THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

80 The Harmony of Virtuehugely, thought hugely, and drank hugely.Bankim's student days did not happen among that circle oforiginal geniuses; his time fell between the heroes of the Renascenceand the feebler Epigoni of our day. But he had contemporarywith him men of extraordinary talent, men like DinabandhuMitra and Dwarakanath Mitra, men so to speak of the secondtier. Bankim was the last of the original geniuses. Since then thegreat impulse towards originality has gone backward like a recedingwave. After Bankim came the Epigoni, Hemchandra Banerji,Nobin Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, men of surprising talent, nay,of unmistakable genius, but too obviously influenced by Shelleyand the English poets. And last of all came the generation formedin the schools of Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, withits religious shallowness, its literary sterility and its madness insocial reform. Servile imitators of the English, politicians withoutwisdom and scholars without learning, they have no pretensionsto greatness or originality. Before they came the first mightyimpulse had spent itself and Bengal lay fallow for a new. It restswith the new generation, the generation that will soon be sittingin the high places and judging the land, whether there shall bescope for any new impulse to work itself out. Two years ago itlooked as if this mighty awakening would lose itself, as the Englishsixteenth century lost itself, in Puritanism and middle-classpolitics.But when Bankim was a student, the traditions of the HinduCollege were yet powerful, the Hindu College, that nurseryof geniuses, where the brain of the New Age had worked mostpowerfully and the heart of the New Age had beat with the mightiestvehemence. The men around Bankim were calmer, sedater, moretemperate; but they walked in the same ways and followed thesame ideals. To that life of hard thinking and hard drinking Bankimwas drawn not merely, as some were, by the power of youthfulimitativeness, but by sympathy of temperament. He had thenovelist's catholicity of taste and keen sense for life, and theartist's repugnance to gloom and dreariness. Even when thethoughts turned to old faith, the clear sanity of the man showeditself in his refusal to admit asceticism among the essentials ofreligion. He never indulged in that habit of frightful and invete-