PRESENT POSITION AND PROSPECTS 105 securing an acquaintance with English, the vernacular may be given a much more important place in the future. Hindi is also under a disadvantage because its standards of prose have not yet been fixed. We have seen that not only is the prose literature a plant of very recent growth, but that the dialect of High Hindi which it uses is also a modern production. There are scarcely any prose standards of the past to look to, and the present state of the language is transitional. Some authors attempt to write in a language from which are expelled, as far as possible, all words other than those of Hindi or Sanskrit origin. But if this standard be adopted the language is for the common folk very difficult to understand. Other writers go to the opposite extreme and admit a great many words not only of Arabic and Persian, but also of English origin, even when there are simple and wxll-understood Hindi words which could just as well express their meaning. It seems indeed inevitable that for the expression of modern ideas a good deal of borrowing must take place, but the limits to which this should go can only be settled in course of time by the practice of good prose writers. At present there is a great deal of variation, both in translations and original works, with regard to the language used, and the adoption of some generally recognised standard is very much to be desired. Owing to Hindi prose literature being written in a modern artificial dialect, which has not proved itself very popular for the purposes of poetry, it has come about not only that the language of poetry is different from that of prose, but that there are several different dialects still used for poetry. The existence of a widely divergent standard between the language of prose and that of poetry would be unfortunate in many ways, and it cannot be said what the ultimate issue of this matter will be, but there does seem a tendency amongst some modern poets to use a language which is approximating more to that of prose.
