Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 5

Many of his friends would not approve, and neither would he if he could express himself, of anything that would require any large expenditure of money while so many thousands of worthy men and women are struggling in vain to secure the bare necessities of life, these holding that costly monuments can do the dead no good, and are in bad taste in the living. There can be no doubt that thousands in the years to come will seek his grave to lay their offerings upon the shrine of genius, and while his will be marked I wish to say in this connection to those asking in what condition Mrs. Brann is left financially that while she will have sufficient to keep the wolf from hers and her children's door if properly managed, that she will not have over a t.i.the of what it has been published that she would.

Submitting these few words for the consideration of his friends, I can say if a response sufficiently favorable come, then the proper steps will be taken to carry it out; if not, nothing more will be said, at least not from me; and as his friend I would not approve of keeping standing in the ICONOCLAST a list of subscribers to the fund; if the suggestion is carried out it will be time enough to publish it when the work is finished and the statue unveiled. G. B. GERALD.

The man who takes up Brann's work will only succeed, not replace him. He was a star of the first magnitude, and such bodies are not created in an hour--not always in an age. He who attempts an imitation, however clever his work, would stand before the world, self-confessed, a failure from the first. Booth, in his favorite character inspired us--Joe Jefferson could only prompt us to laughter. Yet, is not Jefferson without genius in his way?

There is no reason, however, why he who follows may not be as loyal to the faith, as courageous in the fight, as Brann was known and acknowledged to be. The Chief is dead, but did not die until he had blazoned the way for those who dare follow where he so bravely led.

In life Brann often said he wanted no mourning worn for him, save that which enshrouded the hearts of his family and friends--that the mere trappings of woe were but its "limbs and outward flourishes," which, too often, failed to reach the heart.

SPEAKING OF BRANN.

Died Fighting April 2, 1898.

Where now is all his thundering?

He has "fall'n on stillness" in the Spring, And even echo answers not, "In that dim land where all things are forgot,"

His surging sentences, his cadenced chimes Of speech that through the seven climes Wooed the many to rapt listening.

Soothed by the wind of the dead men's feet, He lies in slumber senseless-sweet.

His fame, his wife's and children's tears, The issue that made up his manly years, His hates and loves the burgeoning Earth receives, And list, "a little noiseless noise among the leaves"

Of southern springtime pity does entreat.

A fighter's faults were his, but strong The blows he struck at throned Wrong; Beauty he loved as ever love the brave; The April air breathes beauty o'er his grave.

Truth he pursued. Lo, he has found her now: She kissed the kiss of peace upon his brow.

His ears are filled with Silence's sweet song.

Fighting he died, marched into the Night, His banner blazing with his bravery's light.

"Shot from behind," the story goes, To glorify him and to d.a.m.n his foes.

The foes he fought were Cowardice and Fraud; They have prevailed again, but, O Lord G.o.d, Thou wilt raise up still others for Thy fight.

Rejoicing loud is in the House of Sham, Bigots to themselves make deep salaam, Shoddydom rubs its ringed hands in glee, The Ogre's scandal-scourged at each pink tea, Pecksniff's pray that he has gone to swell The galaxy of bravery and brains in h.e.l.l-- Great joy in small souls all not worth a d.a.m.n!

But where men think, feel, as men can, "Bon voyage through the dark, good man!"

They call and take up his pen-lance And brandish it again 'gainst Ignorance In power fortified with a myriad lies And every great-heart, fine-soul cries As pledge of fealty, "Here's to you, Brann!"

What tho' he hear no rumor of our hail!

What tho' we follow searching for that Grail A bettered world with less of woe and pain, And better G.o.ds than Privilege and Gain, Out in the darkness, by a.s.sa.s.sins sped, 'Tis better far to join defeated dead Than share success with him whose soul's for sale.

--WILLIAM MARION REEDY, in St. Louis Mirror.

DEATH OF W. C. BRANN.

What a sable pall was flung over the spirits of countless thousands who heard last week that Editor W. C. Brann, of the ICONOCLAST, was no more. "The heavens seem hung in black and the clouds are wrung of their stars,"

wrote a St. Paul friend who idolized the apostolic seer.

The world is dark with excess of grief for the immortal soul of an illimitable genius has been sent to its maker and scattered with the star dust of the eidouranion William C. Brann was an apostle. Like Christ, like Lincoln and others whom we deify, he was misunderstood and reviled, and a cowardly bullet pierced him in the back, a martyrdom of which he had a premonition.

The head and front of his offending was strict adherence to the truth, though the heavens fall. He knew no fear, but was never the aggressor.

The lamented Brann was an educator, and an emanc.i.p.ator of human liberty and human thought. The hypocrite stood in awe of his judgment. When he indicted him to be arraigned before the great bar of public opinion he dipped his pen in acid that seared the eyeb.a.l.l.s, and wrote their sentence diluted with worm-wood and gall. It is not small wonder that the Judas Iscariots and the lemurs trembled at his power.

Brann's tragic exit from this vale of tears is inspiration now for jackals to attack his name. Like the dull, dull a.s.s they are not afraid to kick the dead lion, while their ears wave to the seventh heaven of delight. In earth life they feared his name, but like ghouls they now go down into the grave to besmirch his memory. And this, too, from those who profess to follow the teachings of the meek and lowly Nazarene.

Strange as it may seem to the hypocrite, Brann was a religious man. His creed was the religion of humanity.

His biographers, if they do him justice, will write his name with the blood of the lamb high up on the flying scroll.

Brann's friends, and they are legion, should not repine if he is not canonized as his bones are hea.r.s.ed in death, for "whenever was a G.o.d found agreeable to everybody?

The regular way is to lynch, as the Baylorites did, to hang, to kill, to crucify and excoriate and trample them under their stupid hoofs, cloven or webbed, as the case may be, for a century or two; and then take to braying over them when you discover their divine origin, still in a very long-eared manner!" So speaks the sarcastic man, in his wild way, very mournful truths.

Brann was as the "life-tree, Igdrasil, wide-waving and many-toned, with fimbriated tendrils down deep in the Death-Kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men and with boughs reaching always beyond the stars and ever changeless as the immutable empyrean of eternal hope."

They could better spare the whole State of Texas than William C. Brann. While the galled jades winced beneath the scorpion whips of his satire, and would have preferred fireb.a.l.l.s, they felt the potency of his dynamics and scurried to the soldier works of the masters for a glint of mental pabulum they had never known before.

The editor of The Sunday Eye is in receipt of many letters from admirers of the late lamented genius. They are rich in anathema and maranatha of Brann's heartless and cruel detractors. With one accord they have expressed the wish that I excoriate the revilers who desecrated by bludgeon words the sacrosanct acre of G.o.d in which reposes the mortal tenement of the sacred scribe.

I do not believe as Mr. Charles Campbell, of Anchor, does, that they should be gibbeted high as Haman. Nor do I think as Mr. C. E. Stewart, of Minier, does, that they should be lashed naked through the world and lambasted till death ends the heart throbs. I believe that they should be permitted to live until they have read the great genius and learned to understand and exalt him. It would make them better for it, religion would not suffer by it, though Baylor sank a thousand leagues beneath the seven-hued regions of Tartarus.

The ICONOCLAST minced no words. When it dealt body blows they landed in the brisket and affected the solar plexus in a very apprehensive way.

Lincoln was gentle and generous, Ingersoll was brilliant and broad, but Brann was all this and greater. His untimely death was a distinctive loss to the march of civilization and a gain to the shams of hypocrisy which takes now a new grip on the English language to batter down the shackles Brann had welded about them with public opinion.

Brann was a reformer who meant reform. He wore his heart upon his sleeve, but would be cruel to be just.

He endured mental anguish great as was suffered in the garden of Gethsemane. As the sweetest perfume exhales from a crushed, blooming rose so the sweeter and n.o.bler sentiments welled up from the perennial spring of his fountains of love when most bruised and racked with pain.

I have no fear of his acceptance on the right hand up there where men are judged by their deeds and not by semblance of better things that a canting world may simulate. He is in Valhalla with the other battling heroes where the alabaster boxes of eternal love are showered upon the halo of their brighter radiance. Brann wrote to catch the wide world's attention that he might teach them gentler things than feculent shocks. He was essentially an ascetic devoted to uplifting in his own sure way.

All the cla.s.ses came trippingly to his and all the dogmas, all the purlieus of sociology and political economy were as an open book to him. When he soared to the sun he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and the expurgation of money power which he believed was the ne plus ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolic perfidy. He preached as he felt, tender and terrible, loving and vehement, a strange commingling of t.i.tanic vulgate and cooing peace. Brann was eccentric but all genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed Quixotic. He was a man whose loftiest ideality was purity in womanhood. He adored children and was in many respects child-like. He was as

"The long light that shakes across the lake, Where the cataract leaps in its glory."

Friend Brann, through blinding mist of sympathetic tears, I say adieu.--Geo. L. Hutchin, in the Bloomington Eye.

A PEN PICTURE OF BRANN

It is hard for me to realize that Brann is dead. It seems only yesterday night that he sat opposite me at table, and talked of his plans and projects and spoke so hopefully, so boyishly of the future that he was never to realize.

For a long time I had a curiosity to see Brann, of the ICONOCLAST. His pyrotechnic vocabulary, his strange admixture of erudition and slang, his almost womanly sympathy and the more than Apache ferocity with which he pursued his enemies, the tender and poetic metaphor that gemmed his iron prose, and the singular blending of optimism and pessimism that characterized most of his work suggested an anomaly that appealed to the imagination, and I was anxious to see what Brann looked like.

I had an opportunity when he came here to lecture. I knew his business manager, Mr. Ward, who figured in the dreadful duel in which he lost his life, and who was, at that time, arranging his lecture dates. Ward is a big Texan, over six feet high, and I suppose he weighs all of two hundred pounds. He is a lawyer who drifted into journalism years ago, and under a somewhat rough-and- ready exterior there is not much trouble in finding the gentleman and the scholar. Well, Ward introduced me to Brann, and after a while the three of us foregathered in a private room of a down-town cafe, and stayed there for several hours that I remember with unmixed delight.

Looking back at the episode, I have difficulty in framing my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the princ.i.p.al thing that struck me was his lack of pose and affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful naivete.

"I want to pull out of the ICONOCLAST as much as I can," he said. "And since we have made enough money to do so, I have bought a great many outside contributions.