The Complete Works of Brann - The Iconoclast, vol 1 | Page 4

of the Brann that would have written on throughout the
twenty-one years that have since elapsed, and that we would have with
us still at the prime age of sixty-four?
Had Brann lived! We should have had the product of eight times the
period of his writing life that was; and an added quality born of riper
experience, more momentous themes, more leisure for deliberate
composition. We should have heard the man who against petty
politicians and occasional pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his
roaring guns against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape
and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world.
It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les Miserables,"
as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had but stopped the mobs in
the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz and Waterloo had never been.
The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms. Samson, old and
blind, toppled down the temple, and the Philistines that he slew at his
death were more than they which he slew in his life. Not so Brann. His
death was as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade, the
sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine.
Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic waste, for no
purpose under heaven but to serve as food for idle fancies as to what
might have been--such to me is the death of Brann, and my throat
chokes with sorrow and my soul is sick with vain despair.
Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than three years
of writing time. There were previous years of yearning and dreaming
while he fretted beneath the yoke of galling servitude to newspaper
editors unworthy to loose the latchets of Brann's shoes. His own paper,
The Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance, and from
which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition is derived, ran for
just forty months, and for six or eight months of this period Brann was
on lecture tours, during which time his paper was largely filled with
outside contributions.
That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the seven
wonders of the literary world. That a magazine so located and written
by one man, having but a paltry advertising patronage, no illustrations,

no covers, could in three years' time rival the circulation of any
magazine then published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red
Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil.
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