পাতা:বঙ্কিম-প্রসঙ্গ.djvu/১০

( 5 ) a permanent source of income, imparted flexibility and refinement to our language, provided amusement and instruction to the classes that have no acquintance with English, and presented more life-like pictures of local life than could be drawn with a foreign pencil. The country and the author were alike gainers by the resort to the native tongue. These are facts which have a lesson to tell. The literature of life, that is, of national and not of universal life, is never properly written except in the nation's own tongue. But cosmopolitan literature, the literature of universal life and thought, of truths unconditioned by time and place, may, without prejudice to any interests, be embodied in any language. It is possible | for a Bengali who has a sufficient mastery of English, to write \ works on philosophy, theology, science, and such other subjects, in that language, doing justice to himself and the cause he has espoused. Very different will be his position . when he has to write a novel or a drama or a national epic. I If he can excel in any literature properly so called, it can be only in the history and antiquities of his own country, or in a description of its life, or in translations from the native tongue into a foreign. That is the reason why native" " India, however gifted, have not produced any English literature worth the name ; and, may we say, they never will produce it. The exceptions here prove the rule. If Dr. Rajendra iala Mitra or Mr. Justice Telang, or Mr. R. C. Dutt has made any contribution to English literature, that has been wo history or archaeology of this country. Whoever has sought to cultivate the mere literature of a foreign people, has failed to produce any literature himself. Russick Krishna Mullick, Govind Chandra Dutt, Girish Ghose, and, last not lost, Sambhu Chandra Mukerjee, were devoted students of English literature. Their ambition was purely literary, but they could not and did not produce any literature save of the