Early essays and other prose writings on literature, education, art and other cultural subjects including 'The Harmony of Virtue', 'The National Value of Art'...
Early essays and other prose writings on literature, education, art and other cultural subjects. The volume includes 'The Harmony of Virtue', Bankim Chandra Chatterji, essays on Kalidasa and the Mahabharata, 'The National Value of Art', 'Conversations of the Dead', the 'Chandernagore Manuscript', book reviews, 'Epistles from Abroad', Bankim – Tilak – Dayananda, and Baroda speeches and reports. Most of these pieces were written between 1890 and 1910, a few between 1910 and 1920. (Much of this material was formerly published under the title 'The Harmony of Virtue'.)
A Virgilian elegance and sweetness and a Virgilian majesty of diction ennoble the finer epistles of these Heroides; there is too a Virgilian pathos sad & noble breaking out in detached lines and passages, as in Shacountala's sorrowful address to the leaf and the single melancholy line, এই কি রে ফেল ফল প্রেম তরু শাখে, but the more essential poetical gifts, creative force, depth or firmness of meditation, passionate feeling, a grasp of the object, consistency & purity of characterisation are still absent. They were not in the poet's nature and such gifts if denied by Nature, are denied for ever. What exists even faintly can be developed, transformed, strengthened but what does not exist, cannot be produced by labour.
नासतो विध्यते भावो नाभावो विध्यते सतः
The Epistle of Tara is perhaps less satisfactory; the fiery outbursts of a monstrous and lawless passion needed a stronger imagination than Madhusudan's to conceive and execute them. The elegances of the Epistle, with its graceful rephrasing of outworn classical images and its stately love-conceits is out of place where the volcanic sheerness of a Webster could alone have been appropriate. Nevertheless the passage in which Tara complains of the unclean love she cannot avoid or control is not without a noble dignity of passion; and shows with what charm the poet could invest the plainest and most hackneyed images. And there are lines in this latter part which have the true note of that terrific passion, [for example] her cry, দেহ ভিক্ষা, দেহ ভিক্ষা; the magnificent
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কলঙ্কি শশাঙ্ক etc. and লিখিনু লেখন etc. and the powerful distiches closing line have all a dramatic simplicity, fire and force which belong to the highest poetry only. Would that Madhusudan had written not only stray lines, distiches, passages, but whole poems in this spirit. The deplorable want of a discerning criticism and false conceptions of poetry early imbibed have done untold harm to our best and most promising writers.
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