Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 14

I'm talking about the sure-enough, old-fashioned complaint that makes a man miss meals and lose sleep, write spring poetry and misplace his appet.i.te for plug tobacco; not of the new-fangled varioloid that yields to matrimonial treatment. There's a great deal of sugar-coated hum- b.u.g.g.e.ry about this thing we call love. It reminds me of the sulphur and mola.s.ses my careful Presbyterian parents used to pour into me in the gentle springtime. I don't remember why they gave it to me; but it was probably because they didn't want it themselves. Perhaps they thought foreordination hadn't done much for me, and they had best get me used to sulphur gradually. I remember, however, that, like the average case of matrimony, it usually contained a good deal more sulphur than syrup.

Matches, we are told, are made in heaven; and I think it likely, for Satan himself is said to have originated there.

I'll tell you how matches are usually made: By some horrible accident John Henry and Sarah Jane become acquainted. They have no more affinity than a practical politician and pure spring water; but they dance and flirt, fool around the front gate in the dark of the moon, sigh and talk nonsense. John Henry begins to take things for his breath and Sarah Jane for her complexion. The young goslings get wonted to each other, and first thing you know they're tied up until death or divorce doth them part. And, had they missed each other altogether, they would have been just as well--perhaps better--content with other mates and made as enthusiastic a failure of married life.

Most people marry without really knowing whether they're in love or not--mistake the gregarious habit for the mystic fire of Hymen's torch, the pangs of a bad digestion for the barbed arrows from the love-G.o.d's bow.

But when a couple's really got what ailed Romeo and Juliet they're in no more doubt about it than was the man after he sat down on the circular saw to see if it was running and found it the sole proprietor of a South American revolution. They don't have to send their feelings to a chemist for a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification, nor take an invoice of their affections to see if any have got away.

Love is really a very serious thing. Like sea-sickness, everybody laughs at it but those who have got it. When Cupid lets slip a sure-enough shaft it goes thro' a fellow's heart like a Kansas cyclone thro' a colored camp-meeting, and all the powers of hades can never head it off.

Love is the most sacred word ever framed by celestial lips. It's the law of life, the harmony of heaven, the breath of which the universe was born, the divine essence increate of the ever-living G.o.d.

But love is like all other sweet things--unless you get the very best brand it sours awful easy.

Of all the pitiful Humbugs beneath high heaven commend me to those intellectual doodle-bugs who have become Dame Fashion's devotees and devote all their intellectuality to the science of dress--to the art of being miserable a la mode. Thousands are today sailing about in silk hats who are guiltless of undershirts; bedecked with diamonds while in debt to the butcher for the meat on their bones. Families that can scarce afford calico flaunt Parisian finery, keep costly carriages while there's a chronic hiatus in their cupboards, go hungry to bed six nights in the week that on the seventh they may spread a brave feast for fashionable fools. G.o.d have mercy on all such muttonheads. They are the natural breeders of good-for-naughts, for in such an atmosphere children grow up mentally dwarfed and morally debased.

Fashionable mothers commit their children to the care of serving-maids while they sail out to soirees and receptions--put their babes on a bottle while they swing round the social circle. No wonder their sons grow up sapheads, as dest.i.tute of backbone as a banana, as deficient in moral force as a firkin of fish. Think of an infant Napoleon nursing a rubber nozzle, of rearing a Brutus on patent baby food, of bringing a Hannibal up by hand! You can't do it.

Why, if I had a woman of that kind to wife--a fashionable b.u.t.terfly whose heart was in her finery and her feathers; who neglected her home to train with a lot of intellectual tomt.i.ts whose glory was small-talk; who saved her sweetest smiles for society and her ill-temper for the family altar--I say were I tied to that kind of a female, do you know what I'd do? Eh? You don't? Well--neither do I.

There are some Humbugs, however, who merit our respect if not our reverence--men who are infinitely better than they would have the world believe. As the purest pearl is encased in an unseemly sh.e.l.l, so, too, is many a G.o.d-like soul enshrined in a breast of seeming adamant.

Many a man swears because he's too proud to weep, hides a quivering soul behind the cynic's sneer, fronts the world like a savage beast at bay while his heart's a fathomless lake of tears. Tennyson tells us of a monstrous figure of complete steel and armed cap-a-pie, that guarded a castle gate, and by its awful name and warlike mien affrighted the fearful souls of men. But one day a dauntless knight unhorsed it and clove thro' the ma.s.sy helm, when forth from the wreck there came not a demon armed with the seythe of death, but a beardless boy scarce old enough to break a pointless lance upon the village green. So, too, when with the sword Excalibur of human sympathy you shear down thro' the helm and harness of some rough- spoken man who seems to hate all human kind, you find the soul of a woman and the heart of a little child.

Even our religion is ofttimes a Humbug, else why is it that the good Christian woman--who says her prayer as regularly as she looks under the bed for burglars--says to the caller whom she cordially detests, "I am delighted to see you;" when she's wondering why the meddlesome old gadabout don't stay at home when she's not wanted elsewhere?

Why is it that when a good brother puts a five- dollar bill in the contribution box he flashes it up so all may see the figures, but when he drops a nickel in the slot to get a little grace he lets not his right hand know what his left hand doeth? Why is it that when you strike a devout deacon for the loan of ten dollars he will swear by all the G.o.ds he hasn't got it, when his pockets are fairly bursting with bills? If his religion is not hypocrisy--if he is not a Humbug--why doesn't he tell you in plain United States that he would rather have Uncle Sam's promise to pay than yours? Oh, people are becoming such incorrigible liars that I've about quit trying to borrow money.

Too many people presume that they are full of the grace of G.o.d when they're only bilious; that they are pious because they dislike to see other people enjoy themselves; that they are Christians because they conform to certain creeds, just as many men imagine themselves honest because they obey the laws of the land--for the purpose of keeping out of the penitentiary. They put up long prayers on Sunday; that's piety. They bamboozle a green gosling out of his birthright on Monday; that's business. They have one face with which to confront the Lord and another with which to beguile their brethren.

They even acquire two voices--a brisk business accent and a Sunday whine that would make a cub wolf climb a tree.

I am always suspicious of a man's piety when it makes him look as tho' he had cut a throat or scuttled a ship and was praying for a commutation of the death sentence. I could never understand why a man who can read his t.i.tle clear to mansions in the skies--who holds a lien on a corner lot in the New Jerusalem--should allow that fact to hurt him.

I have great respect for true religion; but for the brand of holiness that's put on with the Sunday shirt--that makes a man cry ahmen with unction, but doesn't prevent him selling 5 and 10-cent cigars out of the same box, oleo- margarine and creamery b.u.t.ter out of the same bucket, benzine and bourbon whiskey out of the same barrel; which makes long prayers on Sunday and gives short weights on Monday; which worries over the welfare of good-looking young women, but gives the old grandames the go-by; which fathers the orphan only if he's rich and husbands the widow only if she's handsome--for that kind of Christianity I have no more use than for a mugwump governor who saddles his state with the expense of a legislative session to gratify a private grudge against a brother gambler.

That religion which sits up o'nights to agonize because a few naked n.i.g.g.e.rs in equatorial Africa never heard Eve's snake story, how Job scratched himself with a broken pie- plate or the hog happened to be so full of the spirit of hades; that robs childhood of its pennies to send prayer- books to people whose redemption should begin with a bath, while in our own country every town from Cattaraugus to Kalamazoo--every city from the Arctic ocean to the Austral sea--is overrun with heathen who know naught of the grace of G.o.d or the mystery of a square meal; who prowl in the very shadow of our temples of justice, build their lairs in proximity to our public schools and within sound of the collect of our churches, is an arrant Humbug, a crime against man, an offense to G.o.d, a curse to the world.

People frequently say to me, "Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen." Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good b.u.t.ter.

Persuasion is well enough is you're acourting--or in the hands of the vigilantes; but turning it loose on the average fraud were too much like a tenderfoot trying to move a string of freight steers with moral suasion. He takes up his whip, gently snaps it as tho' he feared it were loaded, and talks to his cattle like a Boston philanthropist to a poor relation. The steers look round at him, wonder, in a vague way, if he's worth eating, and stand at ease. An old freighter who's been over the "divide" and got his profanity down to a fine art, grabs that goad, cracks it like a rifled cannon reaching for a raw recruit and spills a string of cuss words calculated to precipitate the final conflagration. You expect to see him struck dead--but those steers don't. They're firmly persuaded that he's going to outlive 'em if they don't get down and paw gravel and they get a Nancy Hanks hustle on 'em. Never attempt to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work.

Oh, it's possible that you may disagree with me on some minor points of doctrine. That's your blessed privilege and I wouldn't deprive you of it if I had the power.

A pompous old fellow once called at the office of my religious monthly to inform me that I was radically wrong on every possible public question. He seemed to think that I had committed an unpardonable crime in daring to differ from him. I asked him to be seated and whistled for the devil--the printer's devil, the only kind we keep in the office of the ICONOCLAST. I told him to procure for me a six-shooter, a sledge hammer and a boat. My visitor became greatly alarmed.

"Wh-what are you g-going to d-do?"

"Do?" I replied. "I'm going to shoot the printers, smash the press and throw the type into the river. What in the name of the great Sanhedrin, is the use o' me printing a paper if I can't please you?"

Mr. Pomposity subsided somewhat, and I proceeded to talk United States to him.

"You say I'm wrong. Perhaps I am; but how in Halifax"-- I think I said Halifax; anyhow we'll let it go at that--"how in Halifax did you find it out? Who installed you as infallible pope in the realm of intellect and declared it rank folly to run counter to the ideas that roost in your nice fat head?"

He was one of those egotistical mental microbes or intellectual animalculae who imagine that a man must be in the wrong if he disagrees with him. And the woods are so full of that cla.s.s of fellows that the fool-killer has become discouraged and jumped his job.

Those who chance to think alike get together and form a political party, a society or a sect and take it for granted that they've got all the wisdom of the world grabbed--that beyond their little Rhode Island of intellect are only gibbering idiots and plotting knaves. When a man fears to subject his faith to the crucible of controversy; when he declines to submit his ideas to the ballistae and battering-rams of cold logic, you can safely set it down that he's either a hopeless cabbage-head or a hypocritical Humbug--that he's a fool or a fraud, is full of buncombe or bile.

It is a difference of opinion that keeps the world from going to the dogs. Independence of thought, doubt of accepted dogmas, the spirit of inquiry--the desire to KNOW --is the mighty lever that has lifted man so far above the brute level that he has begun to claim kinship with the Creator. Yet we say to our brother, "Thou fool," because he takes issue with us on the tariff, or the proper time in the moon to plant post-holes--even insist on sending people to perdition who cannot see "the plan of salvation" thro' our little sectarian telescope.

Men of a mind flock together just like so many gabbling geese, or other foolish fowl of a feather, each group waddling in the wake of some flat-headed old gander, squawking when he squawks and fluttering when he flies.

Because I decline to get in among the goslings and be piloted about the intellectual goose-pond, I'm told that I have no POLICY. Well, I hope I haven't. If I thought I had I'd take something for it, dontcherknow! When I cannot live among my fellows without surrendering my independence-- forswearing freedom of speech and liberty of thought; without having to play the canting hypocrite or go hungry--to fawn like a flea-bitten fice to win public favor--I'll make me a suit of leather, take to the woods and chop bee trees. I'd rather my babes were born in a cane-brake and reared on bark and wild berries, with the blood of independence burning in their veins, than sp.a.w.ned in a palace and brought up bootlicks and policy players.

I am sometimes inclined to believe that Life itself is a Humbug--that the man who makes the best of it is the one who escaped being born. We know not whence we came or what for, whither we go or what we'll do when we get there. True it is that life is not altogether labor and lees--there's some skittles and beer; but the most of us get more shadow than shunshine, more cholera-morbus than cream. Man born of woman is of few days and full of politics. The moment he hits the globe he starts for the grave, and his only visible reward for long days of labor and nights of pain is an epitaph he can't read and a tombstone he don't want. In the first of the Seven Ages of man he's licked, in the last he's neglected, and in all the others he's a fair mark for the shafts of falsehood.

If he don't marry his first love, he's forever miserable, and if he does, he wishes he were dead. By the time he has learned wisdom he leaves the world, is hustled into a h.e.l.l of fire or an orthodox heaven, and for forty years I've been trying to figure out which of these appalling evils to avoid.

In one place the climate is hot and unhealthy, in the other the inhabitants never entertained an original idea--believed everything they were told. Think of having to live through all eternity with the strictly orthodox--people who regard freedom of thought as foul blasphemy, millions of immaculate bricks cast in the same mold! No wonder there's neither marrying nor giving in marriage in heaven. Just imagine a couple of love-sick loons having nothing to do but spoon from everlasting to everlasting, to talk tutti-frutti through all eternity--never a break or breathing spell in the lingering sweetness long drawn out! Amelia Rives Chanler or Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x couldn't stand it. Nor could I. By the time I had lived ten thousand years with a female who could fly, and had nothing in G.o.d's world to do but watch me, I'd either raise a revolution or send in my resignation. It is said that Satan had an affaire d'amour while he was playing Seraph.

If the object of his affections wore feathers I don't much wonder that he went over the garden wall.

I suspect that the orthodox heaven and h.e.l.l, of which we hear so much, are Humbugs. I should know something of those interesting ultimates--be qualified to speak ex cathedra--for a doctor of divinity recently denounced me as a child of the devil. In that case you behold in me a prince imperial, heir-apparent to the throne of Pluto, the potential master of more than a moiety of mankind. But don't tell anybody that I've got a t.i.tle, that I belong to the oldest n.o.bility, or all the Goulderbilts will be trying to buy me.

I promise you that when I come into my kingdom I'll devise a worse punishment than physical pain. A soul is an immaterial thing. You cannot flay it with aspic's fangs nor kerosene it and set it on fire. A material h.e.l.l for immaterial mind were too ridiculous for a progressive devil. But it is not necessary to be a son of Satan to build a h.e.l.l in which demons dance and sulphur-fumes asphyxiate the soul. You may transform your own home into a valley of Hinnom, a veritable Gehenna; or you may make of the humblest cot a heaven, illumed by love and gilded with G.o.d's own glory--a Beulah land where flowers forever bloom, where perfumed censors swing and music throbs and thrills sweeter far than Orphean lyre or song of Israfeel.

The orthodox heaven is a pageant of barbaric splendor, of gaudy tinsel and flaming gold to dazzle the eyes of infants. It is a land of lotus-eaters, where ambition's star is blotted from the firmament and the wild ecstasy of pa.s.sion beats no longer in the blood; an Oriental heaven, a Paradise for tired people eternal dolce far niente for n.i.g.g.e.rs and yaller dogs. No Celt or Saxon with aspiring mind, with swelling muscles and heart that flames with the fierce joy of strong endeavor, that thrills with the sweetness of sacrifice for others' sake that swells with the mad glory of triumph in the forum or the field, could have conceived such a futile farce.

Give me a land whose skies are lead and soil is sand, yet everlasting life with those I love; give me a lodge in some vast wilderness hallowed by children's laughter; give me a cave in the mountain crag to house those dearest to my heart; give me a tent on the far frontier, where, by the lambent light of their mother's eyes, I may watch my children grow in grace and the truth of G.o.d, and I'll build a heaven grander, n.o.bler, sweeter than was ever dreamed of by the gross materialists of bygone days.

Life is a Humbug only because we make it so. We are frauds because we are fools. This is a beautiful, a glorious world, fit habitation for sons of the Most High G.o.d. It is a fruitful mother at whose fair breast all her children may be filled. There should be never a Humbug nor a hypocrite, never a millionaire nor a mendicant on the great round globe. Labor should be but healthful exercise to develop the physical man--to furnish forth a fitting casket for the G.o.dlike mind, appropriate setting for the immortal soul. The curse of life arises from a misconception of its significance. We delve in the mine for paltry gems, explore old ocean's deep for pearls; we toil and strive for gold until the hands are worn and the heart is cold; we attire ourselves in Tyrean purples and silks of Ind and strut forth in our gilded frippery on the narrow bridge of time, between the two eternities; we despoil the thin purse of the poor to erect brazen altars and priceless fanes, when the whole earth's a sacred shrine, the universe a temple through which rings the voice of G.o.d and rolls the eternal melody of the spheres.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to state that I'm not posing as a saint. I may eventually become an angel--of some sort--but I'll wear no wings. We are accustomed to think of seraphs flying from heaven to earth, flitting from star to star--irrespective of the fact that feathers are useless where there's no atmosphere. An angel working his wings to propel himself through a vacuum were as ridiculous as a disembodied spirit riding a bike down a rainbow.

I do not expect to reform all Humbugs, to banish all Fakes, to exterminate all Folly. If the world should get too good, I might have to hunt another home. I can understand every crime in the calendar but the crime of greed, every l.u.s.t of the flesh but the l.u.s.t for gain, every sin that ever d.a.m.ned a soul but the sin of selfishness. By all the sacred bugs and beasts of ancient Egypt, I'd rather be a witch's cat--or even a politician--and howl in sympathy with my tribe; I'd rather be a tramp and divide my handouts with one more hungry; I'd rather be a mangy yellow dog without a master and keep the company of my kind, than to be a multi-millionaire, with the blood of a snake, the heart of a beast, and carry my soul, like Pedro Garcia, in my purse.

When I think of the three thousand children in the single city of Chicago without rags to shield their nakedness from the keen north wind; of the ten thousand innocents, such as Christ blessed, who died in New York every year of the world for lack of food; of the millions in every country whose cries go up night and day to G.o.d's great throne --not for salvation, but for soup; not for the robe of righteousness, but for a second-hand pair of pants--and then contemplate those beside whose h.o.a.rded wealth the riches of Lydia's ancient kings were but a beggar's patrimony, praying to Him who reversed the law of nature to feed the poor, I long for the mystic power to coin sentences that sear like sulphur-flames come hot from h.e.l.l, and weave of words a whip of scorpions to lash the rascals naked through the world.

We humbug our parents, the public, and then, as far as possible, our wives; though the latter are seldom so blind as they seem. The wife who cannot tell when her lord and master is lying--whether he's been sitting up with a sick friend or nursing a Robert-tail flush--well, she must be the newest kind of a "New Woman," with a brain built for bloomers and bike. The New Woman is--she is all right; just the Old Woman in disguise, a paradox and a coat of paint.

Whenever I tackle this subject I'm reminded of a broth of a boy who in days agone drove the team afield on my father's farm. One rare June day, when the sun was slowly sinking in the west, as the novelists say--and I believe that's where Old Sol usually sinks--he got mixed up with a bevy of industrious b.u.mble-bees who were no respecters of persons--would sting an honest delver as quickly as they'd put the gaffles to a s...o...b..tic duke. In about two minutes Mike came over the hill a-whooping like a segment of the Southern Confederacy reaching for a n.i.g.g.e.r regiment, his head the size and shape of a red peck measure that had been kicked by a roan mule.

"Sure, now, they didn't do a thing t' me," he said. "An ould b.u.mblebug came a bizzin' an' a buzzin' aluken fer all the wurruld like an' Orangeman wid wings, so I up an'

hit him a biff. Thin all the 'rist av the haythen tuk up his foight--an' Oi kem home."

Hit one Humbug and every Fraud and Fake in Christendom is ready for the fray. They attempt to crush their critic with calumny, to defeat him with falsehood.