Mr. Brann, who was killed in Waco last Friday, was a
much greater man than even his admirers knew. He had
many virtues which, in a way, his peculiar tactics in
journalism belied. For instance, his paper was read, for
the most part, by people who took a delight in his calling
a spade a spade, and, in fact, in his seeking out spades to
write about. This was not the true Brann at all. The
man was clean-minded in his conversation. He thought
cleanly. He lived cleanly as a gentleman should, though
he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous
ruffian, reveling in the slums. He was essentially
a family man and a student who "scorned delights and
lived laborious days." His regard for the purity of
women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up
to his own preachment on all the various forms of integrity
with much more strictness than people who affected
to believe he was leper. Furthermore the man was an
ascetic in his essential spirit. He had the true taste for
the finely done thing in letters and if he did not devote
himself to what might be called the more refined literary
artistry, it was because he felt that there was danger
of drawing too fine the lessons he thought it his duty to
impart. There was no use, he said, in writing to the
few. One should write so that all might read, running.
He maintained that the way to instill principles in the
people was to secure their attention first, and he did not
hesitate to secure their attention by any device that seemed
available. Therefore he felt himself justified in appealing
to the lower instincts in men in order that, while they were
all unsuspecting, he might inculcate something better.
And so there ran through his publication the strangest
contrasts of sweetness and salacity, of eloquence and
bombast, of purity and pornography, of jewel-phrases and
gutter slang, excerpts of enthralling poetry and brothel
billingsgate. He pointed his morals with putridity and
he adorned his really beautiful style with barbarities and
banalities which make one shudder. He set his fine
thoughts like jewels in compost. He ravished the classics
to mix them up with sentences that stunk of the stews.
The man seemed to indulge in special flights of poesy with
no other purpose than to achieve a disgusting anti-climax
of muckery and mockery. The person who read Brann
intelligently was impressed most by this habit of irony in
the Waconian. It was of the essence of his iconoclasm.
He had something in his effects in this line that was
piteous. There was no denying his appreciation of the pure
air, of the beautiful in life and nature, of the truth
as thinkers see and feel it. It seemed to me that when
he had soared up towards the ever vanishing ideal, he
reached a point whereat he turned in disgust and hurled
himself madly back to the dungiest part of this dungy
earth. There was a mighty dissatisfaction, even a despair,
in Brann, and a touch of sadness in his writing as in his
face. The more I read of his deliberate pandering to the
literarily excrementitious appetite, the more I saw, or
thought I saw, that he was afflicted with a mighty ennui,
and was chiefly trying to escape from his own torture as
one who knew not whether solace was to be found either
in the spiritual or the earthly nature of man. Such a
one as he might have been expected to take up any cause
that assailed the existing condition of things politically
and sociologically. While he was an ascetic his asceticism
was only a wreaking of his own bitterness upon himself.
He was a man in whom strong emotions were easily excited
and he put into his writing all the passion which he
suppressed in his dealings with his fellows socially. He never
felt malice towards people whom he assailed most
maliciously. He saw them simply as representatives of some
fault in our social or political system, and he felt that he
was doing his duty by his own conception of what the
world should be, by pillorying them as object lessons of
characters to be eliminated in his good time coming. When
he saw a foul wrong he saw it personified in some man or
woman. Then he went abroad in search of foul things to
say about it. And he found them and he hurled them at
the object, and he polluted the atmosphere for a mile
around. When he wrote about the abstractions of poetry
and philosophy he wrote with a sweeping, swinging rhythm
that thrilled anyone. He was master of the diapason.
His ear was not attuned particularly to minor chords.
He loved cyclonic clashes of words and he would strike out
fecal flashes to illuminate them. His correggiosity was
at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him
often, bore him away from his thought and landed him in
some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself,
to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some
quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus
would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt
all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending
things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr.
Brann believed that the country was, if not in itself
decadent and degenerate, under the control of decadent,
degenerate and depraved men. He believed that society
was a social cesspool. He thought that most religion was
hypocrisy. He believed that most wealth represented
nothing more than the superior and diabolic genius of
dishonesty. So believing he so preached and he preached with
a vehemence that was in a sense vicious. His terribly
irony made his work an engine of anarchy. Not that he
meant anarchy at all, but because the people who were
caught by his banalities could not differentiate sufficiently
to extract the core of truth from the great superstructure
of extravagances with which he hid it. Mr. Brann meant
only to lift the world up, and one of his queer conceptions
was, that his own dragging down of things pure to the
lowest levels of life and thought and feeling was calculated
to make his multitudinous clientele look upward. He
was mistaken. He came to know it, too, for he said to
me one evening, "I am only a fad." "I'll pass away when
my vogue is done, like brick pomeroy." He wished he
could believe that the best way to help people up was to
take a stand and view a little above them. He said, when
it was suggested that he try this tack, that he feared it
was too late. Not that he wholly abandoned his belief
in his own plan, but it seemed to me that he felt sorry that
once attention could be attracted by being shocking it
could only be held by a continuance of the shocks.
. . .
In my personal dealings with Mr. Brann I found him a
person of almost feminine fineness. It was amusing to
meet him after some particularly atrocious issue of the
ICONOCLAST, either personally or by letter, and have him
"roar as gently as a sucking dove." In such moods he
revealed a character that was really sweet--though I must
apologize for that misused word. He was impressed with
the pity of life. He loved to toy intellectually with
subtleties of thought. He had intuitions in art and poetry,
and music touched him truly and deeply. I never have seen
such a gentle man with women and his estimate of woman,
either in conversation or writing, was a high and noble one.
If at times he wrote so that his conception of virtuous
womanhood was unpleasantly associated with ideas that
revolted you, it was his peculiar belief that purity was all
the purer for the contrast and antithesis. He loved
children, too, and in his more familiar moods, according
to his intimates, he was like one whose heart was as a little
child. He cared no more for money after he began to
make it than he cared in his bohemian days when he was
readier to give than to take. He loved his friends blindly.
He did not hate his enemies, he despised them. He had
all the manly virtues, courage, generosity, modesty. Yes,
modesty; for egoism such as he had was not foolish pride.
His egotism was only his own force asserting itself. His
friendship was almost foolish. He praised too generously.
He was inclined to help everybody he could and I am sure
that he never assailed anyone or anything that did not
represent to him uncharity and snobbery. He was not
envious. His mind was on the Texas scale; he knew no
meanness. His was Kentucky origin and he was tainted
with Kentucky's quixotism. He loved liberty and he
loved love. He was the friend of the people as he dreamed
they should be. He was the advocate of the greatest
enlargement of rights. With little of what he strove for in
immediate political issues did I sympathize. He believed
more in what is called socialism than I do, but he believed
it most earnestly. He was the greatest force in this
country, with his 80,000 issues of his magazine per month,
for all the things that go with free silver. His following
included all the thinking followers of Bryan and his work
had no little effect, in its powerful music and color, upon
many people to whom Bryanism represented the political
abomination of desolation.
. . .
As to the manner of Mr. Brann's death there is only to
be said that he expected it. He judged from the characters
of those he attacked, that they would assassinate
him. He died as he expected to die, without any cringing
to his enemies. Some people he attacked who did not
deserve his vitriolic attentions, but he thought they did. In
the main he scourged and sacrificed only those who deserved.
The manner in which he was killed and the cause in which
he was killed--the cause of an institution in which a girl
was debauched in the name of Christ and turned out of
doors to starve to the glory of religion--glorify him. He
who fought in the open was shot by a sneak from behind.
The sneak himself was shot in his act of cowardice. Mr.
Brann was brilliant and brave. He partook of the qualities
of the men who immortalized the Alamo. He was the
first man who identified Texas with thought. He loved
Texas so well that he defended the code of private and
public mobbery for righting wrongs. To that cruel
coward code he fell a victim. With all his faults as I see
them, I can think of him only as worthy of being buried
in some high place, to the strains of Sigfried's Funeral
March, and can only say, with Browning of the dead
"grammarian"--
Here, here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
lightnings are loosened
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
peace let the day send!
Lofty designs must close in life effects:
loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
living and dying.
--The Mirror for April 7, 1898.