SOURCE: "Thomas Nelson Page," in Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Sources, Volume II, M. E. Church, 1903, pp. 120-51.

[Mims, one of the first scholars of Southern literature, provides a contemporary assessment of Page's popularity and achievements.]

Different from the poet and the critic is the romancer who finds in the past the inspiration of his art, and would fain preserve the traditions and legends of a bygone age. Mr. Page, by birth, training, temperament, is in thorough sympathy with the ante-bellum South, and in the new life springing up all about him he has endeavored to preserve what is most noteworthy in a civilization that seems to him "the sweetest, purest, and most beautiful ever lived." He would have us not "to forget the old radiance in the new glitter," believing with Burke that people will never look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. He is perhaps aware of the limitations of that life—not so much as the poet or the critic—but seeing it with something of modern breadth, he loves it, idealizes it, and would preserve it as a record of the past and as an inspiration for the future. He may not have occupied some one field as well as Cable or Harris or Craddock, but more than any of the other story-writers he has taken for his field no less than the life of the people of the whole South. Himself a typical Southern gentleman, modest, generous, well-bred, lover of good stories, he has, by his mastery of the short story and his gifts of humor and pathos, delineated the life of the people he loves so well.

If in the preceding paragraph I had substituted "Virginian" for "Southern," I should have been nearer the truth, perhaps, for it is always of Virginia that Mr. Page writes. The title of his most significant book is In Ole Virginia, and the background of nearly all his stories is in old Hanover. Attention has been recently called to the difference between the Southern States—between Georgia and Virginia, for instance, or Tennessee and South Carolina. The difference may be seen in the writings of Page and Harris. In the writings of the latter there is a raciness, a freshness that is almost American in its scope; in those of the former we are always in conservative, aristocratic Virginia. Indeed, he takes as much pride in his State as did any of his ancestors. . . .

His interest in the plantation life before the war found expression first in the many stories he told to his friends in the social circle in which he moved. Mr. Polk Miller, who knew him well at that time, says: "In the social circle he was a great favorite, and, having the ability to tell good negro stories, and his association being with that class of people whose parents had been large owners of slaves in Virginia, they kept him busy telling the humorous and pathetic side of negro life on the plantations. Every one testified to the naturalness and truthfulness of the negro character, and this led to his writing short stories from time to time."

All through his life he had shown a disposition to write. Like Cable and Harris, he began by writing for the newspapers. It was in the air then to write—those years from 1876 to 1880, that saw the emergence of a well-defined group of Southern writers. Of these, the leader was Irwin Russell. "It was the light of his genius," Page says, "shining through his dialect poems, that led my feet in the direction I have since tried to follow." His friend A. C. Gordon was also writing dialect poems, and Page's first efforts were in this direction, his poem "Uncle Gabe's White Folks" appearing in Scribner's Magazine.

His most distinctive work was to be the short story, and not poetry, and his first story was "Marse Chan." . . .

This deservedly popular story was sent in 1880 to Scribner's Magazine, where it remained for nearly four years without being published. In the meantime many of his friends advised him to give up the idea of writing and devote himself exclusively to the law. On the other hand, his wife encouraged him in his literary work. The story of their courtship is, I imagine, suggested in "The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock." She was Miss Anne Seddon Bruce, a niece of Hon. James A. Seddon, Secretary of War under Jefferson Davis.

"She was a very bright woman," says one who knew her well, "and as her father was one of the largest landowners and slaveholders in Virginia, she had a considerable knowledge, and doubtless contributed as much to her husband's store of negro comicalities as any one else. She was naturally solicitous of his popularity as a writer, and encouraged him to continue in that line of work."

When "Marse Chan" finally appeared it was received at once with universal praise. In quick succession Mr. Page wrote "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Meh Lady," "Polly," "Ole 'Stracted," all of which were published in the volume In Ole Virginia in 1887. This volume of short stories established his place in American letters, and is still his most characteristic work.

Mr. Page contributed to the popularity of his stories by public readings, given in all parts of the country. He and Hopkinson Smith took Boston by storm, said a writer in the Critic a few years ago, and students of Yale and other universities gave him a hearty reception. In the cities of the South especially he was received with an enthusiasm rarely displayed. . . .

With his reputation established and his income augmented by receipts from books and readings, Page gradually gave up the practice of law. The death of his first wife is most tenderly referred to in the dedication of Elsket and Other Stories. In 1893 he was married to Mrs. Field, of Chicago. Since their marriage they have lived in Washington City. He has not taken his art any too seriously, nor has the writing of a book made him lean. He has had none of the struggles that Russell or Lanier had. He is, as Carlyle said of Scott, "a robust, thoroughly healthy man, and withal a very prosperous and victorious man. An eminently wellconditioned man, healthy in body, healthy in soul, we shall call him one of the healthiest of men."

And yet with all his ease and with the temptations that have come with a life of leisure, he has continued to write with much attention to his style, and always with a certain degree of "high seriousness." He is not a prolific writer; has taken pains to make his work as good as possible. The printers testify to his revision of his stories, even after they have appeared in magazine form. He has resorted to no sensational measures to acquire cheap notoriety.

I have already referred to the publication of his first volume, In Ole Virginia, in 1887. Two Little Confederates appeared in 1888, and Among the Camps in 1891—books that reveal one of the most charming elements in Mr. Page's character, his love for children. Their popularity is not difficult to understand, so thoroughly human are they, so different from the conventional juvenile books. In 1892 came Elsket and Other Stories; in 1894, The Burial of the Guns; in 1896, a series of political and social essays entitled The Old South; in 1898, Red Rock, a Chronicle of Reconstruction; and for the Christmas holidays, 1900, "Santa Claus's Partner," a somewhat conventional Christmas story after the manner of Dickens. He is now at work on a new novel, and has promised short stories for the magazines. There is no reason why he should not continue to delight the wide reading public he has made for himself.

While in "Elsket" he has written with much power the tragic story of two Norwegian lovers, the most characteristic work that Mr. Page has done is his delineation of the life of the Southern people. I have already spoken of the way in which he was gradually led into literature, his genuine delight in a story, his early fondness for writing; but I doubt not that the most decided impulse has come from his desire to portray the life of the ante-bellum South and the heroism of Southern men and women during and since the war. In his paper on "Authorship in the South Before the War" he says: "The old South had no chronicler to tell its story in that spirit of sympathy from which alone come the lights and shadings on which depend perspective and real truth. It was for lack of a literature that it was left behind in the great race for outside favor, and that in the supreme moment of existence it found itself arraigned at the bar of the world without an advocate and without defense." In an address delivered at Washington and Lee in 1887 he closed by appealing to the men of that institution to look forward to the true historian of the South. "What nobler task can be set himself than this: to preserve from oblivion or, worse, from misrepresentation a civilization which produced as its natural fruit Washington and Lee?" Mr. Page is not this true historian to whom he looks forward with prophetic gaze; nor is he, as he himself realizes, the artist to represent on a large scale the tremendous tragedy of the Civil War; his stories are but a "fragmentary record" of the life of the people he loves.

The best account of life in the South before the war is in "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'." The fox-hunting, dueling, Christmas celebrations, hospitality, chivalry, lovemaking—all are there, not in the nervous prose of his essay on "Social Life Before the War," but in the artistic words of the old negro who recalls it all from the haze of the past. In the preface to Red Rock we are made to feel that a glory has passed away from the earth. "Even the moonlight was richer and mellower before the war than it is now. . . . What an air suddenly comes in with them of old courts and polished halls! What an odor, as it were, of those gardens which Watteau painted floats in as they enter!" The same idea is expressed in the less poetical but more significant words: "Dem was good ole times, Marster; de best Sam ever see!" And again: "Dat wuz de een o' de ole time."

To all of which one may be allowed to ask if there is not too much of a glamour about the old plantations and too much of a halo about the heads of Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen. One wishes that now and then the romancer had used some of the sarcastic touches of Thackeray in dealing with the higher classes of English society, or that he would use some of the irony that Hawthorne shows in dealing with the Puritans. . . .

Mr. Page has some of the sensitiveness of the men about whom he writes—an almost fatal obstacle to insight. I hasten to say, however, that this is a failing of nearly all romantic writers. The same criticism has been passed upon Scott for his presentation of the Middle Ages. He does not see life as it is, he does not write with his eye on the object; but who would be without his enthusiasm for the age of chivalry? And the reader may be allowed to enjoy the idealization of ante-bellum life, and at the same time be aware of the fresh current of ideas of the new South. . . .

In Mr. Page's stories the political problems of [the civil war] and our minds rest upon the heroic men and women who bore the brunt of it all. We can never be too grateful to the writer who has given us the description of Marse Phil's charge "across de oat fiel," or Little Darby's heroic cutting down of the tree while the bullets rain about him, or the devotion of the men to their guns and their colonel. And more moving than their bravery is the death that these sons of the South meet as they do their duty—Marse Chan, brought home in an ambulance by his faithful servant and put "to rest in de ole grabeyard (he done got he furlough);" Marse Phil, found amid the wreck and confusion of the battlefield and dying with the arms of his mother about him; Col. Gray, "falling at the head of his regiment on one of those great days which are the milestones of history."

It is no disparagement to the men to say that, whatever courage they displayed, it was less than that which the women showed; "hit 'peared like when it start the ladies wuz ambitiouser fir it 'n de mens." It would not be difficult to criticise the woman of the ante-bellum days as Mr. Page has described her—the gay and joyous Polly, "the tenderest-hearted little thing in the world," "de young mistis in de sky-blue robes," or the more dignified Miss Charlotte, "who look like she has done come down right from de top o' de blue sky an bring a piece o' it wid her." But these young women are transformed into such heroines as Meh Lady and Cousin Belle, the mother of Frank an' Willie, My Cousin Fanny, Blair Cary, who in times of storm and stress assume the heroic. Theirs is the loneliness of life on the old plantation, with none but the negroes and boys for company; the agony and pathos of death; the decline of once proud estates; the hard, coarse living they had to submit to; the insults of Northern soldiers; after the war the removal to cabins and the teaching of negro schools. It is in the delineation of these women that Mr. Page is at his best.

The favorite way Mr. Page has of presenting his stories is through some negro who in these latter days looks back to the good old days of slavery. He has realized with Irwin Russell and Joel Chandler Harris the literary capabilities of the negro—with a difference, however. Mr. Page delineates the negro only as he is identified with slavery; his thoughts never go beyond that relation; there is much wit and commonsense philosophy characteristic of an unconventional character, but none of the folklore, none of the legends peculiar to the negro race. He is an accessory to the white man, set up to see him as the author sees him. Mr. Harris, on the other hand, gives the negro a separate existence. In "Free Joe" especially he shows the latent life underneath the forms of slavery. It is a mistake to say that Page's characters are untrue to life. There are many such negroes living now, perfectly loyal sons of the Old South to whom the passing away of slavery was the destruction of all that was best in the world. There will be fewer and fewer as time passes and as the negro develops along lines indicated by such leaders as Booker Washington. It is fortunate that one so well fitted as Mr. Page has preserved this interesting type; if for no other reason, to offset the erroneous impressions made in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Such a negro as I have indicated is the best possible character with which to present certain phases of Southern life. In his mouth the most exaggerated words seem justifiable. He cannot adjust himself to new conditions, to "free issue negroes" and "poor white trash." Uncle Sam has been over to the old place to water the graves of his dead master and mistress; Uncle Edinburg meets the writer at the depot and tells him of the Christmas of long ago, "the sho' 'nough tyah down Chris'mas"; Uncle Billy is cutting fishing poles for the sons of the finest of Southern women and the most chivalrous of Northern men.

The blending of humor and pathos which is one of the finest characteristics of Mr. Page is nowhere so evident as in the stories in his first volume. There is one passage that seems to me one of the best in his works, and, indeed, one of the best in American literature: the conclusion of "Meh Lady," where Uncle Billy muses of the olden times as he sits in his cabin door: "An' dat night when de preacher was gone wid his wife an' Hannah done drapt off to sleep, I wuz settin' in der do' wid meh pipe, an' I heah 'em settin' dyah on de front steps, de voices soundin' low like bees an' de moon sort o' meltin' over de yard, an' I sort o' studyin', an' hit 'pear like de plantation live once mo', an' de ain' no mo' scufflin', an' de ole times come back ag'in, an' I heah meh kerridge horses stompin' in de stalls, an' de place all cleared up ag'in, an' fence all roun' de pasture, an' I smell de wet clover blossoms right good, an' Marse Phil an' Meh Lady done come, an' runnin' all roun' me, climbin' up on meh knees, runnin' callin' me Unc' Billy, an' pesterin' me to go fishin', whil' some'ow Meh Lady an' de Cun'l settin' dyah on de steps wid de voice hummin' low like water runnin' in de dark."

So far I have spoken of Mr. Page as a writer of short stories. A more difficult question arises when we consider him as a novelist. The passing from the short story to a really great novel is a task that few men have been able to achieve, perhaps not Kipling himself. That Mr. Page failed in On New-found River is generally conceded; that he came much nearer to it in Red Rock is as generally recognized. . . .

The concluding scene in Red Rock, representing the reconciliation of the two sections in the marriage of Ruth Welch and Steve Allen, suggests a most important phase of Mr. Page's work. While he has written with much enthusiasm, and at times with decided feeling, of the life of his people, he has never been bitter. He has had not a little to do with the fostering of the new national spirit that has been so characteristic of the last few years. His works in the hands of some Southerners have no doubt encouraged them in provincialism and conservatism; to the great majority they have served to keep alive the best memories of the past. To his Northern readers, In Ole Virginia and Red Rock have been a revelation of a life they have misunderstood and misrepresented. This national service rendered by him was fittingly recognized on October 23, 1901, when Yale University, in connection with her bicentennial celebration, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Literature.