Origins (1360-1772)
scious, but doubtless intensified by enforced comparative lowliness.
Still more superficial indications of this can easily be found in Hardy's directly expressed opinions of the Wessex underlings. Certainly he never writes of them as one of them, particularly in his frankly detached, if sympathetic, article, The Dorsetshire Labourer. He examines their reactions with the disinterested feelings of a chemist making a quantitative analysis.
Nor did he ever see anything in his parents to permit him to identify himself with the tillers and villagers. The "Wessex dialect," although recognized as a language with claims to legitimacy perhaps superior to those of London English, was nevertheless strictly verboten within the walls of his birthplace.
It is of course true, and Hardy has himself frankly admitted, that his own immediate forbears were no longer personages of great importance, even locally. His father's own particular line had suffered something of a tragic fall from high estate perhaps analogous to the deterioration of the D'Urbervilles in the novel. This point, however, must not be pressed too weightily. Hardy has repeatedly warned biographers against the dangerous and "impertinent" procedure of identifying him or his associates too closely with the figures of his imagination, tempting and half-truthful as this may often be. It must be done very gingerly, if at all. One must remember the posthumous evil it has wrought in the past upon the fame of Sappho of Lesbos and Will Langland of Shropshire.
Hardy's father, for instance, had decidedly not fallen
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