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மறைமலையம் 13
and aggressiveness, and hence its place is daily becoming more and more prominent amidst them all. In almost all civilised countries but of India, especially southern India, the art of fiction has made a rapid and nearly a perfect development. But here it is still in its infancy. The host of novel writers are primarily led by mercinary and other motives. No genius has as yet arisen and no novel breathes the atmosphere of true art. In most of the Tamil novels that I have come across. I find neither plot nor character delineation, neither a true representation of life nor a chaste and felicitious diction of language. The story chiefly turns only upon love passion--the love in its most degraded type and gross earthly form. Although the Tamil language is pliant and rich in vocabulary capable of conveying the finest shades of meanings, yet in all the Tamil Novels published in a decade or two the diction is rendered very unwholesome by the introduction of unassimilated foreign words from Sanskrit and other languages and by the unhappy combination of words and phrases. In the matter of happy diction and choicest expression of thought a real and fastidious scholarship is the only necesary requirement; but of this not a single Tamil novel of recent times bears a notable mark. Even the Tamil renderings of some English Novels have been done by inelegant hands in so tasteless a manner that the beauty of the original appears in the new drees transformed into ugliness. Except a few who look upon themselves as civilised and up-to date, the main portion of the Tamils brought up in a simple and pure life do not like these novels at all. They like to read novels written in a pure and simple. Tamil style depicting the nature and human life as found in their experience but agreeably ennobled by the moral eelevation of the novelist's ideal thought. Having keenly felt their want I ventured to produce this adapted Tamil translation of an eminent English novel in the hope that the pure and simple Tamil into which the ideas of the original are cast would please the Tamils very much leading them further and further into an appreciation of the art and study of fiction coupled with their own progress of life.
