পাতা:রমেশ রচনাবলী (উপন্যাস).djvu/২৪

ہ’براlھ 尋 public spirit by standing at the window on Bijaya day, to count the images gqing to the Ganges, and mourning and lamenting if these were more, or rejoicing if they were fewer, than at the same time the year before If we are all aware, today, of further elements in the Procession of the Images, than those of mere religious forms, if we understand something of the civic life that goes with it, and the proud history of Pataliputra and of Gour that speaks through it, let us not forget how high amongst the forces that have brought this home to us, stands Romesh Dutt himself. He had none to lead him in the path of nationality. Gradually, he said, as he worked on from point to point, he began to see the greatness of his own country and his own people, and the solidarity and distinctness of their cause. Gradually, he understood the immensity of the Indian world and atmosphere, and by no violent cataclysm of the spirit, but little by little, following the thread of truth, he found himself at last in the opposite camp to that of his early preconceptions. But the determining factor in this process, as anyone but himself | could see, was the strong true heart, that had always stood shoulder to shoulder $owith his own; the heart of a free man, who followed that which he saw to be good, and aped no foreign ways, as such ; the heart of one who was too proud i to be courtier or sycophant, and who knew not how to be petty or ashamed. Romesh Chunder Dutt, notwithstanding the towering success of his life, kept to the end, the simplicity of true greatness. The splendid pluck that carried him and his two friends off to England, in their boyhood, as runaways, turned into the ringing cheer of his presence, in mature age. But his generosity was always the same. He never forgot to tell either that he owed the idea of the adventure, like many other ideas that had contributed to his success—to his friend B. L. Gupta; or that the money that took him was a sister's dower. And the same quality of cheeriness and brightness had yet another and most pathetic development, when I met him for the last time in England more than a year ago, and heard him say, with beaming smiles of self-gratulation, 'A new world has risen, in India, and my day is done ! The boys listen to me with politeness, of course for the sake of the past! But a new day has dawned in India and mine is past’ ‘My day is past!' If one had only known that one would never hear that voice again! But no life would be intolerable, if every moment carried full knowledge of its content of pathos and farewell. And in truth, the day of souls like his is never ended. Woe be to that land and that people where they shall cease to be born The writing of 'Civilisation in Ancient India' was one of the turningpoints in his career. To have begun such a task at all, shows the marvellous energy and courage that was never contented to give a day's labour for a day's bread, but must for ever be doing more than the bond laid down. And having begun, he found himself being re-created by his own work. The task of writing was a task of self-education. It was the inception of the second great intellectual influence of his life. All his great influences were literary. The first had lain in English literature, when he and his two comrades, Surendranath Banerjee and B. L. Gupta, would sit up in their London lodgings, reading Shelly aloud till three in the morning, in sheer delight; or when he, recovering from an illness, read Gibbon for the first time, and in the cosmic mind of England's greatest historian found his own guru. And the second was his discovery of the Indian mind, as revealed in ancient history Out-dated. It was never a work of original scholarship. It never