THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

88 The Harmony of Virtueand a feeling for the delicate spiritualities of religion: he couldlearn grammar and he could write poetry.What shall we say in the presence of this remarkable versatility?Overborne by the pomp of it and the show, shall weset it down as an adjunct of intellectual kingliness? Yes, to haveit is an adjunct of intellectual kingliness, but to give expressionto it is an intellectual mistake. To give impartial expression toall your gifts is to miss your vocation. Bankim was never sofar led astray as that. His province was literature, prose literature,and he knew it. His lyrics are enchanting, but few; metaphysicshe followed at the end of his life and law at the beginning;and he used scholarship and philology simply as othergreat writers have used them, to give subtlety of suggestion andrichness of word-colour to his literary style. Even in the provinceof prose literature, where he might have worked out hisversatility to advantage, he preferred to specialise. He neverstepped unpardonably out of his province, but he was occasionallyled astray by this or that lure to allow small drains onhis fund of energy; and so far as he did so, he sinned againsthis own soul. The one great and continuous drain was the taxput upon him by official drudgery. Under the morbid and wastefulconditions of middle-class life in India genius, when not bornin the purple, has put before it, like the fair Rosamund of Normanromance, a choice between two methods of suicide, theServices and the Law. It must either take the poisoned bowl orthe dagger. And in this limited circle of professions the EducationalService with its system of respites and remissions, andthe Executive Service with its indirect rather than direct tax onthe pure intellect, present, it may be, the points of least repulsion.But they are none the less a fearful drain because theyare, under existing circumstances, necessary.In this versatility Bankim was only a type of the intellectualHindu. This gift, at once a blessing and a curse, is the most singularcharacteristic of those two Hindu races which have thedestinies of the country in their keeping. It is the evidence ofour high blood, our patent of nobility among the nations; for itcomes of the varied mental experience of our forefathers, of thenation's three thousand years of intellectual life. But it is at the