The Complete Works of Brann - The Iconoclast, vol 1 | Page 6

Wang.
Hamlet would be immortal if his name were L. Percy Smith and his
uncle a pork packer in Omaha. The prodigal son has no name, the

swine he fed knew no country. Particular names, local places, and
passing forms and institutions are not the essence of literature. For
those who formerly read Brann in The Iconoclast he was a Texas
journalist in the free silver days; but for those who shall read his work
in these days after the world war, New York might as well be Babylon,
Mark Hanna, Haman, and the files of The Iconoclast, clay tablets dug
from the ruins of some long-buried Waco of the Euphrates Valley.
It is only the transcendent genius who can afford to be careless of the
preservation of his product. Socrates merely talked to chance disciples
in the Groves of Athens; other men wrote and preserved his words.
Shakespeare wrote plays for his current theatrical business; others
gathered and printed his manuscripts. While he lived, Brann's writing
never saw the dignity of a clothbound book. They were not written for
carefully edited, thrice- proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground
out for the unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily
set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and patent medicine
testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet that could be rolled up and
stuck through a wedding ring.
Brann's range of literary form was limited by his single avenue of
publication through the columns of a one-man paper, and varied from
the ten-word epigrams of Salmagundi to the ten-thousand word article
or published lecture. Within this range is evidenced at least three
distinct types of literary composition.
First and foremost in volume and effect is the Philippic or iconoclastic
article, mingling in varying proportions the resounding musical
cadences of Ingersollian oratory and the pungent, audacious
epigrammatic twists on which Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship,
built a more profitable, if not more noble, fame.
It was as the destroyer, the iconoclast, that Brann best saw himself, and
to this role he devoted a great preponderance of his time and talent. But
there is another Brann, unknown to many who have conceived him
only as an idolsmasher, an "apostle of the devil," an angry Christ
driving out the defilers of the temple with a lash of scorpion's tails.
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