Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s5.4

c11.s5.4

It is not denied that some of the Bengal Vaiṣṇava Stotras maintain their popularity, being daily uttered and relished by innumerable devout minds, but popularity or devotional employment is no index to literary quality. They are popular, not because they are great religious poems, but because they give expression to cherished religious ideas. They have, therefore, different values for the devotee and the literary critic. They come within the purview of literary appreciation only when they are not merely liturgical verses, or strings of laudatory names and epithets, or metrical litanies of glory and greatness, or didactic dissertation of doctrinal matter. These effusions of the devout heart are, in a sense, beyond the scope of formal criticism; and it is perhaps difficult for the uninterested critic, who is apt to dismiss them as expressions of abnormal sentimentality, to realise the entire mentality of these devotee-poets, the earnestness of their creed and credulity, the exaltation of their refined emotionalism. But when these devout utterances represent a professional effort and not a born gift, a systematic exposition of religious emotions and ideas and not their automatic fusion in an instinctively poetical and devotional personality, they seldom reach the true accent of a great religious poem.