conventions and ready-made moulds of description prepared for him by Tamil grammarians and prosodists. His inexplicable bias towards the classical poets had led him to describe நன்செய்நாடு and தாமிரபன்னி in the right orthodox style. But these descriptions as they stand may be bodily shifted to depict any other country or any other river - they are so artificial, and so ideal, and what is much worse so flagrantly unreal. If the author had visited the country or the river he intended to describe and added certain realistic descriptions applicable to these only and to no other country or river, he would have succeeded in producing on the mind of his reader a concrete picture. But now his descriptions only raise verbal abstractions floating in the dreamland of fancy. Then again he should have harped less on the hyperbolic string of his lyre. Exaggeration as proceeding from or as tokens of heightened forms of feeling is no doubt allowable. But to use it as one's ordinary stock-in trade is to misuse it. I am aware that, judged by this standard, our oriental poets, as a class, will fare very badly; still from a poet of Mr. Sundaram Pillai's genius, critical acumen and western culture we have a right to expect the very highest in the art.

Ethical Value

I now come to the last problem I have intended to discuss in connection with this play. Being of the highest moment I have reserved it to the last. I believe it is the Italian critic, Croce, who lays down the axiom that anything else than consideration of pleasure should not intrude into the work of a fine art. Such intrusion, even if it be for ethical purposes, will mar, in his opinion, the artistic value of the work. So far as the end of a fine art is concerned, few will question the validity of this primary law. But even fine art should be judged by its wider utility to human life as a whole. Although the work of a fine art is distinguished from the work of a scientific or mechanical art by being merely pleasurable and not directly useful, it by no means follows that it should not be even indirectly useful. Its indirect utility will, in no way, spoil its direct object-pleasure. There are many directly useful objects which indirectly add to our pleasures, as for instance, the pleasures we derive from eating food. As a direct converse of such cases, artistic pleasures may also bring with them a utility of their own. I shall have to name here the modern Biologic doctrine that pleasures are life-preservative and pains the very reverse, to prove the ultimate utility of pleasures. Bringing down the question from this scientific level, the problem to be solved is whether a piece of poetic or dramatic composition should aim at anything more than the satisfaction of man's craving for pleasure. It may be at once conceded that the rule we may derive from the practice of the great poets of the world supports those who lay the emphasis on artistic pleasure. But, at the same time, the very same great poets have followed this rule