THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

TWOThe Bengal He Lived inTHE society by which Bankim wasformed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the most extraordinaryperhaps that India has yet seen, — a society electricwith thought and loaded to the brim with passion. Bengal wasat that time the theatre of a great intellectual awakening. A sortof miniature Renascence was in process. An ardent and imaginativerace, long bound down in the fetters of a single tradition,had had suddenly put into its hand the key to a new worldthronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art andLearning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisationwith a temperament differing from the temperament which createdthem, there issued, as there usually does issue from such meetings,an original Art and an original civilisation. Originality does notlie in rejecting outside influences but in accepting them as a newmould into which our own individuality may run. This is whathappened and may yet happen in Bengal. The first impulse wasgigantic in its proportions and produced men of an almost giganticoriginality. Rammohan Ray arose with a new religion in hishand, which was developed on original lines by men almost greaterone thinks than he, by Rajnarain Bose and Devendranath Tagore.The two Dutts, Okhay Kumar and Michael Madhusudan, begana new Prose and new Poetry. Vidyasagar, scholar, sage and intellectualdictator, laboured hugely like the Titan he was, to createa new Bengali language and a new Bengali society, while invast and original learning Rajendra Lal Mitra has not met hismatch. Around these arose a class of men who formed a sortof seed-bed for the creative geniuses, men of fine critical abilityand appreciative temper, scholarly, accomplished, learnedin music and the arts, men in short not only of culture, but oforiginal culture. Of these perhaps the most finished patterns wereMadhusudan's friends, Gaurdas Byshak, and that scholarly