The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01

by William Cowper Brann

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.