The Life of Thomas Hardy
harmoniums played by native girls who had gained their technique in the larger towns, finally by solemn pipe-instruments. To Hardy, this passing of the old and quaint spelled tragedy: Orpheus had been deposed by St. Cecilia.
The ancient weather-caster, working by divination, was supplanted by the official weather bureaux, working according to meteorological principles. An actual "skimmington" or "skimmity-ride" took place as late as 1884 in a Dorset village—but such things are now no more. Hardy himself has described to William Archer the unforgettable effect produced on him while still very young, by the sight of a man in the stocks, "sitting in the scorching sunshine, with the flies crawling over him." Today one looks in vain for a scene such as this—which may not really be a bad thing.
Varied emotions are aroused by the gradual decay of the Dorset speech, now but seldom heard. Hardy deplored it, saying:
Since Barnes's death, education in the west of England as elsewhere has gone on with its silent and inevitable effacement, reducing the speech of this country to uniformity, and obliterating every year many a tine local word. The process is always the same: The word is ridiculed by the newly-taught; it gets into disgrace; it is heard in holes and corners only; it dies; and, worst of all, it leaves no synonym. In the villages that one recognizes to be the scenes of these pastorals the poet's nouns, adjectives and idioms daily cease to be understood by the younger generation, the luxury of four demonstrative pronouns, of which Barnes was so proud, vanishes by their compression into the two of common English, and the suffix to verbs which marks continuity of action is almost everywhere shorn away.
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