all resources of tender emotions". Says Mr. S. K. Ratcliff, in the paper, 'India', published from London in its issue of the 15th March, 1912: “The English reader is used to being told that the Western convention of romantic love between youth and maid is entirely foreign to Eastern habits of feeling", but a study of “Chaṇdidās and his successors should cause him to abandon that view, for he will find there not only love-poetry indistinguishable in essence from that of Europe, but proof of the existence in India of a fashion precisely similar to that of the mediæval courts of love". M. Sylvain Lévi in the Revue Critique, D'Histoire et De Littérature (January 18, 1913), speaks enthusiastically of “the songs of passionate love of Chaṇdidās"; and May Sinclair in a recent issue of the North American Review[১] quotes abundantly from the old Bengali songs of the Vaiṣṇavas showing their high degree of excellence. Sir George Grierson praises “the matchless sonnets of Vidyāpati” in his History of the Literature of Hindusthan, and he says elsewhere “the glowing stanzas of Vidyāpati are read by the devout Hindu with as little of the baser part of human sensuousness as the song of Solomon is by the Christian priest". “They (Vidyāpati's songs) became great favourites of the more modern Vaiṣṇava reformer of Bengal—Chaitanya—and through him songs purporting to be by Vidyāpati have become as well-known in Bengali households as the Bible is in an English one.” It is not merely the Vaiṣṇava poems that have attracted the attention of European scholars, the late Professor E. B. Cowell of Cambridge had a great admiration for the Shākta poet, Mukundarāma, a considerable portion of whose poems was translated by him into English verse. He compared the Bengali poet to Chaucer and Crabbe[২] and used to recite passages from the poem to Bengali gentlemen who paid a visit to him. Miss Noble[৩] speaks thus of Râmprasāda Sen, another Shākta poet of Bengal, in her beautiful booklet entitled “Mother Kāli.” “No flattery could touch a nature so unapproachable in its simplicity. For in these writings we have perhaps alone in literature the spectacle of a great poet whose genius is spent in realising the emotions of a child. William Blake in our own poetry strikes the note that is nearest his, and Blake is by no means his peer. Robert Burns in his splendid indifference to rank and Whitman in his glorification of common things have points of kinship with him. But to such a radiant white heat of childlikeness, it would be impossible to find a perfect counterpart. His years do nothing
পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/২১
এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা হয়েছে, কিন্তু বৈধকরণ করা হয়নি।
INTRODUCTION.
13
