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.