Chapter 8

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.

PRIVATE VENGEANCE.

A CONSIDERATION OF ALLEGED CHIVALRY.

Some person has sent me a marked copy of the New Orleans Picayune, the marked matter being an editorial substantially approving the manner of the taking off of Mr. Brann, the editor of the Iconoclast.

Granted that, as the Picayune declares, Mr. Brann wantonly attacked spotless reputation, that decency and purity were not sacred to him--an assumption, by the way, that is a rank injustice to Mr. Brann's memory-- let us see about this matter of private vengeance which the Picayune approves.

Are there not laws in all the states against libel? Are there not laws against publishing obscene and defamatory matter? If there be, then what justification can there be for private vengeance? What is the use of laws if men on any provocation may set aside those laws and set themselves above them and execute the person who may have offended, or who may be imagined to have offended them? If private vengeance is to prevail what is to prevent any person construing any criticism into a mortal offense and assassinating the critic, even though the critic be palpably and undeniably criticizing for the public good? When the individual is made the judge, jury and executioner of whomsoever displeases him, what becomes of law, of order, of civilization? There is not a day in the year that one could not justify the murder of a hundred editors, if the rightfulness of the killing were determinable solely by what the killers thought of the criticisms against them in the papers controlled by those one hundred editors.

If we can tolerate a state of society in which any man, for what seems to him good and sufficient reason, for anything from biting the thumb at him to jesting about his whiskers, may take the life of another, why shall we not tolerate the man who will take another's property because the taker deems the other has too much or has unjustly accumulated what he has?

What is the result of this sanction of private vengeance? It is anarchy. Pursued to the ultimate of its logic it means that every man is a law unto himself and the justice of an execution rests upon nothing but the opinion, or delusion, of the executioner. What one man might call a trifle might, to another man, call for blood. You could kill a man because his boots creaked or his eyes squinted or he wore the wrong shade of your favorite color in his necktie. Ridiculous? Not at all. Liking or disliking any of these trifling things is only a matter of personal preference. They may be as distasteful to one person as the tone of an editorial is to another. If a man may rightly kill a writer, like Mr. Brann, why would it not be right for someone to kill any editor? At one time there was talk in the south of killing the late Joseph B. McCullagh for his editorials. How if Senator Hanna were to "go gunning" for the editorial "roasters" of himself, or for the malevolent cartoonist? Mr. Brann attacked hypocritic preachers, snide politicians, shoddy society people, shyster lawyers. He did it in, to me, an exaggerated manner, but he felt that such manner was necessary to arouse the people. Were Brann's blasts against Baylor University intrinsically worse, more a license of the press than let us say the assaults of the New York World, the New York Journal or the Post Dispatch upon Pierpont Morgan and the trusts? And yet, if any trust magnate, crucified as a blood-sucker on the poor, were to shoot the editor of one of these sheets, he would be howled to the hangman's noose. The trust magnate would be told he should have had recourse to law. But in the south, no--Mr. Brann was rightfully assassinated. No law for him! Why? Because Mr. Brann assailed a few southern "josses." If Mr. Brann were justly slain then the next person who may dislike an editorial in the Picayune may kill its editor on the ground that the editorial--no matter how trifling in its imputation--is "carrion journalism." This law of chivalric private vengeance would justify a saturnalia of murder in every large city where gossip circulates in society. The chivalry of it! A man has written something he deems to be true and comments upon it as he deems it his duty in a quasi public capacity. Everyone who does not like the article can "take a pop at him." But, says the chivalrous Picayune, the law of private vengeance does not apply to anything save grave offenses in scurrility. Ah! The offensiveness of a criticism is only a matter of individual capacity for pain or humiliation. The trifle is only a trifle, because a man thinks it so. It may become a thing of importance at any time if you leave the decision of its importance solely to the judgment of the man who is going to resent it.

Private vengeance makes for the creation of a caste of bulldozers. Let it become known in a community that criticism is an invitation to death, and who profit? Not the men of spotless reputation. Not the decent and pure elements of the community. Not at all. The ruffian gang in politics profits. The sanctimonious crooks profit. The seducer and betrayer, who is a dead-shot, profits. Every social and civic iniquity flourishes under this dominance of the law of private vengeance. All the people who deserve criticism are ready to shoot. They are the judges of their own spotless reputations. They will kill the man who spots it. So it is that in almost every southern city there has grown up a class of political brahmins absolutely secure from criticism that counts. Take New Orleans. The papers feared for years to breathe a breath of attack against the "spotless reputations" of its leaders. The story of the corruption that developed is too well known to require telling. After all, it is not the people of spotless reputation who are assailed in the papers. Whenever anyone is assailed the chances are there is ground for the assault, and there is at least a prima facie evidence that attack or exposure is necessary in the interest of public morality. Any reputation would be spotless if no one dared attack it. If it were high crime to assail people vigorously how would dishonor, debauchery, fraud and crime in high places ever be brought to light. If the right of private vengeance shall prevail in any community then the ruffians and blackguards may pursue their nefarious ends unhampered because of the terror they inspire by threats to shoot their critics. This recognition of the right of the individual to punish, by the infliction of death, the person who has injured him, puts the community at the mercy of the worst elements in it. It is the extension of the barbarism of lynch law. It makes every man, who wants to be one, a mob. It develops the idea of savagery in revenge to such an extent that the individual executioner of the offender against himself does not hesitate to wreak his vengeance from behind. It promotes assassination.

Aspersions upon the virtue of women are certainly indefensible on any imaginable ground. They demand often a punishment which the law is inadequate to provide. They cannot be ignored. They constitute the exceptions which confirm the rule that it is well to let the law punish slanderers. And in general men are expected to protect to the last extremity the reputations of the women of their family and their acquaintance. The person who attacks publicly or privately the virtue of a woman deserves the limit of vengeance, for the publicity of legal proceedings toward punishment only aggravates the original wrong. Mr. Brann did not attack the virtue of girl-students at Baylor University. He attacked the administration of that institution and the killing of him was the result of a distorted view of the trend of his criticisms. If it were believed that he assailed the virtue of girl-students at Baylor he would not have a single mourner in the southwest. And no man in any part of the United States can have a following of respectable people, if he defames women. The feeling of reverence for woman is so general that it is often a defense for personal violence against writers who never dream of attacking feminine honor. Aside from the fact that death is too light a punishment for the man who attacks womanly chastity, the law of private vengeance is not sweepingly and invariably to be condemned. I am not liberal enough in recognition of the great fact of human nature to admit that the objection to private vengeance is mainly an objection to the recognition of the right of individual execution of the death penalty for any criticism. Men ought not to be shot for criticisms of public institutions. It would be foolish to argue against the fact that men occasionally feel called upon to resent criticism by an appeal to battle without weapons. The killing of critics at the whim of the criticized is the evil against which protest is made. Plain assault and battery is easily defensible on the ground that no one can be expected always to have his temper in control. It makes writers careful, and it is not followed by the regret which follows killing. Writers are expected to keep within bounds in their criticisms, and even then they are certain to generate ill feeling in the criticized and their friends, but so long as the offense is not murderous of reputation and mortally malevolent the private execution of writers is an offense not to be condoned on a mistaken interpretation of chivalry. For all sins of journalistic criticism, outside of the diabolism of blasting reputations for virtue, the law provides adequate remedy, and if it does not, then it were idle to say that the exasperated victims of criticism should not have recourse to their fists, although decent criticism, free from malice, addressed to people in position semi-public would not seem to call for violence under pretense of resenting something much worse. As a rule I should say that the criticism which does not call for extreme and desperate punishment calls for no notice at all, or if it does, in the case of men, there are laws, civil and criminal, that cover the case, with ample punishment for the offense. This is the practical view of the remedies against "carrion journalism."

A public sentiment strong enough to support private vengeance is strong enough to support the law. There are laws for the punishment of slander. More rigorous laws could be enforced. If the people hate slanderers bitterly enough to kill them, then they should hate them enough to see that the laws against slander are enforced. The moral sentiment that can sustain the one could sustain the other. But the individual execution of vengeance is a turning away from the law. It is the fostering of the bully and the killer for drunken pastime. It is a bulwark for boodlers, blackguards, frauds and lechers. It gives rein to individual passion without limit. Such chivalry is barbarism.--Pasquin.

BRANN, THE FOOL.

BY ELBERT HUBBARD, EDITOR OF THE PHILISTINE.

It's a grave subject. Brann is dead. Brann was a fool. The fools were the wisest men at court; and Shakespeare, who dearly loved a fool, placed his wisest sayings into the mouths of men who wore the motley. When he adorned a man with a cap and bells it was as though he had given bonds for both that man's humanity and intelligence. Neither Shakespeare nor any other writer of books ever dared to depart so violently from truth as to picture a fool whose heart was filled with perfidy.

The fool is not malicious. Stupid people may think he is, because his language is charged with the lightning's flash; but they are the people who do not know the difference between an incubator and an egg plant.

Touchstone, with unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk, into exile. When all, even his daughters, have forsaken King Lear, the fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak. And when in our own day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, Mercutio and Jacques, we find they are men of tender susceptibilities, generous hearts and intellects keen as a rapier's point.

Brann was a fool.

Brann shook his cap, flourished his bauble, gave a toss to that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asked questions and propounded conundrums that stupid hypocrisy could not answer. So they killed Brann.

. . .

Brann was born in obscurity. Very early he was cast upon the rocks and nourished at the she-wolf's teat.

He graduated at the university of hard knocks and during his short life took several post-graduate courses.

He had been wage-earner, printer's-devil, printer, pressman, editor.

He knew the world of men, the struggling, sorrowing, hoping, laughing, sinning world of men. And to those whom God had tempted beyond what they could bear, his heart went out. He read books with profit, and got great panoramic views out into the world of art and poetry; dreaming dreams and sending his swaying filament of thought out and out, hoping it would somewhere catch and he would be in communication with another world.