grew increasingly conservative—always a conservative, he became in his last days reactionary; whereas Rabindranath has been always a critic, as uncompromising as he thought the truth required. Irony and criticism are never absent from his fiction. But his greatness is as a poet, and his novels, with the exception of The Home and the World—which is really a series of episodes treated in the manner of short stories—, are not among his best work. One other, Gora, has fine qualities, and Sarat Babu regards it much as Stevenson did The Egoist. 'I have read it at least twenty times,' he says. This is the link—this, and Rabindranath's short stories, many of which are with the finest short stories ever written,—between Bankim and Sarat, and this is the way in which the torch which the former handed to the young poet of Evening Songs, nearly forty years ago, has from Rabindranath reached the most prominent living novelist of Bengal.
Sarat Babu has gone to the world of to-day, and given us pictures of the present. In his work criticism of society is found, but it is not the radical criticism of such a fearless work as The Home and the World—one of the most courageous books ever written, for which Rabindranath deserves a salute from everyone who loves a brave man—and such stories as Living or Dead and Subha. It does not seriously break a spear with tradition. Yet he has not escaped attack. Srikanta is written round his favourite social theme, the problem which is constantly exercising his mind—society's attitude towards the professional and public woman. The reader will be glad that he has made Rajlakshmi so attractive.
The second and third parts of Srikanta have been published. The present volume is only the first part. The
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