Poetic legend says that on a moonlight night, two
thousand years ago, along the shores of the gulf of Patras,
a mighty voice was heard, crying "Great Pan is dead!"
And from the mountains and the valleys, the woods and
grottoes, where stood the altars of those who worshiped
at the shrine of Pan, was reechoed back the cry, "Great
Pan is dead!" On the second of April, when the winged
lightning bore over a continent, and to foreign lands beyond
the sea, the news that W. C. Brann of the ICONOCLAST
was dead, in every land where his writings are
known, from men and women who worship at the shrine
of genius, went up the wailing cry, "Brann of the
ICONOCLAST is dead." Oh, death! thou grim and imperious
master of us all, how dreadful to the living are your silent
darts, that are ever striking with impartial hand the old
man in his dotage, the strong man in his prime, the brave
man in his courage and the craven in his fear.
W. C. Brann was 43 years of age, and had just arrived
at that period when he was beginning to realize the hopes
and aspirations of years, when he was stricken down amid
the rejoicings of many and the sorrows of many thousands
more. He was born in Coles County, Illinois, and at the
age of two and a half years, by the death of his mother,
was placed with a sister some two years older than himself,
in the care of Mr. Hawkins and his wife, who lived
on a farm in that county. He remained with them ten
years, and then, longing to be something more than a
farm hand, he packed his small belongings in a little box
and at night, when all was still, he took the box under
his arm and went out into the lonely darkness of the
moonless night, without money, friends or education, to
commence the struggle which ended in his untimely death
at Waco.
Mr. Brann always spoke in the most kindly terms of
Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, and when he purchased his home
in this city, he offered to share it with them, but having
grown old and being comfortably situated they did not
desire to change.
The first place he secured was that of a bell boy in a
hotel, and from that passed on to other situations,
realizing all the time, what every proud spirited boy would
do under the circumstances, the bitterness that friendlessness,
ignorance and poverty bring to the struggle of life.
Among other things he learned the trade of painter and
grainer, also that of printer, all the time storing his mind
with what scraps of education that his life of poverty and
toil permitted. After he gathered sufficient education he
became a newspaper writer, and in 1877, at Rochelle,
Ill., was married to Miss Carrie Martin, who, with two
children, Grace and William Carlyle, "Little Billy," as
we call him, survive him. After the death of Mrs. Brann's
mother, he took to his home one of her sisters, now Mrs.
Marple of Fort Worth, and although often driven to the
most desperate straits to make a living, he proved to her
to be both a brother and a father. He continued his
newspaper career in Illinois and Missouri, until some
thirteen years ago, when he came to Texas, and gradually
became known by his connection with various papers of
the State. For a short time he had an interest in a paper
called the ICONOCLAST, published in Austin, but he soon
found himself back at his old trade, that of driving his
pen for others. At last, worn out by long years of
unremitting and generally poorly requited toil, wearied with
waiting for opportunity to write as he wished but could
not do as an employee of others, he determined to again
strike out for himself, as he had done in his early boyhood,
and in 1894 came to this city and established the ICONOCLAST,
which was a success from its first issue, and continued
to grow in circulation as he grew in reputation
as a writer, until the copy that witnessed his death reached
an issue of nearly 90,000.
The world, for several generations, has been discussing
whether Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name,
thousands believing that it was impossible for a man who
had no more education than Shakespeare had in his youth,
to have exhibited the varied knowledge and learning that
characterize his works, therefore these attribute them to
Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most brilliant and best
educated men of his time. All the evidence goes to show
that at the age of 18, when Shakespeare married, that
he had acquired with a "little Latin and less Greek," the
ordinary education accorded to the sons of the well-to-do
middle-class Englishmen of his time, of which his father
was one. At 18 Mr. Brann had barely secured the rudiments
of an English education, and had he lived to the
age of Shakespeare, there is no telling to what heights,
intellectually, he would have risen. From a slight
knowledge of his hopes and aspirations, I can say, that while
he dearly loved the ICONOCLAST, as a vehicle by which
he could convey to the world his thoughts, he had aspirations
that went far beyond it, and proposed that during
the next ten nor twelve years, after his mind had been
fully stored for the work, to leave as a legacy to the
world, in a continuous work, his conception of the wrongs
done to humanity, the evils that spring from them and
the remedies to be applied. And all who have read him
closely and noticed how, month by month, he grew greater
and brighter, will surely join in saying, that the loss of
such a work from such a man, at the meridian of his
intellectual life, is only second, if not equal, to the loss
of the unwritten volumes of Buckle's "History of Civilization."
Alas! that such a man, with such a great future
before him should have died standing on the very threshold
of his work.
In the private relations of life Mr. Brann was as
extraordinary as in his public career; he presented that
combination that is so rare that even novelists do not attempt
to paint it, the combination of the lover and the husband,
and as a father, a friend, a lover of humanity, with a
broad mantle of charity for all, he had few equals.
While he wrote in prose, he was a poet, and of him
can be truly said:
"The thoughts that stir the poet's heart
Are not the thoughts that others feel,
From the world's creed they are all apart,
And oftener work his woe than weal.
They are born of high imaginings,
Kindled to life by passion's fire,
As o'er earth's dross his fancy flings
The golden dreams that wrap his lyre."
As a writer, Mr. Brann had his faults, but they were
the heritage of this God-given son of genius, and with
them he climbed the heights and died among the greatest,
both of the living and the dead. And had he lived ten
years longer, in all probability, the intellectual world
would have held him as the grandest writer that this
earth has ever known since the days when old Homer
painted the matchless beauty of the bride of Menelaus,
and told of the godlike courage of the Greek and Trojan
as they fought for her, from the Scamander to the sea.
While the ignorant, the bigoted and intolerant are
rejoicing in his death and garnishing his grave with the slime
of their slander, they may be assured that his name and
writings will live until the English language dies, and
when W. C. Brann is dead and forgotten, so will be
Sterne, Smollet, Fielding, Swift, Pope, Steele, Addison,
Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Ben and Sam Johnson, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, George Eliot and all that mighty
host that have made the English language what it is. The
language that the little tribe of the Angles brought from
the forest of Germany to Britain swallowed the Britain,
and survived the Norman conquest, and then absorbed
both the conqueror and his language. And in the dead
centuries of over a thousand years, in every generation
has produced some mighty intellect to speed it on in building
up the bulwarks of human rights and human liberty,
until they have grown so high that despots turn from
it with loathing, and slaves cannot speak it. The language
of the Magna Charta and the Declaration of American
Independence, the two instruments that have spread the
bread of liberty before a hungry world. And as a writer
of this language, with all its mighty past and greater
future. W. C. Brann had few equals and no superiors.
I have been asked, both before and since his death,
what were his religious opinions, and while every man's
religious opinions are his own, and no one has the right
to question them, I will say he was a Deist something after
the manner of Thomas Paine, and for the benefit of
some of our professors and preachers, who do not know
the difference between an Atheist and a Deist, I will say
that a Deist is one who believes in one God, and rejects
all forms of so-called revealed religion. Mr. Brann loved
nature and when he looked upon it, he saw nature's God,
that with eternal fingers has written his message on earth
and sky, so that savage and civilized, Christian and Infidel
alike could read, that has by immutable and unvarying
laws, regulated the bloom of the flowers, the
course of the winds, and the fall of the leaf, as well as
the revolutions of the countless millions of worlds that
are ever speeding through the unmeasurable realms of
space. He believed that this mighty power, that men
call God, could perpetuate man in the hereafter as easily
as he had placed him here, and while he, like many others,
knew that all his hopes and faith did not furnish one
atom of real proof as to what lies beyond the gates of
death, still he hoped for the brighter and better life, and
when that beautiful smile overspread his face when he
died, those who beheld it felt that he had realized his
hopes, and in the shadowy realm that bounds the Stygian
river had met his little girl Inez, whose untimely death
at the age of barely 12 years, had worked such havoc
in his heart. Mr. Brann loved nature, not only when
the gorgeous god of day threw over earth and sky the
flashing strands of his golden hair, but in the night time
when all else was wrapped in the arms of sleep, the twin
sister of death; and the belated passer-by of his home
often saw the gleam of his cigar as he sat or walked
upon the lawn, in the small hours of the night: and at
such time I know there came through his soul the thoughts,
if not the words, of that death-devoted Greek, who to the
question from the woman that he loved, "O, Ion, shall
we meet again," answered, "I have asked that dreadful
question of the hills that look eternal. Of the clear
streams that flow on forever. Of the bright stars amid
whose fields of azure my raised spirit has walked in glory.
All, all are dumb."
But when I gaze upon thy face, I feel that there is
something in the love that mantles through its beauty
that cannot wholly perish, we shall meet again, Clemanthe.
But it was not the name of Clemanthe that passed his
lips, it was ever "Inez, darling Inez, we shall meet again."
I here reproduce in his own words an extract appropriate
to this subject. It is from the ICONOCLAST of
March, 1896, and an article headed "Beecher on the Bible":
"I know nothing of the future; I spend no time
speculating upon it--I am overwhelmed by the Past and at
death grips with the Present. At the grave God draws
the line between the two eternities. Never has living man
lifted the somber veil of Death and looked beyond.
"There is a Deity. I have felt his presence. I have
heard his voice, I have been cradled in his imperial robe.
All that is, or was, or can ever be, is but "the visible
garment of God." I seek to know nothing of his plans
and purposes. I ask no written covenant with God, for
he is my Father. I will trust him without requiring priests
or prophets to indorse his note. As I write, my little
son awake, alarmed by some unusual noise, and come
groping through the darkness to my door. He sees the
light shining through the transom, returns to his trundle-
bed and lies down to peaceful dreams. He knows that
beyond that gleam his father keeps watch and ward, and
he asks no more. Through a thousand celestial transoms
streams the light of God. Why should I fear the sleep
of Death, the unknown terrors of that starless night, the
waves of the river Styx? Why should I seek assurance
from the lips of men that the wisdom, love and power
of my heavenly Father will not fail?"
Like the lowly Judean carpenter who gave his life in a
protest against the wrongs which wealth and power had
done to his fellow man, he was hated by the Pharisees
and hypocrites, but he never cast a stone at the poor and
unfortunate, but was ever ready to support the weak
battling in the cause of right against the cohorts of the
wrong.
He was not only a poet, but was a prophet and a
priest; not the prophet and priest of orthodoxy, that has
handed down to us through the ages, written in the blood
of slaughtered millions, that dark story of forked-tailed
demons and flaming hells, that has given us a God that
loves us better than an earthly father can, yet permits
us in the sight of his great white throne to writhe and
suffer through the endless ages of eternity in the flames
of hell. But he was a priest and prophet of a greater
and grander faith, that in the evolution of the unborn
centuries yet to come, will strip from the Godhead all
of the horrid concepts, born of the puny hate of man
for his fellow man.
Mr. Brann was a man of the highest moral courage,
no one doubted this, but some doubted whether he had
that kind of physical courage that is necessary to
contend with mobs and assassins, but when the hour came
--when, without the slightest warning or anticipation or
danger, the death wound tore through his back, with
a coolness that few even of the bravest of men would
have possessed under the circumstances, with a courage
that could have led the Irish exiles, in that desperate and
deathless charge on the bloody heights of Fontenoy, he
turned and fired every bullet of his pistol into the body
of his assassin.
I will briefly sketch here some of the main facts that
led to his death, not only justice to the dead, but to his
living friends who only knew him as a writer and have
been compelled to read in the newspapers the loathsome
and lying slanders sent out against him from this
city.
The origin is to be found in the visit to this city of
ex-Priest Slattery, who, for gross immorality, had been
kicked out of the fold of the Catholic church. He was
accompanied by a woman fully as bad as he, and these
two saints set up to lecture, and the substance of their
lecture was briefly this, that convents and female schools
under the charge of the sisters, were but bawdy houses
to satisfy the lust of the Catholic priesthood. Mr. Brann,
who heard, in the opera house in this city, these vile
slanders flung amid thunders of applause, mostly from a gang
of blackguards from and around Baylor University, outraged
by the wrong done the pure and stainless women
whose vows bar them from the slightest hope of reward
on earth, yet devote their lives in and out of the convent
walls to soothing the sorrows and relieving the sufferings
of humanity, attempted to reply in their defense, and for
this he was hooted and nearly mobbed by this precious
lot of curs and had to be escorted from the opera house
by the police. After the Antonio Tiexeria scandal came
out, and he saw the poor girl reduced to ruin, standing
barely on the verge of womanhood, desolate and friendless
in a foreign land, with his whole sympathetic nature
aroused in her behalf, he certainly struck some hard
blows at Baylor. In his repeated thrusts he made one at
the professors which is believed by many to have cut far
deeper than anything ever said about the Brazilian girl,
and that was his proposition to open a night school for
their benefit. In last October ICONOCLAST, in a
paragraph, he expressed the hope that Baylor would not
continue to manufacture ministers and Magdalens. For
this he was twice mobbed, and it is claimed eventually
murdered.
Since Mr. Brann's assassination I have seen it charged
in some papers, notably one bearing the word Christian
at its head, that he was killed because he had slandered
his slayer's daughter, and then follows a lot of hypocritical
rot about regretting bloodshed, but that there was an
unwritten law that required the death of a man who
would slander the female relatives of another. A greater
falsehood was never published in even a pious Christian
weekly. He never mentioned the name of any woman connected
with Baylor except the Brazilian girl, and her case
was in the courts, and while his friends deeply regretted
his unfortunate expression it neither justified his mobbing
or his murder. And in the judgment of all fair-minded
men, under the circumstances could have been more readily
construed to mean Antonio Tiexera than any other woman
on earth, for within Baylor's sacred precincts she had
been reduced to that condition to which, when a woman
arrives, men call her a Magdalene. If this was the motive
that prompted his slayer, I ask why he did not appeal
to the unwritten law sooner; he who appeals to it must
do so at the first information has been conveyed to him
that the wrong has been done and he cannot wait for
months and then use it as a defense, and I do not hesitate
to say that hundreds besides myself in this city do not
believe that this prompted his assassin, except to be used
as an excuse.
Mr. Brann loved Waco as he never loved any other
place; for he knew that within its borders could be found
as many brave, liberal-hearted men, pure and noble women
as could be found in any other spot on earth with the same
population. He loved it, for he said that here was the
first place he ever found a real home, and here was the
place he had for the first time been recompensed for his
toil by receiving over a bare subsistence. Now, did Waco
love Mr. Brann, or did it hold him the foul slanderer
of her purest and best, as some claimed him to be? Let
us see. Every effort was made to throw cold water on
any turnout to his funeral; it was told around the city
that no women would attend and that no flowers would
be sent, but what was the result? From his home to the
cemetery the sidewalks were crowded, save at Baylor
University, the place that is responsible for his death, and
hundreds of men and women who had no carriages walked
from his home over two miles to the cemetery, and when
the long funeral cortege passed within the gates, around
his grave was a sea of human faces unequaled in numbers
ever before gathered around any other grave in Waco.
Yet Waco had lately laid to rest within that cemetery
a man whom she dearly loved and on whom Texas had
been proud to confer her high places, a man who in bygone
years had so gallantly led her sons on so many bloody
fields. As to the flowers, no greater profusion was ever
seen on any other grave in Waco, or, perhaps, in Texas,
a tribute that the pure and stainless women of Waco paid
to the martyred dead. At his funeral was noticed a greater
number, both from the city and county, of the sun-kissed
sons of toil than had ever been gathered here around any
other grave. Why were they there in such numbers?
Why did they bow their manly heads o'er the coffin of
the dead? I will answer for them. It was because they
knew that the dead man loved the land that they, their
sires and their grandsires loved; that he was seeking to
uproot the evils, both socially and politically, that are so
rapidly overrunning it; that all the gold of earth, or the
plaudits of those who feel themselves the grand and great
could not win him from his task of defending a people's
rights against those who were seeking to strike them down,
and if he had made an error in a paragraph subject to
a double construction, that above all else on earth in his
heart he sought
"But the ruin of the bad, the righting of the wrong
and ill."
He was followed to his grave by hundreds of men who
but a few years ago had given of their money liberally
to build up the new Baylor, many of whose wives, daughters
and sisters had been educated there. Is it reasonable
to suppose that these men who clung to him in life with
hooks of steel, and followed him to his grave with tears,
are such cravens that, alike in life and death, they would
stand by the man who had foully slandered their wives,
daughters and sisters' fame? Out upon such a supposition,
it can only find lodgment in a breast that holds that
the Yahoo of Swift is a true picture of the human race,
and that the lowest of the type is living here. If Mr.
Brann was the slanderer of women, why did so many of
them, from the hundreds that crowded the lawn around
his home, lead their children up to his coffin, and those
that were not able to look into it they would raise up
in their arms that they might look into the dead face
of the Prince of the Imperial Realm of Language.
Mr. Brann was no slanderer of women, no man on
earth had a greater veneration for the good and pure or
more sympathy for the fallen, and he would have died
before he would have wronged intentionally either class.
In this case he had struck in behalf of a poor and
unfortunate girl who had been grievously wronged at Baylor,
and it used to be held, and is yet held in some communities,
that the man who strikes in the defense of a defenseless
woman exhibits the highest trait of chivalry, even if he
had made a mistake in striking, but here in Waco, with
its Christian schools and churches, and its so-called Christian
civilization it was rewarded first by mobs and then by murder.
He was a man who was incapable of malice, he bore
none for injuries that most men would have rewarded the
cowardly perpetrators by shooting them down like they
have their prototype, the sneaking wolf; this arose from
the innate tenderness of the man who shrunk from the
taking of life, even of an animal, unless it was necessary.
I have used no words of sympathy for his wife, for
time and not words can soothe sorrow such as hers, but
for the benefit of those at a distance who were her
husband's friends I will say that she has the sympathy of
all the men and women of this city, irrespective of church
or creed, who are not the indorsers and abettors of mobs
and assassins, and I am glad to say that this collection
of hyena-hearted human vultures, though far too many,
are in the minority.
Now, to the dead friend of humanity, the eternal foe
to wrong and hypocrisy, I bid adieu forever here, and
for aught I know, for hereafter. The greedy grave, whose
hungry mouth is never filled, has claimed him, and in the
arms of old earth, the last mother of us all, we have laid
him to sleep, as peacefully as in infancy he slept upon
his mother's breast, indifferent alike in death as in life
to the human ghouls who pursued him. Never again will
his splendid intellect drive a pen. "In thoughts that
breathe and words that burn" against the serried ranks
of injustice and of wrong. Others will follow in his
footsteps, and battle as faithfully as he for the cause of
right, but, alas, none are clad like him in the Milan mail
of intellectuality, against which the cloth-yard shafts of
foes could rattle but could never pierce. Now, that for
him the restless dream of life has closed, I know that every
admirer of his genius, no matter of what faith or of no
faith at all, will join me in the wish that for him death
did not bring oblivion's dreamless sleep, where Lethean
waves forever wash the pallid brow of death, but Elysian
fields in which he met in joy the loved ones that had gone
before and will await in peace the loved ones that are
left behind.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thou that killeth the
prophets and stoneth them that are sent unto thee."
* * *
REST--REST IN PEACE.