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*Project Gutenberg\'s Etext of Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast*
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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
BRANN
THE ICONOCLAST
VOLUME I
In putting into permanent form the complete works of
William Cowper Brann, twenty-one years after his death,
the sole purpose of the present publishers is to preserve in
its entirety the genius of a writer whose work, though
produced under the stress of journalism, is destined to
endure as literature.
Upon the issues discussed by Brann, the publishers take no
sides; they do not stand as sponsors for, nor do they desire
to appear in the light of either approving or disapproving his
opinions or methods. They were friends and neighbors of
many years' standing of the men and institutions mentioned
in Brann's writings, but were in no way involved in the bitter
controversies and deplorable events which led to Brann's
untimely and dramatic death.
The plan and arrangement of this twelve-volume set of
Brann is simple. The first volume is composed of articles of
various length gathered from miscellaneous sources, and
includes some of the better known articles from The
ICONOCLAST. Volume II to XI inclusive are the files of
The ICONOCLAST (from February, 1895 to May, 1898,
inclusive), with the matter arranged approximately as it
appeared in the original publication. Volume XII contains
the story of Brann's death and various biographical and
critical articles from the press of the day, together with
those of Brann's speeches and lectures which have been
preserved. At the close of Volume XII you will find a
complete index of subjects and of titled articles for the
entire twelve volumes.
PREFACE
BY MILO HASTINGS
As I read the proofs of the last of these volumes, wherein is
told the story of Brann's death, my cup of the joy of love's
labor is embittered with the gall of an impotent, futile rage
against the Sower that flings with mocking hand the seed of
genius and recks not where it falls. The germ of such a life
as Brann's we can but accept in worshipful, unquestioning
gratitude, for the process of its spawning is too entangled to
unravel. But of the environment of his life we cannot refrain
from rebellious questioning, appreciative though we be of
that which was, and of our heritage of the unquenchable
spirit that is and shall be as long as our language shall last.
Genius he is, this only Brann we have; genius audacious,
defiant, and sublime; whose stature, though his feet be on
the flat of the Brazos bottom, towers effulgent over those
effigies placed on pedestals by orthodox popularity, and
sickly lighted by professorial praise.
Nor is my anger born of the fact that Brann, as warped by
his environment of time and place, wasted thought on free
silver economics, spent passion on prohibition and negro
criminals, lavished wrath on provincial preachers and local
politicians or alloyed his style by the so-called "vulgarities,"
which alone could shock into attention the muddle-headed
who paid his printer's bill for the privilege of seeing
barnyard phrases and dunghill words in type.
All this, I can conceive, may have been the particular
combination of circumstances that were needed to
bring to flower a germ of genius that, had it been planted in
last century's Boston, might have given us but another
Harvard classic--or environed in this century's Greenwich
Village only another free-versifier of souls a-jaunt amid
psycho-analytics and parlor Bolshevism.
The slouch-hatted, gun-toting, beer-drinking, woman-
worshiping, man-baiting Brann of Texas may have been the
particular and only Brann to have developed the colossal
courage and fighting fearlessness that gave his poet's soul
the reach and stature, the strength and vigor to raise
himself above the mere music of his words.
Brann as he was when he heard the shot that killed him, I
can accept and proclaim as beyond the need and reach of
apology or regret. But what of the Brann that would have
written on throughout the twenty-one years that have since
elapsed, and that we would have with us still at the prime
age of sixty-four?
Had Brann lived! We should have had the product of eight
times the period of his writing life that was; and an added
quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes,
more leisure for deliberate composition. We should have
heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional
pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns
against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape
and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world.
It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les
Miserables," as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had
but stopped the mobs in the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz
and Waterloo had never been.
The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms.
Samson, old and blind, toppled down the temple, and the
Philistines that he slew at his death were more than they
which he slew in his life. Not so Brann. His death was
as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade,
the sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine.
Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic
waste, for no purpose under heaven but to serve as food
for idle fancies as to what might have been--such to me is
the death of Brann, and my throat chokes with sorrow and
my soul is sick with vain despair.
Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than
three years of writing time. There were previous years of
yearning and dreaming while he fretted beneath the yoke of
galling servitude to newspaper editors unworthy to loose the
latchets of Brann's shoes. His own paper, The
Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance,
and from which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition
is derived, ran for just forty months, and for six or eight
months of this period Brann was on lecture tours, during
which time his paper was largely filled with outside
contributions.
That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the
seven wonders of the literary world. That a magazine so
located and written by one man, having but a paltry
advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in
three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then
published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red
Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil.
It is on this three years' work that Brann's fame must rest.
Barring a few poets, the literary colossi have seldom had
less than the work of a score of years on which to base
their claims for greatness. Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoi, Mark
Twain each wrote for more than fifty years. But greater
range of variety and distance as well as span of time
contributed to their product. They traveled up and down
the world of men, mingled with many races, sailed seas,
climbed mountains, lived in metropoles, and dined with
princes.
Brann's most notable personal acquaintances were country-
town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a
hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of
the world. He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily
unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and
the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement
was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most
spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's
most worthy resident representative, William Marion Reedy.
So environed, in a time when the bicycle marked the acme
of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed
Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college
and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers,"
Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as
Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and
bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made
by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the
Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren
ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars of
bullet-answering bigotry.
But vain are the might-have-beens; and fortunate are we to
have as we have the stuff out of which far-ringing fame
resounds unto generations when teeth are no longer set on
edge--when men will have forgotten the taboos of a little
day and the dust of our Mrs. Grundys will be weeds to
choke the freedom of the grass.
The copies of The Iconoclast, read in their day till worn
to tatters, were ill adapted to preservation. It were futile to
look for them in libraries, for Brann was about as welcome
in those formal repositories of the proper in literature as
matches in a powder mill. So far as they are aware the file
of The Iconoclast possessed by the present publishers,
and from which this edition is reproduced, is the only
complete file in existence.
For twenty years this priceless literary heritage has been
waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly
circumstance. Like a lone great manuscript within the
cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have
perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic
music held but fleetingly within the heart that heard it.
But the blood of ink now flows again through the multiplying
presses and the flaming phrases of The Iconoclast, shot
like shafts of gold from over the mountains of El d'Orado by
the sun of genius, still live and will endure. Again the
million words leap from the yellowed pages like tongues of
fire and beauty; and ten thousand voices will cry and sing
again before the hearths of those who once knew and
loved the Waco Iconoclast, and will sing and cry in the
homes of their children and their children's children who will
read and acclaim Brann as a God whose name is writ
forever in the stars.
These facts are here set down that they who read in days
to come may marvel as I do now that two score issues of a
provincial paper should consistently contain such a freight
of imperishable literature, revealing a learning positively
prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and
crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish
richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps,
of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ardent splendor of
poetic nights.
Whence came the towering intellect, the wealth of
knowledge, the mastery of words, the music of style, the
diapason of feeling? It could only come from the sources
that are available to any American who can read. The
most formal aid that could have contributed is the free
shelves of the St. Louis public library.
The miracle of Brann's growth and flowering is more
marvelous than that of Poe, less explainable than that of
Shakespeare. That Brann knew the literary classics of the
world is obvious from his every line. But, unless we invent
some theory of universal telepathy to have wafted
inspiration to Waco from all the canonized dead from
Homer to Carlyle, we can only conceive that Brann derived
his knowledge and his power, without encouragement and
without guidance, by poring over the printed page in lonely
hours bitterly wrested from the wolf of poverty that for forty
years held mortgage on his time.
What he possessed, however got, was a combination of all
those recognized elements of literary greatness--except one
thing; he heeded not the warning of cultured mediocrity that
commands most writers what to leave unsaid. Brann left
nothing unsaid, and because of that fact was locked out of
colleges, libraries, encyclopaedias and halls of fame.
Where other writers waste half their energies in deciding
what may be written, Brann gave his full energy to writing
what he thought. Whereas in all things else he matched
and equaled others, in this one fact of absolute audacity
and complete freedom from fear, he outmatched all and so
closed the pedants' mouths of praise. Colossal, crude,
terrible and sublime, Brann opened the ears of the people
by the mighty power of his untamed language, by the
smashing fury of his wrath of words.
From the point of disadvantage of the little country town lost
in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world,
and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath. He saw
the sins of high society in New York and London, the
rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling
beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery.
But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial
passing events of his own state and nation and the local
affairs of his home town. Of all these things, great and
small, he wrote with equal fervor, equal venom and equal
power.
To-day the war is fought, the Czar is dead, free silver is
forgotten and the local animosities that Brann brewed in his
own State live only in the memories of a few old men.
With the roll of the years, the perspective of time, like a low
swung sun, casts the mountain's shadow ever farther
across the valley; and Brann the Waco journalist has
become Brann the American genius. No matter how dead
the issues, how local to time and place the characters of
which he wrote, his writing is literature and the imperishable
legacy of the world.
The Biblical story of Joseph would be equally great if his
name had been Fu Chow, and Pharaoh had been the
Emperor Wu Wong Wang. Hamlet would be immortal if his
name were L. Percy Smith and his uncle a pork packer in
Omaha. The prodigal son has no name, the swine he fed
knew no country. Particular names, local places, and
passing forms and institutions are not the essence of
literature. For those who formerly read Brann in The
Iconoclast he was a Texas journalist in the free silver
days; but for those who shall read his work in these days
after the world war, New York might as well be Babylon,
Mark Hanna, Haman, and the files of The Iconoclast,
clay tablets dug from the ruins of some long-buried Waco of
the Euphrates Valley.
It is only the transcendent genius who can afford to be
careless of the preservation of his product. Socrates
merely talked to chance disciples in the Groves of
Athens; other men wrote and preserved his words.
Shakespeare wrote plays for his current theatrical business;
others gathered and printed his manuscripts. While he
lived, Brann's writing never saw the dignity of a clothbound
book. They were not written for carefully edited, thrice-
proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground out for the
unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily
set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and
patent medicine testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet
that could be rolled up and stuck through a wedding ring.
Brann's range of literary form was limited by his single
avenue of publication through the columns of a one-man
paper, and varied from the ten-word epigrams of
Salmagundi to the ten-thousand word article or published
lecture. Within this range is evidenced at least three
distinct types of literary composition.
First and foremost in volume and effect is the Philippic or
iconoclastic article, mingling in varying proportions the
resounding musical cadences of Ingersollian oratory and
the pungent, audacious epigrammatic twists on which
Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship, built a more
profitable, if not more noble, fame.
It was as the destroyer, the iconoclast, that Brann best saw
himself, and to this role he devoted a great preponderance
of his time and talent. But there is another Brann, unknown
to many who have conceived him only as an idolsmasher,
an "apostle of the devil," an angry Christ driving out the
defilers of the temple with a lash of scorpion's tails.
Brann, the poet, the lover of beauty, speaks even amidst
the ruins of the houses of hypocrisy and shame which he
has wrecked. There is scarce a page in all his writings in
which sheer beauty does not stand out amid the
ugliness of carnage and destruction--in which the strains of
celestial music are not heard above the roar of earthly
battle.
But more than this there are many articles that are wholly
cut from a cloth of gold. Many of the finest of these gems
of pure literature were omitted from the early and
incomplete book-publication of Brann, for the compilers who
made that hasty and inadequate selection were too close to
the bitterness of his death to see this other Brann.
To cite from the first volume only:
Where have you heard a more beautiful sermon from a
Christian pulpit than "Charity" or "Throwing Stones at
Christ"?
Can you find in prose or poetry more melody of language
than in "Life and Death"?
In all our countless volumes of fiction, have you ever read a
more wondrous tale than "There Comes One After," or "A
Story of the Sea"?
To read only such as these is to know a very different
Brann from the author of "The Bradley-Martin Bal Masque"
or "Garters and Amen Groans." The Brann who wrote
"Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame
as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard." I have combed my memory in vain to match
it from an American pen. A few paragraphs from Ingersoll,
a few pages from Poe, a few stanzas from Whitman--but
make your own search and your own comparisons; and if,
in your final ranking, Brann stands not among the Titans
who number less than the fingers on God's hand, it will be
because you cannot divorce the sublime beauty of "Life
and Death" from the coyotes and the jackals that run
rampant through the pages of Brann the shocker of the thin
of skin.
Lastly, consider Brann the teller of stories--for laughter and
for tears. Some of these tales are allegories as universal to
the life of man as "Pilgrim's Progress." Elsewhere, as in
the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful
lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow
Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with
the bizarre and scintillating figure. Nor was Brann
unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a
novel at the time of his death. That O. Henry's ambition to
write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems
more than probable. Brann's first attempt to start The
Iconoclast was made in Austin, Texas, but this first paper
survived for only a few issues.
O. Henry, then a drug clerk in Austin, being filled with
literary aspiration, bought the press and the name of The
Iconoclast for $250; but O. Henry's Iconoclast after two
issues also ceased to flutter. Later, when Brann again
accumulated the necessary funds to permit him to throw off
the hireling's yoke, he asked for and received back from O.
Henry the legal right to the title of his own paper.
I relate this incident not to cast discredit upon O. Henry's
originality. His unique mastery of story structure was all his
own, but that richness of figurative speech, particularly
those exaggerated humorous metaphors which make his
every paragraph so delightful, we may well believe to be an
Elijah's mantle fallen from the shoulders of Brann, and worn
over a new tunic.
Should any man create more than a rare few of the words
he uses his speech would be as meaningless as a doctor of
theology explaining the trinity. Likewise that subtle thing
called "style," that revivifying of the dead ashes of
dictionary words, though more peculiar to the man, is most
potent when it borrows freely but wisely from all that has
gone before.
Stevenson read, and confessed to deliberate practice work
in imitation of, the masters that preceded him. So we know
that Brann read, absorbed, transmuted, and transfigured
the style of the classic writers, and added a daring measure
of reckless originality. As Brann read his Homer and his
Carlyle, his Shakespeare and his Ingersoll, so Hubbard and
O. Henry read their Brann; and Hubbard specifically
commends him to the would-be writer as Johnson commended Addison.
There is no ore that will assay more literary metal to the
page than Brann. As a writer's writer no man of our time
surpasses him. His vocabulary is conceded, even by his
most envious critics, to outrange that of any other
American. His gift of figurative speech--that essential that
distinguishes literature from mere correct writing--rivals that
of any writer in any country, language or time. Brann's
compass of words, idioms and phrases harks back to the
archaic and reaches forward to the futuristic.
If you wish merely to learn to appreciate literature so that
you may nod approval in polite society when an accredited
writer's name is mentioned, go to college and listen to the
lectures of literary Ph. D.'s. But if you want to learn to
write, take your Bible, your Shakespeare and your Brann
and hie you to your garret, there to read, reread, study,
memorize, and imitate if you can. And God be praised if
you can steal the best and to it add somewhat of your own.
Brann offends, shocks and outrages, is suppressed,
damned, forcibly ignored and laboriously forgotten, because
though the lark sings in his words, "the buzzard is on the
wing." But Brann did not make the stench that offends the
nostrils of the nice; he only stirred up the cesspools to let
us know that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for
their abatement. That riles the kept keepers of lesser
fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters
should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the
noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the
world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty
that the few may live in perfumed palaces.
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, shouted Brann and died
shouting, while the well-fed and fatted sat on the lid to keep
it down. But we who have lived to see the lid blown off
Russia and feel the growl and grumble of the bowels of all
the earth need not overstrain our ears to hear Brann
laughing now in that good Baptist Hell to which a bullet in
the back gave him the passport.
POTIPHAR'S WIFE.
STORY OF JOSEPH
REVISITED
For more than six-and-thirty centuries the brand of the
courtesan has rested on the brow of Potiphar's wife. The
religious world persists in regarding her as an abandoned
woman who wickedly strove to lead an immaculate he-virgin
astray. The crime of which she stands accused is so unspeakably
awful that even after the lapse of ages we cannot refer to the
miserable creature without a moan. Compared with her infamous
conduct old Lot's dalliance with his young daughters and David's
ravishment of Uriah's wife appear but venial faults, or even
shine as spotless virtues.
The story of Mrs. Potiphar's unrequited passion may be
strictly true; but if so the world has changed most
wondrously. It transcends the probable and rests upon
such doubtful ex parte evidence that a modern court
would give her a certificate of good character. It is not in
accord with our criminal code to damn a woman on the
unsupported deposition of a young dude whom she has had
arrested for attempted ravishment. Had Joseph simply filed
a general denial and proven previous good character we
might suspect the madame of malicious prosecution; but he
doth protest too much.
Mrs. Potiphar was doubtless a young and pretty woman.
She was the wife of a wealthy and prominent official of
Pharaoh's court, and those old fellows were a trifle exacting
in their tastes. They sought out the handsomest
women of the world to grace their homes, for sensuous
love was then the supreme law of wedded life. Joseph was
a young Hebrew slave belonging to Mrs. Potiphar's
husband, who treated him with exceptional consideration
because of his business ability. One day the lad found
himself alone with the lady. The latter suddenly turned in a
fire alarm, and Jacob's favorite son jogged along Josie in
such hot haste that he left his garment behind. Mrs.
Potiphar informed those who responded to her signal of
distress that the slave had attempted a criminal assault.
She is supposed to have repeated the story to her husband
when he came home, and the chronicler adds, in a tone of
pained surprise, that the old captain's "anger was kindled."
Neither Mrs. Potiphar's husband nor her dearest female
friends appear to have doubted her version of the affair,
which argues that, for a woman who moved in the highest
social circles, she enjoyed a reasonably good reputation.
But Joseph had a different tale to tell. He said that the
poor lady became desperately enamored of his beauty and
day by day assailed his continence, but that he was as deaf
to her amorous entreaties as Adonis to the dear
blandishments of Venus Pandemos. Finally she became so
importunate that he was compelled to seek safety in flight.
He saved his virtue but lost his vestments. It was a narrow
escape, and the poor fellow must have been dreadfully
frightened. Suppose that the she-Tarquin had
accomplished her hellish design, and that her victim had
died of shame? She would have changed the whole
current of the world's history! Old Jacob and his other
interesting if less virtuous sons, would have starved to
death, and there would have been neither Miracles nor
Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious
Atonement. Talmage and other industrious exploiters of
intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for
fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo
Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the
knee to Baal. The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the
profoundest study. It was an awful crisis in the history of
the human race! How thankful we, who live in these latter
days, should be that the female rape fiend has passed into
the unreturning erstwhile with the horned unicorn and
dreadful hippogriff, the minotaur and other monsters that
once affrighted the fearful souls of men--that sensuous
sirens do not so assail us and rip our coat-tails off in a foul
attempt to wreck our virtue and fill our lives with fierce
regret. True, the Rev. Parkhurst doth protest that he was
hard beset by beer and beauty unadorned; but he seems to
have been seeking the loaded "schooner" and listening for
the siren's dizzy song. Had Joseph lived in Texas he could
never have persuaded Judge Lynch that the lady and not
he should be hanged. The youngster dreamed himself into
slavery, and I opine that he dreamed himself into jail. With
the internal evidence of the story for guide, I herewith
present, on behalf of Mrs. Potiphar, a revised and
reasonable version of the affaire d'amour.
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