The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12

by William Cowper Brann

Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine message from on high, no God in Israel; only a fashionable pulpiteering to minister to languid minds, the cultivation of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers— the church becoming a mere Vanity Fair or social clearing- house, a kind of esthetic forecourt to hades instead of the gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme we find blatant blackguardism by so-called evangelists, who were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma, yet who set up as instructors of the masses in the profound mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get shipwrecked in the poetry of Shakespeare, or lost in the philosophy of one of his fools, pretend to interpret the plans of Him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire.

Progress in science until we learn that the rainbow was not built to allay the fears of the roachin family, but is old as the sun and the sea; that bourbon whisky drills the stomach full o' blow-holes and that the purest spring water is full o' bacteria and we must boil it or switch to beer; that Havana cigars give us tobacco heart, pastry is the hand-maid of dyspepsia, while even the empurpled grape is but a John the Baptist for appendicitis; that a rich thief has kleptomania and should be treated at a fashionable hospital instead of a plebian penitentiary, while even the rosebud of beauty is aswarm with bacilli, warning the sons of men to keep their distance on pain of death. If all the doctors discovered be true then life isn't half worth living—is stale, flat and unprofitable as a Republican nomination in Texas. When the poet declared that men do not die for love, the doctors had not yet learned that a cornfed kiss that cracks like a dynamite gun may be equally dangerous. I think the bolus-builders are chasing rainbows—that if I wait for death until I'm killed with kisses old Methuselah won't be a marker.

Our car of progress, of which we hear so much, has carried us from the Vates' vision of Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel—to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green- sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry, so-called, everywhere—in books and magazine innumerable, even sandwiched in between reports of camp-meetings, political pow-wows and newspaper ads. for patent liver pills. O, that the featherless jaybirds now trying to twitter in long-primer type would apply the soft pedal unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance and despair! Most of our modern poets are bowed down with more than Werterean woe. Their sweethearts are cruel or fate unkind; they've got cirrhosis of the liver or palpitation of the heart, and needs must spill their scalding tears over all humanity. It seems never to have occurred to the average verse architect that not a line of true poetry was ever written by mortal man; that even the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacreon are but as the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the divine harmony; that you can no more write poetry than you can paint the music of childhood's laughter, or hear the dew-beaded jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose hearts are harps of a thousand strings, ever swept by unseen hands—those whose lips are mute because the soul of man hath never learned a language. Those we call master-poets and crown with immortelles but caught and fixed some far off echo of deep calling unto deep—the lines of Byron or a Burns, a Tasso or a Tennyson are but the half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of its own imaginings.

But we were speaking of progress when diverted by the discordant clamor of featherless crows. I am no pecterist with my face ever to the past. I realize that there has been no era without its burden of sorrow, no time without its fathomless lake of tears; that the past seems more glorious than the present because the heart casts a glamour over days that are dead. From the dust and glare of the noon of life we cast regretful glances back to the dewy morn, and as eve creeps on the shadows reach further back until they link the cradle and the grave and all is dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor mock one earnest effort of mankind; but I would warn this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power—these by thy gods, O! Israel—mere fly-specked eidolons worthy no man's worship.

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When we have adopted higher ideals; when success is no longer a synonym for vain show; when the man of millions who toils and wails for more is considered mad; when we realize that all the world's wealth cannot equal the splendor of the sunset sky 'neath which the poorest trudge, the astral fire that flames at night's high noon above the meanest hut; that only God's omnipotence can recall one wasted hour, restore the bloom of youth, or bid the loved and lost return to glad our desolate hearts with the lambent light of eyes that haunt all our waking dreams, the music of laughter that has become a wailing cry in memory's desolate halls; when we cease chasing lying rainbows in the empty realm of Make-Believe and learn for a verity that the kendal green of the workman may be more worthy of honor than the purple of the prince —why then the world will have no further need of iconoclasts to frankly rehearse its faults, and my words of censure will be transformed into paeans of praise.

"Sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet
And soft as their parting tear."

We have "progressed" from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek protection of the consuls of other countries from the spirit that made our flag respected in every land and honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism" whenever an American manifests a love of country or professes a national pride. What is "jingoism?" It is a word coined by enemies of this country and used by toad-eaters. It is a term which, under various titles, has been applied to every American patriot since our gran'- sires held the British lion up by the caudal appendage and beat the sawdust out of the impudent brute—since they appealed from a crack-brained king to the justice of heaven and wrote the charter of our liberties with the bayonet on the back of Cornwallis' buccaneers. Its synonym was applied to Thomas Paine, the arch-angel of the Revolution, whose pen of fire made independence imperative—who through seven long years of blood and tears fanned Liberty's flickering flames with his deathless faith that the Omnipotent arm of God would uphold the banner of the free. From the brain of that much-maligned and long-suffering man Columbia sprang full-panoplied, like Minerva from the brow of Olympian Jove. And what has been his reward? In life he was bitterly belied by the foes of freedom and the slaves of superstition; in death a mighty wave of calumny rolls above his grave. Greater men have lived and died and been forgotten, but a nobler heart ne'er beat and broke—grander soul ne'er struggled toward the light or bowed before the ever-living God. When the colonists stood debating whether to bear their present ills or fly to other they knew not of, he seized the gage of battle and flung it full and fair in Britain's haughty face. When defeat followed defeat, when the new-born nation was bankrupt and its soldiers starving in the field; when coward lips did from their color fly and men brave as Roman tribunes wept tears of grim despair, his voice rang out again and again like that of some ancient prophet of Israel cheering on the fainting legions of the Lord, and again, and again, and yet again the ragged barefoot Continentals set their breasts against the bayonet, until from the very ashes of defeat dear Liberty arose Phoenix-like, a goddess in her beauty, a titan in her strength.

The term "jingoist;" or its equivalent, was applied to Washington and Henry, to Jefferson and Jackson. It was applied to James G. Blaine, the typical American of his time—a man from beneath whose very toe-nails enough intellect might be scraped to make an hundred Clevelands or McKinleys. All were jingoes in their day and generation, because all preferred the title of sovereign to that of subject; because all believed that Columbia should be mistress of her own fate, the architect of her own fortune, instead of an appendage of England, or political orphan under a European protectorate, because all believed that she should protect her humblest citizen from wrong and outrage wheresoever he may be, though it cost every dollar of the nation's treasure and every drop of the nation's blood—and if that be jingoism then I, too, am a jingo from alpha to omega, from beginning to end.

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