THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

Indian Art and an Old ClassicWE HAVE before us a new editionof Krittibas' Ramayana, edited and published by that indefatigableliterary and patriotic worker, Sj. Ramananda Chatterji.Ramananda Babu is well known to the Bengali public as aclear minded, sober and fearless political speaker and writer;as editor of the Modern Review and the Prabasi he has raisedthe status and quality of Indian periodical literature to an extraordinaryextent, and has recently been doing a yet morevaluable and lasting service to his country by introducing themasterpieces of the new school of Art to his readers. His presentventure is not in itself an ambitious one, as it purports onlyto provide a well-printed and beautifully illustrated edition ofKrittibas for family reading. With this object the editor hastaken the Battala prints of the Ramayana as his text and reproducedthem with the necessary corrections and the omissionof a few passages which offend modern ideas of decorum.Besides, the book is liberally illustrated with reproductionsof recent pictures by artists of Bombay and Calcutta onsubjects chosen from the Ramayana.The place of Krittibas in our literature is well established.He is one of the most considerable of our old classics and oneof the writers who most helped to create the Bengali languageas a literary instrument. The sweetness, simplicity, lucidity, melodyof the old language is present in every line that Krittibaswrote, but, in this recension at least, we miss the racy vigourand nervous vernacular force which was a gift of the early writers.Our impression is that the modern editions do not faithfullyreproduce the old classic and that copyists of more learning andpuristic taste than critical imagination or poetical sympathy havepolished away much that was best in the Bengali Ramayana. Theold copies, we believe, reveal a style much more irregular in dictionand metre, but more full of humanity, strength and the roughand natural touch of the soil. In no case can our Ramayana