strive for. But voluntarily and whole-heartedly Jotindra Mohan set himself worthily to carry on the great traditions of his house and to fulfil the great responsibilities that his exceptional position entailed.