Page:2015.396258.Vyasavali.pdf/156

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144
Essays

ledge of all kinds is diluted and dispensed in small doses not only in school books but in what is called popular literature, including fiction, so that even the man in the street in civilized communities thinks he knows which is which and can make something of what is said to him or written for him.

The learned Pandits of the colleges and the academies, we know, indulge themselves in platitudes relating to the terms literature, fine arts, poetry, prose, &c., and confound themselves and others. So long as they do not recognise that the literature of any people at any given time is the expression of the thought of that people at that time in the language current among the people, we have no common ground for any discussion with them on the merits of what they call "Telugu" and "Telugu Literature" and "Telugu popular Literature."

We should in the first place like to know which of the Telugu books, mentioned in their accounts of Telugu Literature, give us an insight into Telugu Character and Telugu ideals of life in the way that English books do? and which among the host of books that have been prescribed for study in the High Schools and Colleges during the last one hundred years deserve to be called "Popular" like the English Child's Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's