History of Bengali Language and Literature c10.93

c10.93

The poets had betaken themselves to the painter's art. They did not aim at inspiring life; they wanted to give finish to the form. They busied themselves with colouring, till some of the pictures they drew became blurred by their very efforts to embellish them. For it was not the natural that engaged their poetic powers, but the artificial and exaggerated, which pandered to the vitiated taste of mere scholars. From the time of Ālāol the tone gradually degenerated;—the good sense, the sound principles, and the domestic instincts that aimed at purity were lost. There was a violent return to the senses. Sensualism of the grossest kind—unrestrained and vulgar sensualism, redeemed only by fine literary touches and embellished by choice metaphors—pervades a considerable portion of the literature of this age. The poets in their strenuous attempts to depict vulgar scenes cared only to produce effects by their rhythmical pomp; and when one reads such passages he thinks more of the metre and of the niceties of expression than of the wicked and immoral spirit that they breathe. Hence the lawless tone loses much of its force and the scenes themselves appear as harmless as painted devils. Poetry sank to the level of mere painting, as I have said, and to that of a merely decorative type,—painting in which skilled and ornate designs are worked up with inexhaustible patience by gifted hands like those we find in the caves of Elephanta.