পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/৫০

42 INTRODUCTION. Chaitanya Deva came at this stage and in the place of human love - preached the love of God and adopted the phraseology Chaitanya. - of human love merely as a symbol to denote the mystic yearnings of the soul for God. With his advent the spiritual night that had enshrouded Bengal during these days came to an end. The Täntrics used to sit on the dead bodies of the Chandāls, all alone, for whole nights in the dismal funeral grounds, drink from human skulls and pass through unheard-of hardships; while the school of romantic love demanded the greatest sacrifices for its ideal. Often through culpable rites and misdirected and even hideous practices, the earnest amongst these people had tried to get glimpses of a higher life. They were panting for God's grace, to assuage all grief and sanctify the heart. It was the healing balm of the soul that they wanted; it was beauty idealized that they strove to touch and feel. They wanted to see a Poet and not merely read poetry. Chaitanya came as the living Poet among them, holding before their sight the superb beauty of spiritual life in full bloom. The country was at the time full of songs of Rādhā and Krisna. - - - - - - The song of Jayadeva, first sung in the court of Radha-Krisna-Songs. Laksmana Sen in the 12th century, was echoed in remote villages of Bengal. The favourite bard of the court of Shiva Sinha, king of Mithila, sang the love of Rādhā and Krisna in a new strain, and the rural villages of Bengal and Bihar resounded with his song in the 14th century. Chandidas sang in a still higher strain, unmistakably pointing out that the songs of Rādhā-Krisha had a symbolical significance for man's love for God. Here Chaitanya appeared as an interpreter. He rejected the theory of love between man and woman as leading to a high spiritual plane, acknowledging the value of human love-literature merely as a symbol. He was not a preacher or a reformer—not a religious recluse, or a devotee who had developed certain feelings within himself in order to give them a poetic expression. He loved God with that ardour and warmth of the soul which no one had ever before felt for the Unseen. When with open arms he ran to embrace the Tamāla tree which produced in him an illusion of Krisna, none of the vast assembly that witnessed his frenzied ecstasies had the heart to stop him; it was a romance of the highest order which they dared not disturb. When with tears in his eyes he spoke to the cloud decorated with a rainbow-mistaking it for his Krisna, when with startled looks he listened to the chirp of birds as if it was the sound of Krisna’s flute—when in a trance he broke off half-way in the midst of recitation of hymns and fell on the ground senseless, the multitude that saw him realised the truest poetry in life. His whole life was a record of such