The Soil (. . . 1850)
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:
What is the use of saying, as has been said of Barnes, that compound epithets like "the blue-hill'd worold," "the white horn'd cow," "the grey-topp'd heights of Paladore," are a high-handed enlargement of the ordinary ideas of the fieldfolk into whose mouths they are put? These things are justified by the art of every age when they can claim to be, as here, singularly precise and beautiful definitions of what is signified; which in these instances, too, apply with double force to the deeply tinged horizon, to the breed of kine, to the aspect of Shaftesbury Hill, characteristic of the Yale within which most of his revelations are enshrined.
Both authors were united on insisting upon the view that the Dorset dialect was, and always had been, a real
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