The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

Of what avail are creed and dogma and ritual, when we ourselves "bow the knee to pomp that loves to varnish guilt"? Of what avail our benevolence that offers, not the Christ-touch of pity and understanding, but the bitter bread of craven servitude and Pharisaical condescension, that says "thou art vile and lost for all time?"

We laud the wanton because she has wealth and power. She buys our favor with her wines and feasts, and blinds our willing eyes with her gifts and charities, and we only murmur with pensive gentleness "who shall judge!"

We are such cultured black-mailers, such refined bribe-seekers, such sensitive sycophants, while she obeys the eleventh commandment and is properly discreet she feeds us epicurean favors as she feeds her English pug bon-bons. And we are careful that the face of the dog shall express the greater intelligence.

And the woman with the flame in her heart? From her we have nothing to gain so—what would you? Her nature was too great to be discreet. She sinned grandly, but the height of her sin made deeper the depths of her soul abasement and her self-torment was too horrible to clothe itself in the tawdry draperies of diplomacy. She bared herself to the whips of the avenging furies, she cowered before the wrath of outraged God, and to her there was no guerdon possible for the shattered chrystal of her girlhood. When her heaven thrust her out, to her there was only left the world's hell of lost souls. And we in our wisdom accept her own sentence and our lips are silent. We feast the wanton who is wise and bracket Marguerite with Messalina. We kiss the one and curse the other, because the one is a hypocrite in the halls of splendor and the other honest in the haunts of shame. We hover around the one with flatteries and soft courtesies, and we hound down the other with pitiless vengeance, human and divine.

And in all this does our world show its shallowness and its immeasurable stupidity. How dare woman say to her sister woman, "I am better than thou!" In how much has she been tried and tempted? How much does she know of life and its hideous tests? How much does she know woman's love that is at once her glory and her shame, her crown and her crucifix, her heaven and her Calvary? How dare she judge? Has she ever faced the uphill battle where her two hands alone fought the ravenous wolves of Want and Hunger? Has she ever slipped her bared arm thro' the iron staples and held it there, while they howled in fury outside, and this iron cut and bruised and tore flesh and nerve,—till her teeth sank through tongue and lips and her eyes grew misty and dim with torture worse than death? Has she ever done all this—while her strength reeled and failed and through it all she cursed God for the white fear in the faces of those who loved and lived upon her? Has she ever felt that sickening GIVE, as the hell-hounds swept her back and down, and in her blind despair she would clutch at aid though it were steeped in all the infamies from here to hades? Has she ever known all this?—she who would draw her silken shirts aside? Then if she have not, let her strip her heart of its stainless selfishness and her limbs of their ignorant ease; let her go out into the world where women live and strive and suffer, and let her humbly crawl to the feet of those women whose toil worn hands and weary faces and scarred hearts and souls shame her shallow usefulness, and let her lay her mouth in the dust and cry "Peccavi!"

How dare she judge! Who is she, with her pitiless eyes and useless hands and ignorant heart and narrow life,—who is she to question lives that in all their ruins are as grand, compared to hers, as a ruined temple compared to a child's painted toy. Would she write of Rome with the pearl and gold bauble on her dainty, inlaid desk? Would she measure the Pantheon with the little yardstick of her own intellect? Would she weigh Caesar's life and motives on the jeweled letter-scales of her own experience? Would she gauge Jove by the character of her curate?

If she can do this, then is she competent to voice her judgment on the most profound of all mysteries—human life. Boise City, Idaho, November 12.

MACHIAVELLI.

BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

One of the best books issued this year is the thin pamphlet, you might call it, which contains Mr. John Morley's lecture on Machiavelli. It will repay any reader from what standpoint soever he may approach the character. "The veering gusts of public judgment have carried incessantly along, from country to country, and from generation to generation, with countless mutations of aspect and of inuendo, the sinister renown of Machiavelli."