પૃષ્ઠ:Saraswati Chandra Part 1.pdf/૭

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PREFACE

Novels have in these days become an universal luxury and in competing for public interest have succeeded to an extent almost unrivalled. The very natural result has been that the bulls of fiction in the West has ceased to aspire beyond an artistic display of such of the sentimental and emotional idiosyncracies of mankind as happen to tickle the fancy of the ordinary reader. It is however certain – and the higher class of novelists never fail to recognise and claim - that the functions of the novel are more numerous, higher, and more sacred than the mere pandering to the taste of the n૦vel-reading public.

The writer of these pages admits that the origin of his undertaking was in the first instance neither so ordinary nor so ambitious. Like all who live and look around, he had his memoranda of what may be called the substrata. of this our world of human affairs. When he first desired to give an objective existence to all that was so sketched out in his mind's book, he intended to give it the form of essays. Second thoughts discovered that the reading class in Gujarat were, for various reasons, difficult to reach through abstruse or discursive matter, and that illustrations of real or ideal life would be the best medium, best in the ` sense of being attractive and impressive, for communications like those which the writer has to make. Hence the present contribution.