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[Illustration: Walter H. Page]
THE
LIFE AND LETTERS OF
WALTER H. PAGE
BY
BURTON J. HENDRICK
VOLUME
I
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.
_First Edition
after the printing of 377 de luxe copies_
_PREFATORY NOTE_
_Among the many who have assisted in the preparation of this Biography
especial acknowledgment is made to Mr. Irwin Laughlin, First Secretary
and Counsellor of the London Embassy under Mr. Page. Mr. Page's papers
show the high regard which he entertained for Mr. Laughlin's abilities
and character, and the author similarly has found Mr. Laughlin's
assistance indispensable. Mr. Laughlin has had the goodness to read the
manuscript and make numerous suggestions, all for the purpose of
reënforcing the accuracy of the narrative. The author gratefully
remembers many long conversations with Viscount Grey of Fallodon, in
which Anglo-American relations from 1913 to 1916 were exhaustively
canvassed and many side-lights thrown upon Mr. Page's conduct of his
difficult and delicate duties. The British Foreign Office most
courteously gave the writer permission to examine a large number of
documents in its archives bearing upon Mr. Page's ambassadorship and
consented to the publication of several of the most important._
B.J.H.
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD 1
II. JOURNALISM 32
III. "THE FORGOTTEN MAN" 64
IV. THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS 102
V. ENGLAND BEFORE THE WAR 132
VI. "POLICY" AND "PRINCIPLE" IN MEXICO 175
VII. PERSONALITIES OF THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 215
VIII. HONOUR AND DISHONOUR IN PANAMA 232
IX. AMERICA TRIES TO PREVENT THE EUROPEAN WAR 270
X. THE GRAND SMASH 301
XI. ENGLAND UNDER THE STRESS OF WAR 327
XII. "WAGING NEUTRALITY" 357
XIII. GERMANY'S FIRST PEACE DRIVES 398
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Walter H. Page _Frontispiece_
Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H. Page 20
Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H. Page 21
Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, Md. 36
Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins
University, 1876-1915 37
Walter H. Page (1899) from a photograph taken when he was
editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ 100
Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education Board 101
Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a leader in
the cause of Southern Education 116
Woodrow Wilson in 1912 117
Walter H. Page, from a photograph taken a few years before he
became American Ambassador to Great Britain 292
The British Foreign Office, Downing Street 293
No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under Mr. Page 308
Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at London,
1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919 309
THE
LIFE AND LETTERS
OF
WALTER H. PAGE
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE
CHAPTER I
A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD
I
The earliest recollections of any man have great biographical interest,
and this is especially the case with Walter Page, for not the least
dramatic aspect of his life was that it spanned the two greatest wars in
history. Page spent his last weeks in England, at Sandwich, on the coast
of Kent; every day and every night he could hear the pounding of the
great guns in France, as the Germans were making their last desperate
attempt to reach Paris or the Channel ports. His memories of his
childhood days in America were similarly the sights and sounds of war.
Page was a North Carolina boy; he has himself recorded the impression
that the Civil War left upon his mind.
"One day," he writes, "when the cotton fields were white and the elm
leaves were falling, in the soft autumn of the Southern climate wherein
the sky is fathomlessly clear, the locomotive's whistle blew a much
longer time than usual as the train approached Millworth. It did not
stop at so small a station except when there was somebody to get off or
to get on, and so long a blast meant that someone was coming. Sam and I
ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was. Sam was my Negro
companion, philosopher, and friend. I was ten years old and Sam said
that he was fourteen. There was constant talk about the war. Many men of
the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere--that was certain; but Sam and
I had a theory that the war was only a story. We had been fooled about
old granny Thomas's bringing the baby and long ago we had been fooled
also about Santa Claus. The war might be another such invention, and we
sometimes suspected that it was. But we found out the truth that day,
and for this reason it is among my clearest early recollections.
"For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box and gently laid it
in the shade of the fence. The only man at the station was the man who
had come to change the mail-bags; and he said that this was Billy
Morris's coffin and that he had been killed in a battle. He asked us to
stay with it till he could send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles
away. The man came back presently and leaned against the fence till old
Mr. Morris arrived, an hour or more later. The lint of cotton was on his
wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news reached
him; and he came in his shirt sleeves, his wife on the wagon seat with
him.
"All the neighbourhood gathered at the church, a funeral was preached
and there was a long prayer for our success against the invaders, and
Billy Morris was buried. I remember that I wept the more because it now
seemed to me that my doubt about the war had somehow done Billy Morris
an injustice. Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than anybody else; and
she kept saying, while the service was going on, 'It'll be my John
next.' In a little while, sure enough, John Gregory's coffin was put off
the train, as Billy Morris's had been, and I regarded her as a woman
gifted with prophecy. Other coffins, too, were put off from time to
time. About the war there could no longer be a doubt. And, a little
later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift,
deep experiences.
"One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles away,
near the capital. The General and the Governor sat on horses and the
soldiers marched by them and the band played. They were going to the
front. There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night.
Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years
passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend whole
days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers. So precious became woollen
cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were unravelled to be
spun and woven into new fabrics. And they baked bread and roasted
chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to go to the soldiers at
the front[1]."
The quality that is uppermost in the Page stock, both in the past and in
the present generation, is that of the builder and the pioneer. The
ancestor of the North Carolina Pages was a Lewis Page, who, in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, left the original American home
in Virginia, and started life anew in what was then regarded as the less
civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to
the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising
tide of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England
relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely
be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new
things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which has never
forsaken his descendants. His son, Anderson Page, manifesting this same
love of change, went farther south into Wake County, and acquired a
plantation of a thousand acres about twelve miles north of Raleigh. He
cultivated this estate with slaves, sending his abundant crops of cotton
and tobacco to Petersburg, Virginia, a traffic that made him
sufficiently prosperous to give several of his sons a college education.
The son who is chiefly interesting at the present time, Allison Francis
Page, the father of the future Ambassador, did not enjoy this
opportunity. This fact in itself gives an insight into his character.
While his brothers were grappling with Latin and Greek and theology--one
of them became a Methodist preacher of the hortatory type for which the
South is famous--we catch glimpses of the older man battling with the
logs in the Cape Fear River, or penetrating the virgin pine forest,
felling trees and converting its raw material to the uses of a growing
civilization. Like many of the Page breed, this Page was a giant in size
and in strength, as sound morally and physically as the mighty forests
in which a considerable part of his life was spent, brave, determined,
aggressive, domineering almost to the point of intolerance, deeply
religious and abstemious--a mixture of the frontiersman and the Old
Testament prophet. Walter Page dedicated one of his books[2] to his
father, in words that accurately sum up his character and career. "To
the honoured memory of my father, whose work was work that built up the
commonwealth." Indeed, Frank Page--for this is the name by which he was
generally known--spent his whole life in these constructive labours. He
founded two towns in North Carolina, Cary and Aberdeen; in the City of
Raleigh he constructed hotels and other buildings; his enterprising and
restless spirit opened up Moore County--which includes the Pinehurst
region; he scattered his logging camps and his sawmills all over the
face of the earth; and he constructed a railroad through the pine woods
that made him a rich man.
Though he was not especially versed in the learning of the schools,
Walter Page's father had a mind that was keen and far-reaching. He was a
pioneer in politics as he was in the practical concerns of life. Though
he was the son of slave-holding progenitors and even owned slaves
himself, he was not a believer in slavery. The country that he primarily
loved was not Moore County or North Carolina, but the United States of
America. In politics he was a Whig, which meant that, in the years
preceding the Civil War, he was opposed to the extension of slavery and
did not regard the election of Abraham Lincoln as a sufficient
provocation for the secession of the Southern States. It is therefore
not surprising that Walter Page, in the midst of the London turmoil of
1916, should have found his thoughts reverting to his father as he
remembered him in Civil War days. That gaunt figure of America's time of
agony proved an inspiration and hope in the anxieties that assailed the
Ambassador. "When our Civil War began," wrote Page to Col. Edward M.
House--the date was November 24, 1916, one of the darkest days for the
Allied cause--"every man who had a large and firm grip on economic facts
foresaw how it would end--not when but how. Young as I was, I recall a
conversation between my father and the most distinguished judge of his
day in North Carolina. They put down on one side the number of men in
the Confederate States, the number of ships, the number of manufactures,
as nearly as they knew, the number of skilled workmen, the number of
guns, the aggregate of wealth and of possible production. On the other
side they put down the best estimate they could make of all these
things in the Northern States. The Northern States made two (or I
shouldn't wonder if it were three) times as good a showing in men and
resources as the Confederacy had. 'Judge,' said my father, 'this is the
most foolhardy enterprise that man ever undertook.' But Yancey of
Alabama was about that time making five-hour speeches to thousands of
people all over the South, declaring that one Southerner could whip five
Yankees, and the awful slaughter began and darkened our childhood and
put all our best men where they would see the sun no more. Our people
had at last to accept worse terms than they could have got at the
beginning. This World War, even more than our Civil War, is an economic
struggle. Put down on either side the same items that my father and the
judge put down and add the items up. You will see the inevitable
result."
If we are seeking an ancestral explanation for that moral ruggedness,
that quick perception of the difference between right and wrong, that
unobscured vision into men and events, and that deep devotion to America
and to democracy which formed the fibre of Walter Page's being, we
evidently need look no further than his father. But the son had
qualities which the older man did not possess--an enthusiasm for
literature and learning, a love of the beautiful in Nature and in art,
above all a gentleness of temperament and of manner. These qualities he
held in common with his mother. On his father's side Page was undiluted
English; on his mother's he was French and English. Her father was John
Samuel Raboteau, the descendant of Huguenot refugees who had fled from
France on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; her mother was Esther
Barclay, a member of a family which gave the name of Barclaysville to a
small town half way between Raleigh and Fayetteville, North Carolina.
It is a member of this tribe to whom Page once referred as the "vigorous
Barclay who held her receptions to notable men in her bedroom during the
years of her bedridden condition." She was the proprietor of the "Half
Way House," a tavern located between Fayetteville and Raleigh; and in
her old age she kept royal state, in the fashion which Page describes,
for such as were socially entitled to this consideration. The most vivid
impression which her present-day descendants retain is that of her
fervent devotion to the Southern cause. She carried the spirit of
secession to such an extreme that she had the gate to her yard painted
to give a complete presentment of the Confederate Flag. Walter Page's
mother, the granddaughter of this determined and rebellious lady, had
also her positive quality, but in a somewhat more subdued form. She did
not die until 1897, and so the recollection of her is fresh and vivid.
As a mature woman she was undemonstrative and soft spoken; a Methodist
of old-fashioned Wesleyan type, she dressed with a Quaker-like
simplicity, her brown hair brushed flatly down upon a finely shaped head
and her garments destitute of ruffles or ornamentation. The home which
she directed was a home without playing cards or dancing or smoking or
wine-bibbing or other worldly frivolities, yet the memories of her
presence which Catherine Page has left are not at all austere. Duty was
with her the prime consideration of life, and fundamental morals the
first conceptions which she instilled in her children's growing minds,
yet she had a quiet sense of humour and a real love of fun.
She had also strong likes and dislikes, and was not especially
hospitable to men and women who fell under her disapproval. A small
North Carolina town, in the years preceding and following the Civil
War, was not a fruitful soil for cultivating an interest in things
intellectual, yet those who remember Walter Page's mother remember her
always with a book in her hand. She would read at her knitting and at
her miscellaneous household duties, which were rather arduous in the
straitened days that followed the war, and the books she read were
always substantial ones. Perhaps because her son Walter was in delicate
health, perhaps because his early tastes and temperament were not unlike
her own, perhaps because he was her oldest surviving child, the fact
remains that, of a family of eight, he was generally regarded as the
child with whom she was especially sympathetic. The picture of mother
and son in those early days is an altogether charming one. Page's mother
was only twenty-four when he was born; she retained her youth for many
years after that event, and during his early childhood, in appearance
and manner, she was little more than a girl. When Walter was a small
boy, he and his mother used to take long walks in the woods, sometimes
spending the entire day, fishing along the brooks, hunting wild flowers,
now and then pausing while the mother read pages of Dickens or of Scott.
These experiences Page never forgot. Nearly all his letters to his
mother--to whom, even in his busiest days in New York, he wrote
constantly--have been accidentally destroyed, but a few scraps indicate
the close spiritual bond that existed between the two. Always he seemed
to think of his mother as young. Through his entire life, in whatever
part of the world he might be, and however important was the work in
which he might be engaged, Page never failed to write her a long and
affectionate letter at Christmas.
"Well, I've gossiped a night or two"--such is the conclusion of his
Christmas letter of 1893, when Page was thirty-eight, with a growing
family of his own--"till I've filled the paper--all such little news and
less nonsense as most gossip and most letters are made of. But it is for
you to read between the lines. That's where the love lies, dear mother.
I wish you were here Christmas; we should welcome you as nobody else in
the world can be welcomed. But wherever you are and though all the rest
have the joy of seeing you, which is denied to me, never a Christmas
comes but I feel as near you as I did years and years ago when we were
young. (In those years _big_ fish bit in old Wiley Bancom's pond by the
railroad: they must have been two inches long!)--I would give a year's
growth to have the pleasure of having you here. You may be sure that
every one of my children along with me will look with an added reverence
toward the picture on the wall that greets me every morning, when we
have our little Christmas frolics--the picture that little Katharine
points to and says 'That's my grandmudder.'--The years, as they come,
every one, deepen my gratitude to you, as I better and better understand
the significance of life and every one adds to an affection that was
never small. God bless you.
"WALTER."
* * * * *
Such were the father and mother of Walter Hines Page; they were married
at Fayetteville, North Carolina, July 5, 1849; two children who preceded
Walter died in infancy. The latter was born at Cary, August 15, 1855.
Cary was a small village which Frank Page had created; in honour of the
founder it was for several years known as Page's Station; the father
himself changed the name to Cary, as a tribute to a temperance orator
who caused something of a commotion in the neighbourhood in the early
seventies. Cary was not then much of a town and has not since become
one; but it was placed amid the scene of important historical events.
Page's home was almost the last stopping place of Sherman's army on its
march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Confederacy came to an
end, with Johnston's surrender of the last Confederate Army, at Durham,
only fifteen miles from Page's home. Walter, a boy of ten, his brother
Robert, aged six, and the negro "companion" Tance--who figures as Sam in
the extract quoted above--stood at the second-story window and watched
Sherman's soldiers pass their house, in hot pursuit of General "Joe"
Wheeler's cavalry. The thing that most astonished the children was the
vast size of the army, which took all day to file by their home. They
had never realized that either of the fighting forces could embrace such
great numbers of men. Nor did the behaviour of the invading troops
especially endear them to their unwilling hosts. Part of the cavalry
encamped in the Page yard; their horses ate the bark off the mimosa
trees; an army corps built its campfires under the great oaks, and cut
their emblems on the trunks; the officers took possession of the house,
a colonel making his headquarters in the parlour. Several looting
cavalrymen ran their swords through the beds, probably looking for
hidden silver; the hearth was torn up in the same feverish quest; angry
at their failure, they emptied sacks of flour and scattered their
contents in the bedrooms and on the stairs; for days the flour,
intermingled with feathers from the bayonetted beds, formed a carpet all
over the house. It is therefore perhaps not strange that the feelings
which Walter entertained for Sherman's "bummers," despite his father's
Whig principles, were those of most Southern communities. One day a
kindly Northern soldier, sympathizing with the boy because of the small
rations left for the local population, invited him to join the
officers' mess at dinner. Walter drew proudly back.
"I'll starve before I'll eat with the Yankees," he said.
* * * * *
"I slept that night on a trundle bed by my mother's," Page wrote years
afterward, describing these early scenes, "for her room was the only
room left for the family, and we had all lived there since the day
before. The dining room and the kitchen were now superfluous, because
there was nothing more to cook or to eat. . . . A week or more after the
army corps had gone, I drove with my father to the capital one day, and
almost every mile of the journey we saw a blue coat or a gray coat lying
by the road, with bones or hair protruding--the unburied and the
forgotten of either army. Thus I had come to know what war was, and
death by violence was among the first deep impressions made on my mind.
My emotions must have been violently dealt with and my sensibilities
blunted--or sharpened? Who shall say? The wounded and the starved
straggled home from hospitals and from prisons. There was old Mr.
Sanford, the shoemaker, come back again, with a body so thin and a step
so uncertain that I expected to see him fall to pieces. Mr. Larkin and
Joe Tatum went on crutches; and I saw a man at the post-office one day
whose cheek and ear had been torn away by a shell. Even when Sam and I
sat on the river-bank fishing, and ought to have been silent lest the
fish swim away, we told over in low tones the stories that we had heard
of wounds and of deaths and of battles.
"But there was the cheerful gentleness of my mother to draw my thoughts
to different things. I can even now recall many special little plans
that she made to keep my mind from battles. She hid the military cap
that I had worn. She bought from me my military buttons and put them
away. She would call me in and tell me pleasant stories of her own
childhood. She would put down her work to make puzzles with me, and she
read gentle books to me and kept away from me all the stories of the war
and of death that she could. Whatever hardships befell her (and they
must have been many) she kept a tender manner of resignation and of
cheerful patience.
"After a while the neighbourhood came to life again. There were more
widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs than
anybody there had ever seen before. But the mimosa bloomed, the cotton
was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the barnyard and
the stable again became full of life. For, when the army marched away,
they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield. The last hen had been
caught under the corn-crib by a 'Yankee' soldier, who had torn his coat
in this brave raid. Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees were chicken
thieves whether they 'brung freedom or no.'
"Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun;
for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the
turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the
story of our Southern land--of its institutions, of its misfortunes and
of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main
threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white
fields and the rivers run--a story that is now rushing swiftly into a
happier narrative of a broader day. The same women who had guided the
spindles in war-time were again at their tasks--they at least were left;
but the machinery was now old and worked ill. Negro men, who had
wandered a while looking for an invisible 'freedom,' came back and went
to work on the farm from force of habit. They now received wages and
bought their own food. That was the only apparent difference that
freedom had brought them.
"My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin Margaret
with her. Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed ground
beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing the hurt
done by horses' hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks, which bore the
scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler games than camp
and battle. One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the piazza and saw us
come loaded with apple-blossoms, they said something (so I afterward
learned) about the eternal blooming of childhood and of Nature--how
sweet the early summer was in spite of the harrying of the land by war;
for our gorgeous pageant of the seasons came on as if the earth had been
the home of unbroken peace[3]."
II
And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born. He
was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life
was therefore cast in a desolate country. Like all of his neighbours,
Frank Page had been ruined by the war. Both the Southern and Northern
armies had passed over the Page territory; compared with the military
depredations with which Page became familiar in the last years of his
life, the Federal troops did not particularly misbehave, the attacks on
hen roosts and the destruction of feather beds representing the extreme
of their "atrocities"; but no country can entertain two great fighting
forces without feeling the effects for a prolonged period. Life in this
part of North Carolina again became reduced to its fundamentals. The
old homesteads and the Negro huts were still left standing, and their
interiors were for the most part unharmed, but nearly everything else
had disappeared. Horses, cattle, hogs, livestock of all kinds had
vanished before the advancing hosts of hungry soldiers; and there was
one thing which was even more a rarity than these. That was money.
Confederate veterans went around in their faded gray uniforms, not only
because they loved them, but because they did not have the wherewithal
to buy new wardrobes. Judges, planters, and other dignified members of
the community became hack drivers from the necessity of picking up a few
small coins. Page's father was more fortunate than the rest, for he had
one asset with which to accumulate a little liquid capital; he possessed
a fine peach orchard, which was particularly productive in the summer of
1865, and the Northern soldiers, who drew their pay in money that had
real value, developed a weakness for the fruit. Walter Page, a boy of
ten, used to take his peaches to Raleigh, and sell them to the
"invader"; although he still disdained having companionable relations
with the enemy, he was not above meeting them on a business footing; and
the greenbacks and silver coin obtained in this way laid a new basis for
the family fortunes.
Despite this happy windfall, life for the next few years proved an
arduous affair. The horrors of reconstruction which followed the war
were more agonizing than the war itself. Page's keenest enthusiasm in
after life was democracy, in its several manifestations; but the form in
which democracy first unrolled before his astonished eyes was a phase
that could hardly inspire much enthusiasm. Misguided sentimentalists and
more malicious politicians in the North had suddenly endowed the Negro
with the ballot. In practically all Southern States that meant
government by Negroes--or what was even worse, government by a
combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including
that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself
from the North for this particular purpose. Thus the political
vocabulary of Page's formative years consisted chiefly of such words as
"scalawag," "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union League," "Ku Klux
Klan," and the like. The resulting confusion, political, social, and
economic, did not completely amount to the destruction of a
civilization, for underneath it all the old sleepy ante-bellum South
still maintained its existence almost unchanged. The two most
conspicuous and contrasting figures were the Confederate veteran walking
around in a sleeveless coat and the sharp-featured New England school
mar'm, armed with that spelling book which was overnight to change the
African from a genial barbarian into an intelligent and conscientious
social unit; but more persistent than these forces was that old dreamy,
"unprogressive" Southland--the same country that Page himself described
in an article on "An Old Southern Borough" which, as a young man, he
contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_. It was still the country where
the "old-fashioned gentleman" was the controlling social influence,
where a knowledge of Latin and Greek still made its possessor a person
of consideration, where Emerson was a "Yankee philosopher" and therefore
not important, where Shakespeare and Milton were looked upon almost as
contemporary authors, where the Church and politics and the matrimonial
history of friends and relatives formed the staple of conversation, and
where a strong prejudice still existed against anything that resembled
popular education. In the absence of more substantial employment, stump
speaking, especially eloquent in praise of the South and its
achievements in war, had become the leading industry.
"Wat" Page--he is still known by this name in his old home--was a tall,
rangy, curly-headed boy, with brown hair and brown eyes, fond of fishing
and hunting, not especially robust, but conspicuously alert and vital.
Such of his old playmates as survive recall chiefly his keenness of
observation, his contagious laughter, his devotion to reading and to
talk. He was also given to taking long walks in the woods, frequently
with the solitary companionship of a book. Indeed, his extremely
efficient family regarded him as a dreamer and were not entirely clear
as to what purpose he was destined to serve in a community which, above
all, demanded practical men. Such elementary schools as North Carolina
possessed had vanished in the war; the prevailing custom was for the
better-conditioned families to join forces and engage a teacher for
their assembled children. It was in such a primary school in Cary that
Page learned the elementary branches, though his mother herself taught
him to read and write. The boy showed such aptitude in his studies that
his mother began to hope, though in no aggressive fashion, that he might
some day become a Methodist clergyman; she had given him his middle
name, "Hines," in honour of her favourite preacher--a kinsman. At the
age of twelve Page was transferred to the Bingham School, then located
at Mcbane. This was the Eton of North Carolina, from both a social and
an educational standpoint. It was a military school; the boys all
dressed in gray uniforms built on the plan of the Confederate army; the
hero constantly paraded before their imaginations was Robert E. Lee;
discipline was rigidly military; more important, a high standard of
honour was insisted upon. There was one thing a boy could not do at
Bingham and remain in the school; that was to cheat in class-rooms or at
examinations. For this offence no second chance was given. "I cannot
argue the subject," Page quotes Colonel Bingham saying to the distracted
parent whose son had been dismissed on this charge, and who was begging
for his reinstatement. "In fact, I have no power to reinstate your boy.
I could not keep the honour of the school--I could not even keep the
boys, if he were to return. They would appeal to their parents and most
of them would be called home. They are the flower of the South, Sir!"
And the social standards that controlled the thinking of the South for
so many years after the war were strongly entrenched. "The son of a
Confederate general," Page writes, "if he were at all a decent fellow,
had, of course, a higher social rank at the Bingham School than the son
of a colonel. There was some difficulty in deciding the exact rank of a
judge or a governor, as a father; but the son of a preacher had a fair
chance of a good social rating, especially of an Episcopalian clergyman.
A Presbyterian preacher came next in rank. I at first was at a social
disadvantage. My father had been a Methodist--that was bad enough; but
he had had no military title at all. If it had become known among the
boys that he had been a 'Union man'--I used to shudder at the suspicion
in which I should be held. And the fact that my father had held no
military title did at last become known!"
A single episode discloses that Page maintained his respect for the
Bingham School to the end. In March, 1918, as American Ambassador, he
went up to Harrow and gave an informal talk to the boys on the United
States. His hosts were so pleased that two prizes were established to
commemorate his visit. One was for an essay by Harrow boys on the
subject: "The Drawing Together of America and Great Britain by Common
Devotion to a Great Cause." A similar prize on the same subject was
offered to the boys of some American school, and Page was asked to
select the recipient. He promptly named his old Bingham School in North
Carolina.
It was at Bingham that Page gained his first knowledge of Greek, Latin,
and mathematics, and he was an outstanding student in all three
subjects. He had no particular liking for mathematics, but he could
never understand why any one should find this branch of learning
difficult; he mastered it with the utmost ease and always stood high. In
two or three years he had absorbed everything that Bingham could offer
and was ready for the next step. But political conditions in North
Carolina now had their influence upon Page's educational plans. Under
ordinary conditions he would have entered the State University at Chapel
Hill; it had been a great headquarters in ante-bellum days for the
prosperous families of the South. But by the time that Page was ready to
go to college the University had fallen upon evil days. The forces which
then ruled the state, acting in accordance with the new principles of
racial equality, had opened the doors of this, one of the most
aristocratic of Southern institutions, to Negroes. The consequences may
be easily imagined. The newly enfranchised blacks showed no inclination
for the groves of Academe, and not a single representative of the race
applied for matriculation. The outraged white population turned its back
upon this new type of coeducation; in the autumn of 1872 not a solitary
white boy made his appearance. The old university therefore closed its
doors for lack of students and for the next few years it became a
pitiable victim to the worst vices of the reconstruction era.
Politicians were awarded the presidency and the professorships as
political pap, and the resources of the place, in money and books, were
scattered to the wind. Page had therefore to find his education
elsewhere. The deep religious feelings of his family quickly settled
this point. The young man promptly betook himself to the backwoods of
North Carolina and knocked at the doors of Trinity College, a Methodist
Institution then located in Randolph County. Trinity has since changed
its abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the
largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in those days
a famous Methodist divine and journalist described it as "a college with
a few buildings that look like tobacco barns and a few teachers that
look as though they ought to be worming tobacco." Page spent something
more than a year at Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving
in December, 1872. A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely
more complimentary than the judgment passed above. They show that the
young man was very unhappy. One long letter to his mother is nothing but
a boyish diatribe against the place. "I do not care a horse apple for
Trinity's distinction," he writes, and then he gives the reasons for
this juvenile contempt. His first report, he says, will soon reach home;
he warns his mother that it will be unfavourable, and he explains that
this bad showing is the result of a deliberate plot. The boys who obtain
high marks, Page declares, secure them usually by cheating or through
the partisanship of the professors; a high grade therefore really means
that the recipient is either a humbug or a bootlicker. Page had
therefore attempted to keep his reputation unsullied by aiming at a low
academic record! The report on that three months' work, which still
survives, discloses that Page's conspiracy against himself did not
succeed, for his marks are all high. "Be sure to send him back" is the
annotation on this document, indicating that Page had made a better
impression on Trinity than Trinity had made on Page.
But the rebellious young man did not return. After Christmas, 1872, his
schoolboy letters reveal him at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.
Here again the atmosphere is Methodistical, but of a somewhat more
genial type. "It was at Ashland that I first began to unfold," said Page
afterward. "Dear old Ashland!" Dr. Duncan, the President, was a
clergyman whose pulpit oratory is still a tradition in the South, but,
in addition to his religious exaltation, he was an exceedingly lovable,
companionable, and stimulating human being. Certainly there was no lack
of the religious impulse. "We have a preacher president," Page writes
his mother, "a preacher secretary, a preacher chaplain, and a dozen
preacher students and three or more preachers are living here and
twenty-five or thirty yet-to-be preachers in college!" In this latter
class Page evidently places himself; at least he gravely writes his
mother--he was now eighteen--that he had definitely made up his mind to
enter the Methodist ministry. He had a close friend--Wilbur Fisk
Tillett--who cherished similar ambitions, and Page one day surprised
Tillett by suggesting that, at the approaching Methodist Conference,
they apply for licensing as "local preachers" for the next summer. His
friend dissuaded him, however, and henceforth Page concentrated on more
worldly studies. In many ways he was the life of the undergraduate body.
His desire for an immediate theological campaign was merely that passion
for doing things and for self-expression which were always conspicuous
traits. His intense ambition as a boy is still remembered in this sleepy
little village. He read every book in the sparse college library; he
talked to his college mates and his professors on every imaginable
subject; he led his associates in the miniature parliament--the Franklin
Debating Society--to which he belonged; he wrote prose and verse at an
astonishing rate; he explored the country for miles around, making
frequent pilgrimages to the birthplace of Henry Clay, which is the chief
historical glory of Ashland, and to that Hanover Court House which was
the scene of the oratorical triumph of Patrick Henry; he flirted with
the pretty girls in the village, and even had two half-serious love
affairs in rapid succession; he slept upon a hard mattress at night and
imbibed more than the usual allotment of Greek, Latin, and mathematics
in the daytime. One year he captured the Greek prize and the next the
Sutherlin medal for oratory. With a fellow classicist he entered into a
solemn compact to hold all their conversation, even on the most trivial
topics, in Latin, with heavy penalties for careless lapses into English.
Probably the linguistic result would have astonished Quintilian, but the
experiment at least had a certain influence in improving the young man's
Latinity. Another favourite dissipation was that of translating English
masterpieces into the ancient tongue; there still survives among Page's
early papers a copy of Bryant's "Waterfowl" done into Latin iambics. As
to Page's personal appearance, a designation coined by a fellow student
who afterward became a famous editor gives the suggestion of a portrait.
He called him one of the "seven slabs" of the college. And, as always,
the adjectives which his contemporaries chiefly use in describing Page
are "alert" and "positive."
[Illustration: Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H.
Page]
[Illustration: Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H.
Page]
But Randolph-Macon did one great thing for Page. Like many small
struggling Southern, colleges it managed to assemble several instructors
of real mental distinction. And at the time of Page's undergraduate life
it possessed at least one great teacher. This was Thomas R. Price,
afterward Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia and Professor
of English at Columbia University in New York. Professor Price took one
forward step that has given him a permanent fame in the history of
Southern education. He found that the greatest stumbling block to
teaching Greek was not the conditional mood, but the fact that his
hopeful charges were not sufficiently familiar with their mother tongue.
The prayer that was always on Price's lips, and the one with which he
made his boys most familiar, was that of a wise old Greek: "O Great
Apollo, send down the reviving rain upon our fields; preserve our
flocks; ward off our enemies; and--build up our speech!" "It is
irrational," he said, "absurd, almost criminal, to expect a young man,
whose knowledge of English words and construction is scant and inexact,
to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period
of Cicero." Above all, it will be observed, Price's intellectual
enthusiasm was the ancient tongue. A present-day argument for learning
Greek and Latin is that thereby we improve our English; but Thomas H.
Price advocated the teaching of English so that we might better
understand the dead languages. To-day every great American educational
institution has vast resources for teaching English literature; even in
1876, most American universities had their professors of English; but
Price insisted on placing English on exactly the same footing as Greek
and Latin. He himself became head of the new English school at
Randolph-Macon; and Page himself at once became the favourite pupil.
This distinguished scholar--a fine figure with an imperial beard that
suggested the Confederate officer--used to have Page to tea at least
twice a week and at these meetings the young man was first introduced in
an understanding way to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
the other writers who became the literary passions of his maturer life.
And Price did even more for Page; he passed him on to another place and
to another teacher who extended his horizon. Up to the autumn of 1876
Page had never gone farther North than Ashland; he was still a Southern
boy, speaking with the Southern drawl, living exclusively the thoughts
and even the prejudices of the South. His family's broad-minded attitude
had prevented him from acquiring a too restricted view of certain
problems that were then vexing both sections of the country; however,
his outlook was still a limited one, as his youthful correspondence
shows. But in October of the centennial year a great prospect opened
before him.
III
Two or three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns Hopkins
had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found a college or
university in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins was not an educated man himself
and his conception of a new college did not extend beyond creating
something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard in Maryland. By a lucky
chance, however, a Yale graduate who was then the President of the
University of California, Daniel Coit Gilman, was invited to come to
Baltimore and discuss with the trustees his availability for the
headship of the new institution. Dr. Gilman promptly informed his
prospective employers that he would have no interest in associating
himself with a new American college built upon the lines of those which
then existed. Such a foundation would merely be a duplication of work
already well done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort.
He proposed that this large endowment should be used, not for the
erection of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in
all parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved
branches of learning. In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly
selective process be adopted in the choice of students: that only those
American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should be admitted
and that part of the university funds should be used to pay the expenses
of twenty young men who, in undergraduate work at other colleges, stood
head and shoulders above their contemporaries. The bringing together of
these two sets of brains for graduate study would constitute the new
university. A few rooms in the nearest dwelling house would suffice for
headquarters. Dr. Gilman's scheme was approved; he became President on
these terms; he gathered his faculty not only in the United States but
in England, and he collected his first body of students, especially his
first twenty fellows, with the same minute care.
It seems almost a miracle that an inexperienced youth in a little
Methodist college in Virginia should have been chosen as one of these
first twenty fellows, and it is a sufficient tribute to the impression
that Page must have made upon all who met him that he should have won
this great academic distinction. He was only twenty-one at the time--the
youngest of a group nearly every member of which became distinguished in
after life. He won a Fellowship in Greek. This in itself was a great
good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him
into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness.
Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very
first rank--Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard
Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek. It was the last of these
who now took Walter Page in charge. The atmosphere of Johns Hopkins was
quite different from anything which the young man had previously known.
The university gave a great shock to that part of the American community
with which Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in
October, 1876, without an opening prayer. Instead Thomas H. Huxley was
invited from England to deliver a scientific address--an address which
now has an honoured place in his collected works. The absence of prayer
and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley caused a
tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious press, and the
evangelical pulpit. In the minds of Gilman and his abettors, however,
all this was intended to emphasize the fact that Johns Hopkins was a
real university, in which the unbiased truth was to be the only aim. And
certainly this was the spirit of the institution. "Gentlemen, you must
light your own torch," was the admonition of President Gilman, in his
welcoming address to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence,
freedom from the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing
ideas. One of Page's associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a
distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard. "The beginnings of Johns
Hopkins," he afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be
alive. The air was full of noteworthy work done by the older men of the
place and of hopes that one might find a way to get a little working
power one's self. One longed to be a doer of the word, not a hearer
only, a creator of his own infinitesimal fraction of the product, bound
in God's name to produce when the time came."
A choice group of five aspiring Grecians, of whom Page was one,
periodically gathered around a long pine table in a second-story room of
an old dwelling house on Howard Street, with Professor Gildersleeve at
the head. The process of teaching was thus the intimate contact of mind
with mind. Here in the course of nearly two years' residence, Page was
led by Professor Gildersleeve into the closest communion with the great
minds of the ancient world and gained that intimate knowledge of their
written word which was the basis of his mental equipment. "Professor
Gildersleeve, splendid scholar that he is!" he wrote to a friend in
North Carolina. "He makes me grow wonderfully. When I have a chance to
enjoy Æschylus as I have now, I go to work on those immortal pieces with
a pleasure that swallows up everything." To the extent that Gildersleeve
opened up the literary treasures of the past--and no man had a greater
appreciation of his favourite authors than this fine humanist--Page's
life was one of unalloyed delight. But there was another side to the
picture. This little company of scholars was composed of men who aspired
to no ordinary knowledge of Greek; they expected to devote their entire
lives to the subject, to edit Greek texts, and to hold Greek chairs at
the leading American universities. Such, indeed, has been the career of
nearly all members of the group. The Greek tragedies were therefore read
for other things than their stylistic and dramatic values. The sons of
Germania then exercised a profound influence on American education;
Professor Gildersleeve himself was a graduate of Göttingen, and the
necessity of "settling hoti's business" was strong in his seminar.
Gildersleeve was a writer of English who developed real style; as a
Greek scholar, his fame rests chiefly upon his work in the field of
historical syntax. He assumed that his students could read Greek as
easily as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set
them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For work of
this kind Page had little interest and less inclination. When Professor
Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek: prin], and direct him
to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the Byzantine
writers, he really found himself in pretty deep waters. Was it
conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation of this
kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils
uncovered many new facts about the language and even found hitherto
unsuspected beauties; but Page's letters show that this sort of effort
was extremely uncongenial. He fulminates against the "grammarians" and
begins to think that perhaps, after all, a career of erudite scholarship
is not the ideal existence. "Learn to look on me as a Greek drudge," he
writes, "somewhere pounding into men and boys a faint hint of the beauty
of old Greekdom. That's most probably what I shall come to before many
years. I am sure that I have mistaken my lifework, if I consider Greek
my lifework. In truth at times I am tempted to throw the whole thing
away. . . . But without a home feeling in Greek literature no man can lay
claim to high culture." So he would keep at it for three or four years
and "then leave it as a man's work." Despite these despairing words Page
acquired a living knowledge of Greek that was one of his choicest
possessions through life. That he made a greater success than his
self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact that his
Fellowship was renewed for the next year.
But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently
than the cloister. "Speaking grammatically," writes Prof. E.G. Sihler,
one of Page's fellow students of that time, in his "Confessions and
Convictions of a Classicist," "Page was interested in that one of the
main tenses which we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the
excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend
it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him
even more than did the heroes of the ancient world. He went somewhat
into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose
membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably
his most congenial associations, however, came of the Saturday night
meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall, where, over pipes and steins of
beer, they passed in review all the questions of the day. Page was still
the Southern boy, with the strange notions about the North and Northern
people which were the inheritance of many years' misunderstandings. He
writes of one fellow student to whom he had taken a liking. "He is that
rare thing," he says, "a Yankee Christian gentleman." He particularly
dislikes one of his instructors, but, as he explains, he is "a native of
Connecticut, and Connecticut, I suppose, is capable of producing any
unholy human phenomenon." Speaking of a beautiful and well mannered
Greek girl whom he had met, he says: "The little creature might be taken
for a Southern girl, but never for a Yankee. She has an easy manner and
even an air of gentility about her that doesn't appear north of Mason
and Dixon's Line. Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say race
intentionally: Yankeedom is the home of another race from us) however
much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon blood, it owes
its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate and culture. Who
says that we are not an improvement on the English? An improvement in a
happy combination of mental graces and Saxon force?" This sort of thing
is especially entertaining in the youthful Page, for it is precisely
against this kind of complacency that, as a mature man, he directed his
choicest ridicule. As an editor and writer his energies were devoted to
reconciling North and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do
with opening his eyes. Its young men and its professors were gathered
from all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned
more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung
nation known as the United States.
And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum. He
writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School, not,
however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve his
colloquial German. "Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?" he asks.
And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence--from
which these quotations are taken--with a young woman in North Carolina,
his cousin. About this time this cousin began spending her summers in
the Page home at Cary; her great interest in books made the two young
people good friends and companions. It was she who first introduced Page
to certain Southern writers, especially Timrod and Sidney Lanier, and,
when Page left for Johns Hopkins, the two entered into a compact for a
systematic reading and study of the English poets. According to this
plan, certain parts of Tennyson or Chaucer would be set aside for a
particular week's reading; then both would write the impressions gained
and the criticisms which they assumed to make, and send the product to
the other. The plan was carried out more faithfully than is usually the
case in such arrangements; a large number of Page's letters survive and
give a complete history of his mental progress. There are lengthy
disquisitions on Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Shelley, Matthew Arnold,
and the like. These letters also show that Page, as a relaxation from
Greek roots and syntax, was indulging in poetic flights of his own; his
efforts, which he encloses in his letters, are mainly imitations of the
particular poet in whom he was at the moment interested. This
correspondence also takes Page to Germany, in which country he spent the
larger part of the summer of 1877. This choice of the Fatherland as a
place of pilgrimage was probably merely a reflection of the enthusiasm
for German educational methods which then prevailed in the United
States, especially at Johns Hopkins. Page's letters are the usual
traveller's descriptions of unfamiliar customs, museums, libraries, and
the like; so far as enlarging his outlook was concerned the experience
does not seem to have been especially profitable.
He returned to Baltimore in the autumn of 1877, but only for a few
months. He had pretty definitely abandoned his plan of devoting his life
to Greek scholarship. As a mental stimulus, as a recreation from the
cares of life, his Greek authors would always be a first love, as they
proved to be; but he had abandoned his early ambition of making them his
everyday occupation and means of livelihood. Of course there was only
one career for a man of his leanings, and, more and more, his mind was
turning to journalism. For only one brief period did he again listen to
the temptations of a scholar's existence. The university of his native
state invited him to lecture in the summer school of 1878; he took
Shakespeare for his subject, and made so great a success that there was
some discussion of his settling down permanently at Chapel Hill in the
chair of Greek. Had the offer definitely been made Page would probably
have accepted, but difficulties arose. Page was no longer orthodox in
his religious views; he had long outgrown dogma and could only smile at
the recollection that he had once thought of becoming a clergyman. But a
rationalist at the University of North Carolina in 1878 could hardly be
endured. The offer, therefore, fortunately was not made. Afterward Page
was much criticized for having left his native state at a time when it
especially needed young men of his type. It may therefore be recorded
that, if there were any blame at all, it rested upon North Carolina. He
refers to his disappointment in a letter in February, 1879--a letter
that proved to be a prophecy. "I shall some day buy a home," he says,
"where I was not allowed to work for one, and be laid away in the soil
that I love. I wanted to work for the old state; it had no need for it,
it seems."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From "The Southerner," Chapter I. The first chapter in this
novel is practically autobiographical, though fictitious names have been
used.]
[Footnote 2: "The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths." (1902.)]
[Footnote 3: "The Southerner," Chapter I.]