પૃષ્ઠ:Saraswati Chandra Part 3.pdf/૭

વિકિસ્રોતમાંથી
આ પાનું પ્રમાણિત થઈ ગયું છે.
PREFACE.

WITH the third volume this narrative enters upon a different phase of its career. It still continues to be a mosaic even blending of the actual and the ideal aspect of our eye in these days, but the latter, henceforth, begin to acquire a distinct predominance over the former. It is eleven years since the first volume was published, and the progress of the reading classes during the interval has been equal to the writer's aspiration to interest them in the principal problems of the day.

This and the succeeding volume will bring this tale to close. The labours of the writer will be sufficiently rewarded, if his book will have stimulated, among the various classes of our society, an abiding interest in some of the neat questions that make the young and the old in the country thrill with interchanging hopes and fears in all the tried matters which make up our life, and if it can enable them to follow with patience the solution which society is evolving upwards along a slow but sure gradient in relation to each of these pressing questions.

Each one of these problems is complicate and difficult, and the writer of a novel cannot be expected to do it the justice which a scientific or philosophical essayist can struggle for. An artist - and a novelist is no more - can only hope to give that simplicity to problems which the passive reader craves for, to bring out for his gaze the fascinations of their lights and shades so as to recreate and not tax his eyes, and yet to hope that, humble as this province of the writer is, he may enable the reader to rise a stage higher than where he was. At the same time it is no object of the writer to do so with that partisan spirit which may