288 BENGALI LITERATURE But the British influence on Bengali, owing to its permanent and all-embracing charac- The language of the - Enropean writers 661 Was more deep and far-reaching. (সাহেবী ব| খষ্টানী In matters of language, however, the < ৬7. বাঙ্গ।লা), British writers at the outset, we have seen, found themselves in an embar- rassed position. They did not know in the midst of per- plexing diversity what models to choose or what form of the language to adopt. They however took primarily as their guide the compositions of their own munsis_ or pundits, which leaned towards pedantry and sanseritisa- tion; but fortunately their strong commonsense, their literary instinct, and an innate tendency to realism,! which is a distinetive feature of all English writers, saved them from the contagion of affectation and made them adopt a more simple and natural style. Their language is a curious admixture of the sanscritised style of the pundits (সাধুভাষ1) and the colloquial language of the people (চলিতভাষা) with some pecu- larities of its own and a more or less decided leaning towards Its sources. the latter. ‘The missionaries and the schoolmasters, to whose rank and file belong most of the early European writers in Bengali, lived in the closest touch with the people, and their chief end in writing was not to show off their erudition but to make themselves intelligible, to be popular, clear and useful. here are, it is true, errors and Its errors in vocabul- excesses in their writing as vexatious ary, syntax and idiom ; é ; but general excellence 8 the stiffness of the Pundits, and the in its healthy direc- Wissionary Bengali has always been tion towards simpli- * ee ৪ ু city and naturalness. the sport of criticism. But, inspite of these and other aberrations, the gene- ral excellence of their style in one direction at least can =.) সপ
1 See the remarks on Carey’s Dialogues at p. 146.
