The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913
A Blessed Companion Is a Book
by . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1928, 8vo. xiv+437 pp, Illus. $5.00.
PHILLIPS BROOKS, a devotee of biography, once declared that the best way to read a man’s life — and even perhaps to write it — was to begin in the middle, when he could be depicted at the top of his powers, and then to revert to his beginnings. Good fortune has imposed this method on Mr. Hendrick, whose three former volumes on Walter Hines Page, seen in the noontide light of an international rôle of the first importance, have established him as an American figure with respect to whose long morning of preparation for his work as a world figure there is every valid reason for enlightening the public at home and abroad.
With most biographies the reader must work his way by degrees to the qualities and achievements which justify any record of the subject under consideration. Here, these are so familiar in advance that the reader stands in the position of a guesser of riddles who ‘peeks,’ and gets his glow of satisfaction from finding with what extraordinary aptness the answers fit the puzzles, His goal is not so much discovery as confirmation.
In the case of Page the confirmations are almost uncanny. It is significant, for example, that among his teachers at Randolph-Macon College, which he entered at eighteen, there was a professor of Greek anti Latin who planted and nourished in Page something of his own ardent love for England, a sentiment of powerful effect upon the war-time Ambassador’s belief in the cooperation of the English-speaking nations — ’no improvised conviction,’ his biographer calls it. This aspect of his training for the work by which he is best known is quite subsidiary, however, to the many influences which made him so heartily and characteristically an American. These, in their interplay with the vigorous native qualities of Page himself, afford the material for a distinctively American biographical study.
Reared in the rigid Methodism of North Carolina, yet so little subdued to it that at twenty-four he was seriously considering the Unitarian ministry as his work for life, he plunged heart and soul at that age into the career of journalism. From this beginning, vastly quickened by his experience as one of the first twenty ‘fellows’ at Johns Hopkins, he proceeded far — to such influential editorial chairs as those of the Forum, the Atlantic, and the World’a Work. In all his writing and editing, in labors of prodigious energy and effectuality, he responded constantly to an inward spur to serve his country and his time — an impulsion no less strongly moral than intellectual. ‘Success,’ he once wrote, ‘has a fast gait: or she flies high; or she yields after a long, hard siege. Use what figure you will, it means struggle, devotion, absorption, enthusiasm, the losing of one’s self; and she is won in no other way.’ So indeed did Page win his own success.
As one saw him outwardly while he was in the process of winning it. these qualities, however clearly they may have been realized by his intimates, cannot be said to have revealed themselves so unmistakably as they appear in the contemporaneous records of them now to be seen in his assembled letters and memoranda. If he was then a man with a mission, he was also — and this volume confirms it—a man with plenty of time for all the amenities of genial human relationships. Now that his days are chronicled, the wonder is only the greater that he could seem for so much of the time so little harried and driven by the day’s work.
His credo as editor and publisher, read in the light of later manifestations in magazines and books, is a declaration of faith which ought to be reread from decade to decade. The fruits of this creed —for actualities concerned him more than theories, as the results of his interest in Southern education attest — were the very fruits to be expected of an intrinsically liberal and democratic citizen, whose sympathies with Woodrow Wilson, through the many years preceding their few of unhappy divergence, were but the most natural expression of his spirit. Once more, be it added, Mr. Hendrick shows himself a sympathetic and skillful interpreter.
M. A DEWOLFK HOWE