VII
Later members of the Georgia group, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Harry Stillwell Edwards, and William Nathaniel Harben, have continued the tradition of Longstreet and have dealt more or less realistically with the humbler life of their region. Miss Elliott with her The Durket Sperrit entered the domain of Charles Egbert Craddock and gave a new version of the mountain dialect. A comparison of this novel with The Juggler, which appeared the same year, is illuminating. The two writers seem to be complements of each other, the one strong where the other is weak. The story lacks the atmosphere, the poetic dignity, the sense of mystery and of mountain majesty so notable in the elder novelist, but it surpasses her in characterization and in sympathy. The people are tremendously alive. The tyrannical old woman about whom the tale centers, with her narrow ideals and her haughty "Durket sperrit," dominates every page as Egdon Heath dominates The Return of the Native. She is felt during every moment of the story and so is the pathetic little mountain waif in the earlier chapters of Jerry. Miss Elliott's distinctive work is limited to these two books. Had she had the courage to work out with clearness the central tragedy of The Durket Sperrit, the deliberate disgracing of Hannah by her discarded lover, the book might take its place among the few great novels of the period.
Edwards inclined more toward the old Georgia type of human-nature sketch. His best work is to be found in his short studies in black and white after the Johnston pattern. Indeed, his first story, "Elder Brown's Backslide," Harper's Monthly, 1885, without his name would have been regarded as a Dukesborough Tale. He has written two novels, one of which, Sons and Fathers, was awarded the $10,000 prize offered by the Chicago Record for a mystery story, but he is not a novelist. He is humorous and picturesque and often he is for a moment the master of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing commandingly distinctive.