<SPAN name="chap05"></SPAN>
<h3> V </h3>
<h3> Of the Wings of Atalanta </h3>
<p class="poem">
O black boy of Atlanta!<br/>
<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">But half was spoken;</SPAN><br/>
The slave's chains and the master's<br/>
<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Alike are broken;</SPAN><br/>
The one curse of the races<br/>
<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Held both in tether;</SPAN><br/>
They are rising—all are rising—<br/>
<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The black and white together.</SPAN><br/>
<br/>
WHITTIER.<br/></p>
<br/>
<p>South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred
Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the
future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day
had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of
Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the
tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and
roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl
of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.</p>
<p>Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of
the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its
sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the
sea. And the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea,
till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for
her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some
bitterness, with a touch, of reclame,—and yet with real earnestness,
and real sweat.</p>
<p>It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to
see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel
the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell
on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live,
something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that
with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something
sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this
is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it
excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.</p>
<p>Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned
resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of
purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta,
Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of
web and woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred hills with
factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched
long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming. And the Nation
talked of her striving.</p>
<br/>
<p>Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull
Boeotia; you know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would
marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid
three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused,
startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled
again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew
over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his
arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of
their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If
Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.</p>
<p>Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led
to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race
of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the
gambler's code of the Bourse; and in all our Nation's striving is not
the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So common is this
that one-half think it normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to
question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not
rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of America, how dire a
danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping
for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!</p>
<p>It was no maiden's idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful
wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism,
poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and
Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a
journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all
this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the
red waste of sun-baked clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will
not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!</p>
<p>The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer,
"all too few." There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of
the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten
Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran
she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot
the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the
grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor
with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to
apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more
unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful—I remember the lawless days
of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and
field—and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no
despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this
old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes
and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily
Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal
of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.</p>
<p>Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is
beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with
vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern
life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every social ill the
panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of
the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth
to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them
working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender
for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and
Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.</p>
<p>Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,—the
Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In
the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain,
unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and
will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never
come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but
words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.
To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the
strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil
are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of
serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the
Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them;
and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,—a field
for somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of
Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now
indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill,
the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old
leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro
social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black
preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into
their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the business-men,—all those with property and
money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the
Other-world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South
laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of
Negro,—the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his
incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just
as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from
not dissimilar causes,—the sudden transformation of a fair far-off
ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the
consequent deification of Bread.</p>
<p>In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals
of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague
dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger
is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration,
will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here
stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that
must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in
the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some
ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples
before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for
righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all
and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the
rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South
be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black
millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty
and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom
which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our
fathers' blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of
gold,—into lawless lust with Hippomenes?</p>
<br/>
<p>The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On
one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold
relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple
unity:—a broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled
roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in
the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful,
sparingly decorated, and with one low spire. It is a restful group,
—one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I
live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life. In
winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures
pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning,
when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and
laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from
the busy city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join
their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a
half-dozen class-rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song
of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander
among the stars, there to wander among men and nations,—and elsewhere
other well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no
time-saving devices,—simply old time-glorified methods of delving for
Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the
good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that
was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato,
that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the
freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will
not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content
richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will
ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of
that life which meat nourishes.</p>
<p>The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing
mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia,
is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the
determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest
possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with
their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of
their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and
proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a
deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and
the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and
breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a
future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:</p>
<p class="poem">
"Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren."<br/></p>
<br/>
<p>They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta
before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but
those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat
uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new
educational system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we
ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots
of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and
from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of
the University has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built
the kindergarten's A B C.</p>
<p>But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the
problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in
therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and
lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard
through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled
them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are
forgetting, the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth,
some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and
capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of
blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be
college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a
missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free
workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is
almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a
blacksmith; almost, but not quite.</p>
<br/>
<p>The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or
to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite
society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment
between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment
which forms the secret of civilization. Such an institution the South
of to-day sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion
that on both sides the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth
commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones. She has, as
Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that
broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human living and
doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life to-day
confronting her. The need of the South is knowledge and culture,—not
in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy
abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the
Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from
the curse of the Boeotian lovers.</p>
<p>The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South. They
alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit. They
will not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for—ah,
thoughtful Hippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life?
But they will guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in
the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and
undefiled. Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising
the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support of colleges.
Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul
breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing
fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial
selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack
of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South's need and
danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen's sons!
how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the
conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build
the Southern university—William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas,
Tulane, Vanderbilt, and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the
Negro universities:—Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at
the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship
has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and
perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning
and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South
a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic
tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and
giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?</p>
<p>Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and
kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and
tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children
of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not
upside down.</p>
<p>Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys
and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less
knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to
think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and
they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think
aright. If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best
education for one or seven or sixty million souls! shall we teach them
trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the
workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of
carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor
can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group
of men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our
training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.
And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends
of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker
must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the
thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained
only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education;
by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search
for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the
industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not
a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.</p>
<br/>
<p>When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself
from the seas and comes murmuring westward. And at its bidding, the
smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and
covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle
above Stone Hall. And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic of
Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for
yonder comes Hippomenes!</p>
<br/><br/><br/>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />