Nowhere is she commonplace; nowhere does she come down from the stately plane that she reaches always with her opening paragraph. Even her dialect is individual. Doubtless other writers have handled the mountain speech more correctly, doubtless there is as much of Charles Egbert Craddock in the curious forms and perversions as there is of the Tennessee mountaineers, yet no one has ever used dialect more convincingly than she or more effectively. She has made it a part of her style. The story of Charles Egbert Craddock is a story of gradual decline. _In the Tennessee Mountains_ was received with a universality of approval comparable only with that accorded to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. In her second venture, _Where the Battle Was Fought_, she attempted to break from the narrow limits of her first success and to write a Hardy-like novel of the section of Southern life in which she herself belonged, but it failed. From all sides came the demand that she return again to her own peculiar domain. And she returned with _The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_. It was praised, but with the praise came a note of dissatisfaction, a note that became more and more dominant with every novel that followed. Her first short stories had appealed because of their freshness and the strangeness of their setting. Moreover, since they were the first work of a young writer they were a promise of better things to come. But the promise was not fulfilled. After _The Juggler_, her last attempt on a large scale to create a great Tennessee-mountains novel, she took the advice of many of her critics and left the narrow field that she had cultivated so carefully. She wrote historical romances and novels of contemporary life, but the freshness of her early work was gone. After 1897 she produced nothing that had not been done better by other writers. Her failure came not, as many have believed, from the poverty of her materials and the narrowness of her field. Thomas Hardy deliberately had chosen for his novels a region and a people just as primitive. A great novel should concern itself with the common fundamentals of humanity, and these fundamentals, he believed, may be studied with more of accuracy in the isolated places where the conventions of polite society have not prevented natural expression. Or, to quote Hardy's own words: Social environment operates upon character in a way that is oftener than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture by making the exteriors of men their screen rather than their index, as with untutored mankind. Contrasts are disguised by the crust of conventionality, picturesqueness obliterated, and a subjective system of description necessitated for the differentiation of character. In the one case the author's word has to be taken as to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they can be seen as in an écorché.[139]