THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

96 The Harmony of Virtuethe same consummation. But Vidyasagara, though he had muchin him of the scholar and critic, was nothing of an artist; OkhayKumar's audience ran only to the subscribers of a single magazine;and the literary originality of the rest was not equal to theiraudacity. None of them could transform and recreate with thatsure and easy touch which reveals the true maker of language.Bankim moreover has this splendid distinction, that he morethan any one exalted Bengali from the status of a dialect to themajesty of a language. The immediate effect of English educationhad been to foster an undiscriminating love of things Englishand an unwise contempt for things Bengali. Among the restthe Bengali tongue was put by as an instrument hopelessly badand unsatisfying: even Madhusudan in his youth neglected andforgot it. The strivings of Vidyasagara and Okhay Kumar Duttwere the strivings of a few far-sighted and patriotic men in ageneration misled by false ideals. On that generation Madhusudan'sfirst great poems, Sharmistha and Tilottama, had a complexeffect much of a piece with the sensation created by Marlowe'sTamburlaine in Elizabethan England or Hugo's Hernaniin 19th century France. They took men's imaginations by stormwith their splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creatingthe Bengali blank verse they freed poetry from the facilities andprettinesses of the old rhymed stanza; by their magnificences ofstyle and emotion they brought new elements into Hindu literature,and they gave battle with their strange and fiery colouredmusic to the classic frigidity of the Sanskritists. They first soundedthe note of Romanticism which still governs our literature. Theyrevealed too those magnificent possibilities, latent in every Sanskriticlanguage, which only wait for the magic touch of originalgenius to open out their store; and they set flowing thatperennial fountain of gracious and noble poetry which is doingso much to bring beauty and high feeling into our lives and toproduce a race of Bengalis braver and better than we. But atthe same time they had to overcome a vast opposition. Laudedwith rapturous enthusiasm by the cultured, they were anathematisedby the pedants. All the Pandits, all the Sanskritists, allthe fanatics of Classicism, even the great Vidyasagara himself,then the intellectual dictator of Bengal, were startled out of their