Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/89

 justified what may still seem a curious compromise between scientifically naturalistic speech-reproduction and unscientific cross-fertilization of two distinct languages.

This inexactness and license in the employment of what was so carefully, accurately and jealously recorded in the work of Barnes was amply atoned for by Hardy's greater richness in the use of rural idioms and by his very generous paraphrases of characteristic, revealing turns of speech. Barnes, on the other hand, frequently forsook the simplicity and the naive rustic euphuism so delightfully indulged in by Hardy's countrymen, and decked out their language with the cut and dried flowers of traditional book-rhetoric. The flowers in the speech of William Worm, Joseph Poorgrass, Grandfer Cantle and their associates are always fresh, spontaneous, and of the wild and uncultivated variety. But although Hardy never violated the peasant character himself, he thus defended Barnes's practice:

Both authors were united on insisting upon the view that the Dorset dialect was, and always had been, a real