ie te CHAPTER IX
GeNERAL CHARACTERISTICS We have now closed the survey of a period of 19th century literature in Bengal, which is covered principally by European writers and their colleagues and which, if not the greatest, is at least one of the most important in its literary history: for although not rich in positive accomplishment, this and the period General remarks on of transition which followed it, had the characteristics of the European writers been the great school-time of modern and their achieve- : ক ‘ z fend. literature, periods in which — the unconscious experiments of Carey and his colleagues were made, expanded, and multiplied, sometimes with the conscious purpose of developing a prose sfy/e and always with the practical effect of doing so, by writers in the widely diverging branches of literature. No other period demonstrates so conclusively the folly or fallacy of the theory already ae ৭ alluded to, which would bid us ignore history. historie estimates and look only to “the best things’’in literature. Of such “best things” this period has got very little to show; its productions, with the greatest stretch of literary charity, can hardly be said to touch even the fringe of literature proper. To appreciate, much less to enjoy, the rudi- mentary publications of this period would require a certain amount of patience and catholicism, if not a kind of pre-established harmony of taste, in the reader; yet the importance of this period is not to be underrated on that account. There is no other portion of our modern literature
