5) If books are written in Modern Telugu, both the quantity and quality of literary production will improve. The difficulty of the poetic dialect has discouraged literary composition in the vernacular on the part of intelligent graduates, who dread violating rules of grammar at every step. They can write coffectly in Modern Telugu without fear of violating an imaginary and impossible standard which is fatal to all spontaneity. In Bengal and Bombay persons who have received the best English culture apply themselves assiduously to the cultivation of the vernaculars while the leaders of Madras are content with talking about the improvement of the vernaculars on wrong lines.
6) Modern Telugu is acquired naturally, by the higher castes, and it can be acquired by the natural or direct method by the lower classes. It is so learnt now in towns by domestic servants.
188. Elementary School-books should be written in Modern Telugu without an admixture of poetic forms. Poetic forms may be sparingly used in books intended for higher forms. But it should be borne in mind that the writing of books should not be entrusted to writers who have not cultivated literary art on Western lines. That a person has succeeded in securing appointment as pandit in a school or college does not augur sound scholarship or literary power. Good writers alone can decide which poetic forms can be used with effect in prose; but not writers wedded to the Kavya or the Neo-Kavya dialect whose literary sense has been trained to abhor spoken forms.
REPUGNANCE TO SPOKEN FORMS
189. This repugnance to spoken forms is a feeling of recent growth. Its psychology is simple. Two generations of schoolboys were bredup in the grammatical tradition. Those school-boys have grown up to be the men of to-day--and the grammatical
