820 BENGALI LITERATURE off without much incongruity. But in the songs of the Kabiwalas these things, severed from their true relations and from their natural surroundings of beauty, assumed an incongruous independence and a distorted shape, incompatible with artistic or spiritual excel- lence, especially as it is often dressed in weak phraseology and loose versification. The Baisnab The spirit of ancient poetry unfolds before our vision such poetry inadequately : ঃ represented, an extensive realm of beauty that its occasional deformities and blemishes are easily passed over, nor do they appear in their natural state artistically inconsistent. Apart from all questions of spiritual interpretation, the ideal of love depicted in Baisnab poetry may have, from a layman’s stand-point, departed in places from the strictness of propriety or deco- rum, but if after a study of the poetry in its entirety, a man does not rise with an impression of its beauty and nobility, then the conclusion is obvious that either he has not read it properly or that he is impervious to all sense of its excellence. In the infinite varieties of amorous situa- tion, the description of Radha as a ‘/andita heroine or of Krsna as an arch-deceiver may have, leaving aside other explanations, an artistic justification of enhancing the beauty of this poetry by adding to it an element of playful toying (chhalana) or wayward vagary toe een a (dafichana) or even 8 sterner element ception and treatment of distressing poignancy ; yet what- of Radha and Krsna. ever may be the interpretation, it certainly does not dwarf our concep- tion of the finer spirit of Baisnab poetry. Ignoring the considerations of sensual presentation or spiritual explana- tion, the central and essential idea of Baisnab poetry, embodied in the conception of Radha’s fsalanka, has an emotional suggestion of its own, which adds an element
