76 SOCIAL SCIENTIST most unpalatable thing is the lollypop of hope which Dey finds by repeating the words of a foreign visitor. It is all, we daresay, platitudinous and we have had enough of platitudes already. The same sob-stuff, though clothed in the verbiage of polish, we find in the writings on the poets and poetry. There must also be demur and dissent in respect of Dey's frequent references to Marx, dialectical materialism and socialistic society, in all of which the impression gained by the reader is that these things which often get i educed to mere catchy shibboleths are none the better in Dey's writings. His references are evidently in the light of approval and Dey's rhetoric lays bare his Marxist intellectual bias. But what is really unfortunate is his almost persistent inability to go the whole hog for it. The names are chanted almost as a ritual but not in a single instance is any serious attempt made to analyse the socio-economic or socio-cultural complex in the light of Marxian dialectics. While thus Dey stands exposed as the cat in the adage which would eat the fish but would not wet its feet, his Marxian perspective does not show any the better than that of the dying generations of exploiters and tycoons. The most disappointing essay in this context is his "Marx and Bengali Writing". Hiren Mukerjee's note on the book-jacket says that Bishnu Dey's essays are 'provocative in style'. It provoked the present critic too but not in the way in which, in all probability, it had provoked Hiren Mukerjee at least to some kind of log-rolling in his laudatory notes on the author. What disconcerts and sometimes exasperates the reader is Bishnu Dey's fondness for tying knots of his clauses, with parentheses galore, and weaving involved sentence patterns of fantastic complexity. He is not incapable of writing chiselled but straightforward prose and I wonder why there should be such proclivity for the outmoded and useless baroque. Examples are odious but one cannot resist the temptation of quoting the following passage from "The Problem of Art in Education" : "Of course, problems of mere good living often triumph over the idea of the good life. But even though we admire our worldliness and advise our sons and nephews to follow this easy path of success, we have not got the brazen courage to avow this fact openly. So we quite often find a compromise. We pay our homage to those who did not surrender to this middle-class temptation but fought for freedom and adventure of the mind, of the sensibility—particularly when these nonconformists are great men of the past, that is, when they do not embarrass us or compete with xis actually—and on the other hand, we try to make the best of life here and now, this life which is so real, so earnest and not at all 'an empty dream9, and whose goal is social success" (page 121). Though we may ignore the cliches and grammatical aberrations in the passage, which by themselves would suffice to downgrade the value of the style, we may just point out that language does not gain anything by such meandering progress. A simple idea, as the above is, ought not to call for artifice and convolution. The pity is that Dey, who displays commendable forthrightness in many of his essays, gets not