GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 291 although secondarily it incorporated various elements from the language of the common people (5fS Stal) and even from the persianised court-language (S{#f7st Stal). Thus we see that this opposition between the plain and the ornate styles persistently dominated the history of Ben- gali prose for almost half a century and reached to a crisis in the two antithetical movements of the fif- ties—indicated by the A/@/7 style and the Sanserit College Synthesis in Bahkim- style—of which 019 genius of ইস a writer 1109 13820010000100007% &10009 eould find a proper synthesis. It will be seen therefore that from the standpoint of literary history, the importance of this period in prose is hardly less than that of any other. Formal importance of this period; but ao less intrinsic gre by earliness and immaturity, merit. = ¥ But its productions, marked that they have far less intrinsic merit. No historian of literature can claim anything like literary competency for much of this early prose, if he judges it by any strict literary standard. Originality is not a distinctive merit of this literature at all. Grammars, school-books, religious tracts, and other similar documents, most of them again mere translated pieces, cannot, in their very nature, justly claim to be called literature. In their translations again these writers are faithful enough : there is hardly any native aspiration to be free and original. Here and there, no doubt, they improved upon the capital that came into their hands but they seldom created or broke loose from their original. ‘The style, again, is of the rudest character, abrupt, disconnected, obscure, and full of anacolutha, not only in the works of the missionaries whose command over the inherent resources of the lan- guage must havenecessarily been limited and whose repute Want of originality.
