Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/329

KABIWALAS 305 now become an irregular profession and a regular means of livelihood, and of a body of literature which was marked by earelessness rather than by scrupulousness and which belonged to that class of writings conveniently termed ephemeral journalism. The authors had 100 higher ambition than that of immediately pleasing their patrons and gaining their cheap praise and pay. They never eared to reach that mark of excellence which would make posterity pause before it would willingly let their produe- tions perish. These songs, again, had generally circulated in the mouths of the people ; in course of time, while some were forgotten, others got curiously mixed up or passed through strange transformations until, as in their present extant form, they can hardly be called the genuine original works of their creator, or with confidence be referred to this or that individual author. No critical appreciation or diserimination was expected and none was made. The literature was forgotten no sooner than a generation had passed away. Even in 1854, [svar Gupta lamented that most of these songs had already vanished in his time or had been fast vanishing and his self-imposed task of collecting these old songs had been rendered difficult by the fact that he had to depend entirely upon the uncertain and fleeting memory of old men who had been, day by day, dropping away. Except Nidhu Babu among the earlier group—and Nidhu Babu, though a patron of as/dai, can hardly be classed as a Kabiwala—none of these poets or their followers ever eared to reduce their songs to writing. Printing was hardly known in those days and, if known, was too expensive and difficult of access to these needy songsters; yet men like Haru Thakur had rich patrons like Raja Naba Krsna to whom it had never occurred that these floating songs were worth 39