A Girl's Visions and Her Career | 1910-04-09 | The New York Times

A Girl's Visions and Her Career From the New York Times, dated April 9, 1910. A Girl's Visions and Her Career Winston Churchill contributes a fascinating study of American womanhood in the making. In elder days, when the hero rode forth upon his charger, militant and adventurous, following his high vision, the course of empire lay westward. The heroine trailed humbly behind the man on horseback, or she was trampled beneath the iron hoofs, or, if she was good, waited demurely to be caught up on the cropper behind the victor and made a part of the triumph. They have changed all that. In our time, it is the heroine who carries the pennant and rides the high-steed ambition. She comes out of the west and her star is in the east, where lies her vision of empire. Spurred on by vague longings for finer things, for graces, beauties, splendors, power, titles, mastered by insatiable curiosities and limitless aspirations, she climbs and tramples as she climbs upon an ascending series of dead selves. Beside each dead self, and as little unwept, she leaves a hero slain. For she rides with her clear gaze on the goal, and she rides fast. The figure would not be a fair one, however, if you did not remember that the woman on horseback is more Joan of Arc than Tamerlane. No matter if her vision is a never-never land of gracious living, which wears the outward semblance of the world of fashion in New York, London, and Paris, while her voices call her to a box at the opera, not to the saving of her country. The plain fact is that this girl out of the west, who is the typical heroine of this woman's age, grows so fast that she outgrows her hero almost as soon as she has found him. For she outgrows her old self. Her eyes look upward and outward. His are bent on ground, where he grubs. The man of our time is so busy a builder of the material edifice of life that his task leaves him no leisure for growth such as hers. The edifice encloses him, limits him, as the shell does the oyster. Of such stuff heroes are not made. Modern machinery has slain the hero. The heroine has stepped into his place, because in our system of life the only person not harnessed to the chariot of accumulation is the young woman. She only is free. She is the one of all of us who has leisure to dream and by her dreams to grow. And heavens, how she does grow! Jack's beanstalk is nothing to her. That is why America furnishes wives to the European aristocracy and heroines to the novelists of many nations, who sometimes give Miss America a very bad name, and why the land supplies hardly any heroes even to our own novelists. She it is that moves and grows, and she it is that you follow absorbedly. The story is her progress, the seven stages of Honora Leffingwell. She has the rich imagination which leads to limitless aspiration, and the invincible innocence which in a certain kind of young woman merely adds effect to the feminine arts which she uses instinctively for all her ends. You watch her grow up in her homely and provincial setting and fall under her spell as you watch. You see her transplanted to New York, mistaking the show for the substance, choosing a hero she could only have invested with heroic glamour at just that stage. It was a schoolgirl stage, a hero she is bound to outgrow very soon. You follow her to a prosy suburb, then to a loud gay seaside colony. You see her established upon Fifth Avenue and welcomed at Newport, and you watch her ways with men and women and her education in heroes. Of the series of these heroes, all but one command both respect and interest, exercise explicable fascination upon the growing honora in her separate stages. There is a divorce which might have been in Reno, though that Nevada city is not named. There is an episode of passionate romance with a wholesome melodramatic touch. Life also is that way. There are throughout scenes and people admirably selected and deftly presented, vital situations skillfully handled, even, what is hardest, illuminating episodes piquantly managed. Above all, there is always honora, her young face toward the light as she sees it, remaining through all her blunders, young America incarnate, invincibly ideal. Those prudities of style which in Mr. Churchill's earlier novels used to pain the fastidious are hardly to be found here at all. Prudities of taste there are, of course. Failures intact, and an omniscience of human nature which is the novelist's business. But these are not glaring. It is a far cry from Richard Carvel to a modern chronicle. And if Mr. Churchill's picture of St. Louis is truer than his picture of New York, it is because St. Louis twenty years ago was real, and New York of to-day is mostly sham. A Modern Chronicle By Winston Churchill Illustrated by J. H. Gardner-Soper New York The Macmillan Company $1.50 End of article