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THE CONCLUDING NOTE
Nirodbaran was a personal friend and brother-disciple of Roy. When he was. asked to appreciate Dilip Roy as a literary artist, he observed:
"Literary artist? I don't know. I don't see that he is a novelist. Novelist in the sense of common knowledge, common acceptation of the word novel. They are all psychological, mental, so he could not pass as a novelist... But his biographies are very good- very good biographies. About his poetry itself I have said, in Bengali, it struck a new line. That is also intellectual-his poetry-and he was a great prosodist... All you can see in the correspondence between him and Sri Aurobindo.... He was a great lover of poetry, lover of literature,
literature, not philosophy, so much, like Bertrand Russell etc."!
Nirodbaran is right. Roy was not a gifted thinker, nor was he a professional literary artist in spite of his mastery of English prosody and spontaneously sweet and singing mind. But he was a biographer of note, of note, again, because he is not a traditional biographer either.
It should be clear now that Dilip Roy, as a writer, is not easily classifiable strictly according to known genres of literature. His art of biography also is not much concerned with the history of concerned individuals. Yet, it can not be denied that he is an artist. He may be an artless artist and yet an artist, because the primary characteristic of literary art is a strange power to move the reader, which may arise from peculiar personality or from linguistic skill or partially from both. Such power we discover in Dilip Roy. He has the qualities of a good writer as a man according to Longinus's requirement, though he lacks the skills as an artist laid down by Longinus. Roy, we have repeatedly stressed, has the faults and merits of a romantic poet.
He presents an impressionistic account of each of his heroes and invests him with a halo. It is a spatial portrait delivered from the flux of time. There is nothing of the chronological development and the history of an individual is not turned into a plotted story in any of them. Then how shall we call them biographies? But if we do not call them biographies. how shall we describe them in critical terms? Shall we say they are just elaborate portraits or more than living spirits as they might appear in the visions of a mystic ? Okay, then that is what they are, and we call them biographies only in that sense. Can anyone deny that they make a pleasant reading ? The fact that the works of Roy had been best sellers, proves that they moved a large number of readers to intense delight. And it is not cheap delight of sensational tales but higher intellectual and emotional
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