[46] The part played by drunkenness in recent American fiction is appalling. In the good old days drinking used to be poetic and it was still Horatian in the way the late Barrett Wendell presented it in a famous essay. Since prohibition, it has become a narcotic and a dope. The triumph of drunkenness as a _deus ex machina_ in modern American literature will be found in Eugene O’Neill’s plays, although the fact that we pass our time on his stage mostly among sailors, may be taken as an extenuating circumstance. [47] Eugene O’Neill, in “Emperor Jones,” succeeded in the _tour de force_ of staging a continuous monologue, but he was clever enough to use a tom-tom for a diversion from beginning to end. We miss this diversion in “Many Marriages.” [48] “Many Marriages,” 217. [49] From Rousseau to jazz seems a very long way, and yet does not the modern American, so fond of dancing to the tune of a Paul Whiteman orchestra, in some gorgeous palace, unconsciously pay homage to the primitive instincts so dear to the author of “Dark Laughter”? What a piquant contrast, not only in shade but in ideals, that both the black man and the Puritan should live within the same frontiers and that the latter should borrow from the former one of his favorite forms of self-expression. [50] Hamlin Garland, in his “Crumbling Idols” (1894) frankly put the case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism before the public. He quoted Mistral and the French Felibres, as well as Taine and the critic Veron in support of his plea for what he called _provincialism_. Realism triumphed in American fiction until Mrs. Wharton published her article on “The Great American Novel” in the _Yale Review_ for July, 1927. She protested against what she called the “twelve-mile limit” and the narrow horizons of “the village pump.” That the “revolt against the village” will lead to an entire change of orientation in present-day American fiction and possibly to a new flight “beyond the horizon” in the next few years may soon become an easy and necessary prophecy. [51] Let me refer the reader on this point to “The Outlook for American Prose” by Joseph Warren Beach (The University of Chicago Press). [52] And needless to say, in an entirely different spirit from the “Connecticut Yankee” by Mark Twain, who showed himself a gross Philistine in regard to medieval lore. [53] Author of “La Vie secrète,” “Les Choses Voient,” etc. [54] We owe that expression to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, a much talented novelist and a specialist of women’s psychology in the United States. [55] In her latest short novel, “My Mortal Enemy,” Miss Cather has brought the tragedy of moral repression to its most crucial point. She tells the story of a woman who was looked upon as a rather peevish and vain person by those who knew her and who, at the end, frees her truest self in a pathetic prayer before going to die alone on a cliff above the sea.