And yet it must not be thought that either “Bassetts” or “Little Baddow” figures in the “Little Bradmarsh” of my story. The artist cannot be tied down: he creates a composite landscape to his needs. Moreover, in these last four or five years a zealous constabulary can testify out of what odds and ends the strange inquiring figure, who walked, cycled, or rode in carriers’ carts to forgotten hamlets or sea-marshes, has composed his background. Nor have I followed photographic realism even in my dialect, deeming the Cockneyish forms, except when unconsciously amusing, too ugly to the eye in a long sustained narrative, though enjoyable enough in those humorous sketches which my friend Bensusan, the true conquistador of Essex, pours forth so amazingly from his inexhaustible cornucopia. I differ—in all diffidence—from his transcription on the sole point that the Essex rustic changes “i” into “oi” in words like “while,” though why on the other hand “boil” should go back to “bile” can be explained only by the perversity which insists on taking aspirates off the right words and clapping them on the wrong, much as Cockney youths and girls exchange hats on Bank Holiday. I have limited my own employment of this local vowelling mainly to the first person singular as sufficiently indicative of the rest. In the old vexed question of the use of dialect, my feeling is that its value is simply as colour, and that the rich old words, obsolete or unknown elsewhere, contribute this more effectively and far more beautifully than vagaries of pronunciation, itself a very shifting factor of language even in the best circles. It is not even necessary for the artistic effect that the reader should understand the provincial words, though the context should be so contrived as to make them fairly intelligible. In short, art is never nature, though it should conceal the fact. Even the slowness and minuteness of my method—imposed as it is by the attempt to seize the essence of Essex—are immeasurable velocity and breadth compared with the scale of reality.