పుట:Satee-Mani.1900.pdf/19

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11


to be turned into a decided improvement, and every encouragement must be given to even the humblest effort in these directions, If Telugu is to be a living language and become what DeQuincey has finely called the Literature of Power, two conditions precedent are necessary viz., (1) our heroes and heroines should cease to be mere wax-works or puppets, opening and shutting their eyes and lips or dancing to the guidance of the unseen wire-puller; and (2) we must eschew guerilla warfare about historic forms of words, about lapses from rigid canons of metre and about servile adherence to rules, which may be likened to the now-exploded "unities" and other arbitrary conventions of by-gone systems. It has become too much the fashion for critics to turn captious and self-conscious and to make mountains of occasional slips and peccadilloes, in order to denounce, as plaguespots, what are, at the worst, only like sun-specks. Allowance must, of course, be nevertheless made to the ineradicable datum of oriental nature, to the influence of environments and to the bias, imparted by prior studies and habits of thought.

It only remains for me to explain how it has come to pass that this body of my remarks is printed as introductory to Satee-mani. Those remarks form a part of what constitute a sort of prelude to a lengthy, analytical critique, drawn up by me on the leading Telugu writers, past and present; and I have thought