Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/440

416 BENGALI LITERATURE mystery of his mystery stands clear and visible in its own familiar light before our eyes. This transfiguration of the primeval instinct of filial affection of A child crying in the night A child crying for the light into a religious phantasy or poetic rapture is a remarkable achievement of Ram-prasad’s songs. The incommunicable communion between the human soul Transfiguration of a and thedivineis communicated through primitive human in- . : aye : stinct, and appeal fora the exceedingly familiar and authen- more emotional form of religion. tic intensity of the child’s feeling for the mother. This new stand- point vivifies religion with a human element and lifts one of the primitive elements of human nature into the means of glorious exaltation. It brings back colour and beauty into religious life and appeals to the imagination and the feelings. Its essential truth lies in its appeal for a more emotional religion and in its protest against the hard intellectuality of doctrines and dogmas. It is not the isolated expression of moral or religious ideas but its fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, expressing itself in a distinetly novel yet familiar mode of utterance, which makes these songs so remarkable. The fanufric form of worship has its terrible as well as its beautiful aspect ; in these latter-day Sakta writers we find an assertion of the rights of the emotional and the esthetic in human nature. In this view the achievements of Ram-prasad, ably seconded by other devotional songsters who followed in the line, is of a kind which most of the great religious or moral leaders of the race in some way or other performed and which opened up a new source of elevating joy. But in this idea of the Divine Mother (ma/rd4a4) which primarily follows the authority of the /antras and the