THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

II. 7. Bankim Chandra Chatterji101of good hope for the future; for what Bengal thinks tomorrow,India will be thinking tomorrow week. Even towards commerceand science, spheres in which he has been painfully helpless,the Bengali is casting wistful glances; but whether he will hereas elsewhere ascend the ladder, can only be settled by experiment.He is almost too imaginative, restless and swayed by hisfeelings for paths in which a cold eye or an untroubled brain isthe one thing needful. Nevertheless let Bengal only be true toher own soul, and there is no province in which she may notclimb to greatness. That this is so, is largely due to the awakeningand stimulating influence of Bankim on the national mind.Young Bengal gets its ideas, feelings and culture not from schoolsand colleges, but from Bankim's novels and Rabindranath Tagore'spoems; so true is it that language is the life of a nation.Many are carrying on the great work in prose and poetry— Hemchandra, Nobin, Kamini Sen, Rabindranath and Rabindranath'ssister, that flower of feminine culture in Bengal, SwarnaKumari Devi, and many more whose names it would takelong to repeat; but another Bankim, another Madhusudan comesnot again. Some are pointing to this as a sign of intellectual barrenness;but it is not so. Shakespeare and Milton came withinthe limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth,Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton.Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there havebeen Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second Dante orBoccaccio. Such men come rarely in the lapse of centuries. Greecealone has presented the world an unbroken succession of supremegeniuses. There is nothing to prevent us Hindus, a nationcreated for thought and literature, from repeating that wonderfulexample. Greece is a high name, but what man has oncedone, man may again strive to do. All we need is not to tieourselves down to a false ideal, not to load our brains with thepedantry of a false education, but to keep like those first buildersa free intellect and a free soul. If we are careful to do that,there is no reason why the creative impulse in Bengal should fora moment die out. But whatever else may perish or endure,Bankim's fame cannot die. Already it has overleaped the barrierbetween East and West; translations of his works are already