 Chapter 29 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Carper Bran. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, auto-volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Tavaresh. 29. Life and Death In a city beyond Far Seas there dwelt a youth who claimed not land nor gold, yet wealthier was than sceptred sovereign, richer, far than fancy ever feigned. The great round earth, the sun, the moon, and all the stars that flame like fireflies in the silken web of night were his, because garnered in the salvatory of his soul. And the beaded dew upon the morning glories, the crimson tins of dawn, iris-bended bow, and all the cloth of gold and robes of purple that mark the royal pathway of the descending sun. The perfume of all the flowers, the bubbles sensuous song, and every flowing line that marks woman's perfect form he hoarded in his heart, and gloated over as a miser does his gain. And the youth was in love with life, and held her to his heart as God's most gracious gift. Ah, beautiful was she with her trustful eyes of blue and hair of tangled sunbeams blown about a brow of alabaster. Arms of ivory and bust whose rounded loveliness were a pulsing pillow, wherever dreamed desire. Beautiful beyond compare and sweet as odours blown across the brine from the island valley of Avalon, maddening as Lydian music in which swoons the soul of youth while all the passion in the blood beats time in delirious ecstasy. And youth and life build fair castles in the air with turrets of sapphire and gates of beaten gold wherein they dreamed the days away on a bed of thornless roses, drained the chalice of the honeysuckle, ate the lotus bud, and thought of knot in all the world but love. On this soft dalliance was born a son, and life cried with falling tears, now I am ashamed. Nay, said the youth, for I will hide our child within my heart, and none shall know. And life laughed, and kissed the boy, and called him Ambition, and hid him in the secret recesses of her lover's heart, and gaily went and came as though her fair breasts had never burgeoned with a wealth of liquid pearl. But the child was restless within its prison house, and beat against the wall, and grew day by day, and fought with teeth and nails until the youth cried out in agony. And life, said mockingly, has not room enough within thy heart for one poor child to range, that heart which holds the earth, the sun, and stars? Cast forth the foolish rubbish, the rainbow, and the flowers, the incense, and the summer sea, make room, make room for thine and mine, though not else doth remain. He cast them forth with fond regret, and Ambition grew, and filled his heart, and strove with all his strength. The youth looked no more upon the fair-field flowers, but thought only of the victor's wreath. He heard no melody but fame's shrill trumpet rising ever louder on the blast, and saw no beauty, but in Minerva's laurel'd brow. The cool Sylvan path became a blinding mountain trail, his hours of dalliance, days of toil, and nights of agony. The hidden sun had become master of the sire, and all the host of heaven melted into a single star which poured its baleful fire into his face, the treacherous star of hope. And so he strove with augmenting strength, his goal the highest, his garden the immortals, but oft he fell and cursed his folly for having left the flowery veil to beat against the barren mountain rocks. But life abraded him, and with her soft breath fanned the paling star to brighter flame, the star behind which lay the throne. And death followed them, shadowy, indistinct, like a spirit wrapped in mist. And life mocked at death crying, Behold the envious trumpet doth follow, To despoil me of mine own, far, how uncanny and how cold, what lava would hang upon those ashen lips? Her bosom is marble, and in her stony heart there flames no fire. With her ambition perishes, and the star of hope forever fades. Her house is a ghastly tomb, her bed the granite rock, her lava childless, for her womb is barren. And the youth, glancing with a shudder, the figure in the mist, drew close to life, and echoed her words with trembling lip, how uncanny and how cold. Thus fared he on through many a toilsome year, to where no shadow falls to east or west, to manhood's glorious noon. He looked at the towering heights before him, with undaunted eye measuring his strength against the walls of stone. He glanced back, and the chill swept over him, for he was standing far up on the mountain side. He was in a barren desert, whose level waist stretched back to the pathetic tomb, where love was left to starve, and sweet content lay festering in her shroud. Fool, cried life, why looked you back like wife of ancient lot? Now, are ye indeed undone? The voice was harsh and shrill, and starting as from an uneasy dream, he looked on life with wide open eyes and soul that understood. He found her far less fair than in the heyday of his youth, when he reveled in her voluptuous charms and loved her well. Her face was hard and stern, as that of some hag from hell. The sunlight had faded from her hair, the cestus of red roses become a poisonous serpent, her fragrant breath a consuming flame, her robe of glory a sackcloth suit. Begrimed with ashes, torn by thorns and stained with blood. Though has changed her life, he cried in horror. Not so, she said, the change is thine. In youth you saw me not, but only dreamed you saw. She you loved was a creature of your vain imaginings. I am life, mother of that scurvy brat ambition. She pointed upward, saying, Behold, thy star is gone, and the shining gold hangs pathless in the heavens. When the sun has reached the zenith, it must descend. Henceforth your path leads downward, for every hour will sap your lusty strength, and every step be weaker than the last, until you sink into senility. Come, my love, you do not know me yet. Behold me as I am. She cast aside her soiled and ragged robe, and stood revealed in all her hideousness, a thing of horror. Her breasts distilled a poisonous dew, around her gaunt limbs, aspects crawled. Her eyes were fierce and hollow, and in one bony hand she held a scrawl, on which was writh the record of her frauds and follies, her sin and shame. Come, she cried mockingly, let us on together. You may caress me as in the days of old, and I will answer with a curse. Hold me to your heart, and I will wither it with my breath of flame. Praise me, and I will requite you with disona, and crown you with the gruesome chaplets of grief. Fool, thou hast striven for a prismatic bubble bursting on the crest of a receding wave. Why scorned you gold and lands to grasp at castles in the air? Why dreamed of the demurgers when desiring harlots beckoned thee? Why dealt with open hand and unsuspecting heart, when thrown mid a world of thieves? Hadst thou been content and not aspired to rise above the grossness, the falsehoods, and the folly which is life? I would have loved thee well, and deceived thee with a painted beauty to the end, my foul brits would have been to thee ever a fragrant bed of flowers. You have invaded life's mysteries, the penalty whereof is pain. You have looked upon the past, behold the future. He looked and saw a torturous path winding downward through bogs and poisonous fens and bitter pools. In the far distance, an old man, tottering beneath his weight of years, stood leaning on a staff, reading a riddle propounded by a sullen sphinx, and striving with failing intellect to understand. Kui Bono? Nearby was an open grave beside which an angel of mercy stood and beckoned him. Thou hast arid long, my lover, she said in a low, sweet voice, that was the distant note of Aeolian harp, Osama Zephyr sowing through the pines. With a cry of gladness, he cast himself into her cool arms. She touched his tired eyes with her soft white hands. She pressed a kiss upon his lips that drained his breath in an expiring gasp of pleasure, all passionless, and cradled upon her bosom like a weary child, he fell asleep. The burden and its bearer, hallowed by a pale glory as of St. Elmo's fire, sank into the open grave, yet the sphinx sat stolidly holding the painted riddle in his stony hand. Kui Bono? But there was none to answer. The path faded like the phosphorescent track over ship in midnight waters, and all was dark. He turned fiercely to life, a question on his lip, but ere he could utter it, she had answered with a bitter shrug. The angel with the pitying eyes? The beautiest one? My rival death, so uncanny and so cold. All who love me leave me for this sorceress, and she holds them neath the magic of her spell forever more. But what care I? I do take the grain and give to her the husk. I drink the wine and leave the leaves. Mine, the bursting bud, hers, the withered flower. Go to her and thou wilt. I have slain ambition, and blotted thy foolish igneous fatus from the firmament. For thee the very sun henceforth is cold, the moon a monstrous wheel of blood, the stars but aged eyes winking back their tears, as they look upon thy broken altars and ruined fangs, the grass grown green above the ashes of thy dead. Go, I want thee not, for thou hast seen me as I am. I am for the red wine and wild revel, where in folly's cup still laughs the bubble joy. For the idle daydream and the sensuous dance, the fond kiss of foolish love and the velvet couch of lust. Then death came and stood near him, beautiful with a beauty all spiritual, and world of pity in her eyes. But he shrank from her with a shudder, seeing which she said, Am I indeed so cold? I who warm the universe? Is the bosom of mercy to be feared, and the breath of peace despised? What is life that she should mock me? This hideous harlot whose kisses poison and whose words betray? Is she not the mother of all ills? Behold her demonic brood, hate and horror, discord and disease, pride and pain? She is the creature of time, the slave of space. She is the busted spawn of heat and moisture, was engendered mid the unclean ooze of miasmic swamps in the womb of noisome fens. And I? I am empress of all that is, or was, or can ever be. Come, dwell with me, and all the earth shall be thy home, thy period eternity. Wouldst live again? Then will I make of thy clustering lox grasses to wave in the cool meadows green, of thine eyes fair daisies, that nod in the dewy dawn of thy heart a great blush rose worn between the breasts of beauty, of thy body an oak to defy the elements, of thy blood a wave breaking in slumbrous thunder upon a beach of gold, of thy breath the jasmine's perfume, of thy restless spirit the living brand that crashes in thunder-peel above the storm. Why press the cruel thorn into thy heart the iron into thy soul? Thus do I clasp thee to a bosom ever true, and shield thee from the slings and arrows of the world. Thy hot heart beats faint and ever fainter against its pulseless pillow until it seizes with a sigh, and thou art mine, and eternal peace is thine. Chapter 30 The Garden of the Gods Much has been written of Texas by immigration boomers, able editors and others, with an eye single to the almighty dollar. Its healthfulness, delightful climate, undeveloped resources, churches, schools, etc., have been expatiated upon times without number. But little has been said of its transcendent beauty. The average able editor is not a very aesthetic animal. He has an eye for the beautiful, it is true, but his tastes are of the earth earthy. A half-page display ad with wood-cut portrait of a chamber set occupying the foreground in the Claire obscure worked up with various sizes and styles of black type possesses far more charm for him than does the deep blue of our southern sky, whose mighty concave seems to reach to infinity's uttermost verge. A two-story brick livery stable or laundry is to him far more interesting than the splendors of the day God rising from the ocean's blue. An eighty-cent dollar, with its lying legend, more beautiful in his eyes than even Austin's violet crown, bathed in the radiance of the morning or arched with twilight's dome of fretted gold, the able editor cares not for purple hills unless they contain mineral, for broad champagne's unless the soil be good, for flashing brooks unless they can be made to turn a millwheel or a water a cow. The able editor takes it for granted that everybody is as grossly materialistic as himself. Care not whether the sky above their heads is blue or black so long as the soil beneath their feet is fertile. Whether the landscape be pleasant or forbidding so long as it will yield them creature comforts, perhaps he is very nearly right. The fact that millions will make their homes beneath the leaden skies amid scenes of desolation, while there is room and despair in our sunny southland, is not without its significance. Indicates plainly that man is not yet progressed far into that spiritual kingdom, where the soul must be fed as well as the stomach, where sunlight is more necessary than sauerkraut, where beauty furnishes forth more delights than beer. Still, there must be a few people in this game-grabbing world, not altogether indifferent to the beauties of nature, to whom the gold of the evening sky is more precious than that rung with infinite toil from the bowels of the earth, to whom the purple of the hills is more pleasing than the crustacean dyes of ancient tire. The flashing of clear waters more delightful than the gleam of diamonds, the autumn's rainbow tints more inspiring than the dull red heart of the ruby. To have such a home in Texas were like a sojourn, in that pleasant paradise where our primal parents first tasted terrestrial delight. No Alps or Apennines burst from Texas's broad bosom, and rear their cold dead peaks mile above mile into heaven's mighty vault. No Vesuvius belches his lurid angry flame at the stars like a colossal cannon, worked by Titans at war with the heavenly hierarchy. No Niagara churns its green waters into rainbow-tinted foam. The grandeur of Texas is not that of destruction and desolation. Its beauties are not those which thrill the heart with awe, but fill it with adoration and sweet content. Not dark in dreary mountains, riven by the bolts of angry jove, not gloomy while purgous, gorgeous were devil's dance and witches shriek, not the savage thunder of avalanche, but the sun-kissed valley of Kashmir, the purple hills of the Lotus Eater's land, the pastoral beauties of temp's delightful veil. Here is, repeated a thousand times, that suburban home which Horace sang, here the coast where Odysseus, the much-enduring man, cast anchor and declared he would no longer roam, here the Elysian fields, far beyond the sunset, here the valley of avian lies, deep meadowed happy, fair with orchard lawns and bowery hollows, crowned with summer sea, where queen's nurse, the wounded hero back to life, here the lost Atlantis, newfound, the land where it is always summer, where air is softer than those of air be the blessed are, ever-blowing, sky's bluer than ever-arched, famed, tuskany-bid earthworms look heavenward, sunsets whose gleaming gold might ransom a universe. What care I, who owns this broad expanse of emerald mead and purple hills, who pays the taxes and digs and delves therein for gain? It is all mine, in the sky above it is mine to the horizon's uttermost verge, the flashing waters, the cool mists creeping down the hill, a soft breeze stealing up from Neptune's watery world, with healing on its wings, still fragrant with spices of the Spanish Maine, all, all mine, a priceless heritage which no man toiled for, which no span-thrift can cast away. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rita Butros. Chapter 31. Woman's Wickedness. Chastity Going Out of Fashion By the social evil is commonly understood illicit intercourse of the sexes, a violation of law or custom intended to regulate the procreative passion. The evil is probably as old as society, coeval with mankind. History tradition itself goes not back to a time when statutes, confessedly human or professedly divine, were capable of controlling the fierce fires that blaze within the blood. When all consuming love was cold reasons humble slave, and passion yielded blind obedience unto precept. Although the heavens have been ever peopled with threatening gods, and the great inane filled with gaping hells, although kings and courts have thundered their inhibitions forth, and society turned upon illicit love Medusa's awful frown, the peffy in Venus has flourished in every age and climb, and still flaunts her scarlet flag in the face of heaven. The history of humanity, its poetry, its romance, its very religion, is little more than a Joseph's coat, woven of love's celestial warp, and passion's infernal wolf in the loom of time. For sensuous Cleopatra's smiles, Mark Antony thought the world well lost. For false hellen's favors, proud Ilians temples blazed, and the world is strewn with broken altars and ruined faines, with empty crowns and crumbling thrones blasted by the self-same curse. In many cities of every land, abandoned women are so numerous, despite all these centuries of lawmaking and moralizing, that they find it impossible to earn a livelihood by their nefarious trade, are driven by sheer necessity to seek more respectable employment. The supply of public prostitutes is apparently limited only by the demand, while the number of kept women is constantly increasing, and society becoming day by day more lenient to those favorites of fortune who have indulged in little escapades not in strict accord with the Seventh Commandment. It is now a common occurrence for a female member of the Four Hundred who has confessedly gone astray to be received back on inequality with her most virtuous sisters. In ancient Sparta, theft was considered proper, but getting caught a crime. Modern society has improved upon that peculiar moral code. Adultery, if the debauchee have wealth, is but a venial fault, and to be found out a trifling misfortune, calling for condolence rather than condemnation. It is not so much the number of professed prostitutes that alarms the student of sociology as the brutal indifference to even the semblance of sexual purity, which has taken possession of our social aristocracy, and which poison percolating through the underlying strata threatens to eliminate womanly continence from the world. If, despite all our safeguards of law and the restraining force of religion, society becomes more hopelessly corrupt, if, with our advancing civilization, courtesans increase in number, if, with our boasted progress in education and the arts, women of alleged respectability grow less cherry of their charms, if the necessities of poverty and the luxury of wealth alike breed brazen bauds and multiply cuckolds, it is a fair inference that there is something radically wrong with our social system. It might be well, perhaps, for priests and publicists who cease launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many bright young women into dens of infamy, for those good souls who are assiduously striving to drag their fallen sisters out of the depths to study the causes of the disease before attempting a cure. I say disease, for I cannot agree with those utilitarians who profess to regard prostitution as a necessary evil, who protest that the brute passions of man must be sated, that but for this scarlet woman he would debauch the vestal virgin. I do not believe that Almighty God decreed that one half of the women of this world should be sacrificed upon the unclean altar of lust that the others might be saved. It is an infamous, a revolting doctrine, a damning libel of the deity. All the courtesans beneath heaven's blue concave never caused a single son of Adam's misery to refrain from tempting so far as he possessed the power one virtuous woman, never. Governor Fishback of Arkansas recently declared that houses of ill fame are necessary to city life and added if you close these sewers of men's animal passions you overflow the home and spread disaster. This theory has been adopted by many municipalities, courtesans duly licensed, their business legitimized, legitimized, and accorded the protection of the law. If houses of ill fame be necessary to city life, if they prevent the overflow of the home of bestial lust and the spread of disaster, it follows as a natural sequence that the prostitute is a public benefactor, to be encouraged rather than condemned, deserving of civic honor rather than social infamy. Will Governor Fishback and his fellow utilitarians be kind enough to make a careful examination of the quasi-respectable element of society, and inform us how large an army of courtesans will be necessary to enable it to pass a baking powder purity test? Governor Fishback does not appear to have profited by Pope's suggestion that the proper study of mankind is man, or he would know full well that the presence in a city of prostitutes but serves to accentuate the dangers that environ pure womanhood. He would know that they add fuel to lusts on holy fires, that thousands of them are procuracies as well as prostitutes, and that one bad woman can do more to corrupt her sex than can any libertine since the days of Sir Lancelot. He would likewise know that so perverse is the nature of man, that he would leave a harem filled with desirous heurus more beautiful than ever danced through a Mohammedan dream of paradise, to dig pitfalls for the unwary feet of some misshapen country wench who was striving to lead an honest life as a muley cow will turn from a manger filled with pneumon hay and wear out her thievish tongue trying to coax a wisp of rotten straw through a crack in a neighbor's barn, so will man turn from consenting venus matchless charms to solicit scornful dian. What is it that is railroading so large a portion of the young women to hell? What causes so many to forsake the straight and narrow path that is supposed to lead to everlasting life and seek the irremediable way of eternal death? What mad fantasy is it that leads so many wives to sacrifice the honor of their husbands and shame their children? Is it evil inherent in the daughters of Eve themselves? Is it lawless lust or force of circumstances that adds legion after legion to the cohorts of shame? Or has our boasted progress brought with it a suspicion that female chastity is after all an overpriced bobble that what is no crime against nature should be tolerated by this eminently practical age? We have cast behind us the myths and miracles proven the absurdity of our ancestors' most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and intellectual house cleaning have we consigned virtue to the rubbish heap or at best relegated it to the garret with the spinning wheel, hand loom, and other out-of-date trumpery? Time was when a woman branded as a bod hid her face for shame or consorted only with her kind. Now if she can but become sufficiently notorious she goes upon the stage and men take their wives and daughters to see her play Camille and kindred characters. This may signify much, among other things, that the courtesan is creeping into social favor, even that a new code of morals is now a building in which she will be the grand exemplar. As change is the order of the day and what one age damns its successor off times deifies, who knows but an up-to-date religion may yet be evolved with bockic revels for sacred rites and a favored prostitute for high priestess? Were I called upon to diagnose the social disease did any duly ordained committee from the numerous reform societies, ministerial association, secular legislatures, or other bodies that are taking unto themselves great credit for assiduously making a bad matter worse? Call upon me for advice and ent the proper method of restoring to healthy life the world's moribund morality. I would probably shock the souls out of them by stating a few plain facts without troubling myself to provide polite trimmings. You cannot reform society from the bottom, you must begin at the top. Man, physically considered, is merely an animal and the law of his life is identical with that of the brute creation. Continence in man or woman is a violation of nature's edicts, a sacrifice made by the individual to the necessities of civilization. Like a beast of the field, man formally took unto himself a mate and with his rude strength defended her from the advances of other males. Such, reduced to the last analysis, is the basis of marriage of female chastity and family honor. Rape and adultery were prohibited under pains and penalties and behind the sword of the criminal law grew up the moral code. As wealth increased, man multiplied his wives and added concubines, but woman was taught that while polygamy was pleasing to the gods, polyandry was the reverse, that while the husband was privileged to seek sexual pleasure in a foreign bed, the wife who looked with desiring eyes upon other than her rightful lord merited the scorn of earth and provoked the wrath of heaven. For long ages woman was but the creature of man's caprice, the drudge or ornament of his home, mistress of neither her body nor her mind, but as the world advanced and matter was made more subject unto mind, as divine reason rested the scepter from brute force, woman began to assume her proper place in the world's economy. She is stepping forth into the garish light of freedom, is realizing for the first time in the history of the human race that she is a moral entity, that even she and not another is the arbiter of her fate, and as ever before new found freedom is manifesting itself in criminal folly, liberty has become a synonym for license. The progressive woman, the woman who is not only well up to date but skirmishing with the future, is asking her brother, if thou, why not I? If man is forgiven a score of mistresses, must woman, blessed with like reason and cursed with kindred passions be damned for one lover? And while the question grates upon her ear, the answer comes not trippingly to the tongue. I do not mean that all women who imagine themselves progressive are eager to assume the same easy morals that from time immemorial have characterized the sterner sex, but this line of argument peculiar to their class, while not likely to make men better, is well calculated to make foolish women worse. The sooner they realize that he deans are as scarce in the country as brains in the head of a chrysanthemum dude, that such sexual purity as the world is to be blessed with all must be furnished by the softer sex, the better for all concerned, that they will eventually cease their altogether useless clamor that bearded men become as modest as blushing maids, and agree with the poet that, whatever is, is right. The lessons of history bid us hope. When the French people threw off the yoke of the royalist and aristocrat, they likewise loudly clamored for equality, fraternity, and other apparently reasonable but utterly impossible things, until the bitter school of experience taught them better. The progressive women have not yet set up la belle guillotine in Washington or elsewhere for the decapitation of male incorrigibles, which significant fact confirms our old faith that the ladies rather like a man who would not deliberately overdo the part of Joseph. But the female reformer with her social board of equalization theories is but a small factor in that mighty force which is filling the land with unfaithful wives and the potters filled with degraded prostitutes. When the people of a nation are almost universally poor, sexual purity is the general rule. Simple living and severe toil keep in check the passions and make it possible to mold the mind with moral precepts. But when a nation becomes divided into the very rich and the extremely poor, when willful waste and willful want go hand in hand, when luxury renders abnormal the passions of the one, and cupidity born of envy blunts the moral perceptions of the other, then indeed is that nation delivered over to the world the flesh and the devil. When all alike are poor, contentment reigns. The sun grows up a useful, self-reliant man, the daughter an industrious virtuous woman. From this class comes nearly every benefactor of mankind. It has ever been the great repository of morality, the balance wheel of society, the brain and brawn of the majestic world. Divided into millionaires and mendicants, the poor man's son becomes feverish to make a showy fortune by fair means or by foul, while his daughter looks with envious eye upon malady, follows her fashions and too often apes her morals. The real life is supplanted by the artificial, and people are judged not by what they are, but by what they have. The true love match becomes but a reminiscence. The blind God's bow is manipulated by brutish mammon. Men and women make marriages of convenience, consult their fortunes rather than their affections, seek first a lawful companion with a well-filled purse and then a congenial paramour. The working girl soon learns that beyond a few stale platitudes, fired off much as a hungry man says grace, she gets no more credit for wearing honest rags than flaunting dishonest silks. That good name, however precious it may be to her, is really going out of fashion, that when the world pretends to prize it above rubies, it is lying, is indulging in the luxury of hypocrisy. She likewise learns that the young men really worth marrying, knowing that a family means a continual striving to be fully as fashionable and artificial as those better able to play the fool, seek mistresses rather than wives. She becomes discouraged, desperate and drifts into the vortex. Much is said by self-constituted reformers of the Lacrimose School, anent trusting maids betrayed by base-hearted scoundrels and loving wives led astray by designing villains. But I could never work my sympathies up to the slopping overstage for these pathetic victims of man's perfidy. It may be that my tear glands lack a hair-trigger attachment and my sob machine is not of the most approved pattern. Perchance woman is fully as big a fool as these reformers painter, that she has no better sense than a blind horse that has been taught to yield a ready obedience to any master, to submit itself without question to the guidance of any hand. Well the progressive woman who is just now busy boycotting Colonel Breckenridge and spilling her salt tears over his discarded drab, kindly take a day off and tell us what is to become of this glorious country when such incorrigible she idiots get control of it. It is well enough to protect the honor of children with severe laws and a double-shotted gun, but the average young woman is amply able to guard her virtue if she really values it, while the married woman who becomes so intimate with a male friend that he dares assail her continence deserves no sympathy. She is the tempter, not the victim. True it is that maids and matrons too, as pure as the white rose that blooms above the green glacier, have been swept too far by the fierce whirlwind of love and passion. But of these the world doth seldom hear. The woman whose sin is sanctified by love, who staked her name and fame upon a cowardly lie, masquerading in the garb of eternal truth, never yet rushed into court with her tale of woe, or aired her grievance in the public prince. The world thenceforth can give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded, pharisecal female whose heart never thrilled to love's wild melody, yet who marries for money, puts her frozen charms up at auction for the highest bitter, and, having obtained a fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself preeminently respectable. In the name of all the gods at once, which is the fowler crime, the greater social evil, for a woman to deliberately barter her person for gold and lands, for gougas, social position, and a preferred pew in a fashionable church, even though the sale be in accordance with law, have the benediction of a stupid priest and the sanction of a corrupt and canting world, or, in defiance of custom and forgetful of cold precept, to cast the priceless jewel of a woman's honor upon the altar of illicit love. Give the latter woman a chance, forget her fault, and she will become a blessing to society, an ornament to heaven. The former is fit inhabitant only for a hell of ice. She has deliberately dishonored herself, her sex, and the man whose name she bears, and custom can no more absolve her than the pope can pardon sin. She is the most dreadful product of the social evil of unhallowed sexual commerce, is the child of Mammon and Medusa, the blue ribbon abortion of this monster-bearing age. END OF CHAPTER XXXI WOMEN'S WICKEDNESS CHAPTER XXXII OF THE COMPLETE WORKS OF BRAN THE ICONOL CLASS, VOLUME I, by William Copper Brand This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information nor to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by William Jones. CHAPTER XXXII TALMAGE THE TURGID That man who first coined the phrase, nothing succeeds like success had a great head. Talmage is emphatically a success, viewed from a worldly point of view. He attracts the largest audiences of any American preacher. His sermons are more extensively printed, more eagerly read, than those of any other divine. He is regarded by the public as the greatest of modern preachers, and he evidently thinks this verdict a righteous one. Why this is so? I am at a loss to determine. I have read his sermons and writings with unusual care, hoping thereby to discover in what particular he towers like so above his brethren, wherein he is greater than the thousands of obscure pulpit pounders who do battle with the devil for a few dollars and a destructive donation party per year. But so far I have signally failed. I have yet to see in print a single sermon by the so-called great Talmage, remarkable for wit, wisdom, or eloquence, or a single scrap from his pen that might not have been written by a sophomore or a young reporter. I have before me, while I write, one of his latest oratorical efforts entitled Bricks Without Straw. It was delivered to one of the largest audiences that ever crowded into the Great Taper Knuckle, is considered above the Talmagean average, and was evidently regarded as one of his ablest efforts. For the great daily in which I find it prefaces it with a three-story head, a short biographical sketch and a portrait of the speaker making an evident effort to look wise. Yet such a sermon delivered before a Texas congregation by a fledgling DD, seeking a call, would provoke supercilious smiles on the part of those people who considered it their painful duty to remain awake. At the close of the services, the good deacons would probably feel called upon to take the young men out behind the church and give him a little fatherly advice, the birthing of which would be to become an auctioneer or seek a situation as a spouter for a snake side-show. Had Bricks Without Straw been written as a Sunday special by a horse editor of any daily paper in Texas, the managing editor would have chucked it into the wastebasket and advised the young men that journalism was not his forte. It is a rambling fragmentary piece of mental hodgepodge in which scraps of school book Egyptology, garbled Bible stories, false political economy, and fragments of misapplied history tumble over each other like specters in a delirium. It is just such a discourse as one might expect from the lips of a female lieutenant in the Salvation Army, who possessed a vivid imagination, a smattering of learning, and a valuable tongue, but little judgment. The only original information I can find in the discourse is to the effect that when Joseph was a bare-legged little Hebrew, making mud pies in the land of his forefathers, his daddy called him Joe, that the Bible refers to Egypt and Egyptians just two hundred and eighty-nine times, and that Egypt is our great grandmother. He goes out of his way to denounce his lunatics those who would place the American railways and telegraphs under government control. He is quite sure that the logical effect of such a proceeding would be the revival and free America of the old Egyptian tyranny. The analogy between a tyrant enslaving his subjects by means of a monopoly of the food supply and a free people managing a great property for their own advantage could only be traced by a Talmejan head. During the few months that Mr. Talmej was pottering about in the land of the erstwhile pharaohs, examining mummified cats and drawing a fat salary for unrendered services, he evidently forgot that in his own, his native land, the people rule the roost, that the government is but their creature and has to dance to music of their making. If the distinguished gentleman had spent his vacation in the Haloft in close communion with a copy of the Constitution of the United States and a primary work on political economy instead of gating from the pyramids to the acropolis hunting for small pegs upon which to hang large theories, perhaps he would be able to occasionally say something sensible. Of course, in sloshing around over so wide a field, Mr. Talmej gave his hearers his truly valuable opinion of Muhammadanism. He admitted that it is a religion of cleanliness, sobriety and devotion, but the fact that its founder had four wives caused him to sweat in agony. Polygamy, according to Mr. Talmej, blights everything it touches. Those who practice it are, he is quite sure, the enemies of woman kind. Is it not a tribal strange that from so foul a root should spring such a celestial plant as the Christian religion, that from the loins of a polygamous people should come an immaculate Christ? How can we mention Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob without a curse or think of a God whose teachings they followed without horror? Unless indeed we take issue with the public and vote, Mr. Talmej an ass of the longest-eared variety. Mr. Talmej is quite sure that God was on the side of the allies at the Battle of Waterloo, that he was on the side of the Russians during the French invasion. Mr. Talmej does not take it upon himself to explain, however, how the deity chanced to be on the other side at Marengo and Austerlitz. No wonder that war is a risky business if the God of battle changes his allegiance so erratically and without apparent provocation. Mr. Talmej should advise the government to cease expending money for iron clads and coast fortifications. In case of a foreign complication, it were all day with us if the autocrat of the universe were swinging a battle axe against us. While if we chanced to have him with us, we could send baby McGee out with the jawbone of a hen and put the armies of the world to shame. Mr. Talmej should retire to some secluded spot and make a careful analysis of his sermons before firing them out to the press. They may sound all right in the big tabernacle, where a great volume of noise is the chief desideratum, but they make very poor reading. Like a flapjack, they may tickle the pallet when served hot and with plenty of sop, but when allowed to grow cold, are stale, flat and unprofitable. Mr. Talmej is troubled with a diarrhea of words and should take something for it. Perhaps the best possible prescription would be a long rest of a couple of centuries or so. How in God's name the American people every became afflicted with the idea that he is a great man is a riddle which might make Oedipus cuddle his wits in vain. He is not even a skillful pretender shining like the moon by borrowed light, for he does not shine at all. His sentences are neither picturesque, dramatic nor wise. His so-called sermons are but fragmentary and usually ignorant allusions to things in general. He seldom or never encroaches upon the realms of science and philosophy, although he frequently attempts it and evidently imagines that he is succeeding admirably when he is but sloshing around like a drunken comet that is chiefly tailed in inane limboes. I can find no other explanation of Mr. Talmej's distinction than that like Elliot F. Shepard, he can be more kinds of a fool in a given time than any other man in his profession. That were indeed distinction enough for one man, well calculated to cause the world to stand to gaze. No notoriety and fame have, in this age, become synonymous if not exactly the same. The world gauges greatness by the volume of sound which the aspirant for immortal honors succeeds in setting afloat, little caring whether it be such celestial harp music as caused thebes walls to rise or the discordant bray of the ramshorn which made Jerichoes to fall. And Mr. Talmej is emphatically a noise producer. From the lecherous but learned and logical beacher to the gabbling inanity now doing the drum major act is a long stride. End of Chapter 32, Talmej the Turgid Chapter 33 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Calper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by William Jones. Chapter 33, Nude Art at Chicago Now the very old nick is to pay at the world's fair and an exasperating strigency in the money market. The great uncultured west is flocking to Chicago to see the show and is seen more than it bargained for. Its modest cheek has been set aflame by the exuberant display of the nude in art. And the west is kicking, kicking with both feet, kicking like a bay steer who has a kick coming and knows how to recalcitrate. The Colchud East and Blase Europe look on with mild astonishment and wonder what ails the barbarians, don't you know? We learned from our Chicago correspondent that the great buildings are liberally adorned with figures of nude men of heroic size, not a detail of which has escaped the loving care of the fonduciecle sculptors. Elsewhere, the examples of the nude represent both sexes. Yet the east wonders that the west is shocked cannot understand why wives drag their husbands away and young ladies leave the building with faces ablaze with indignation. Our correspondent volunteers the information that a much severe test of the patience of the western people will come when the art palace is opened. Also, that the treatment the western people are getting is drastic and cruel, but it will work wonders in cultivating and refining them. We beg leave to dissent from the conclusion. We hardly think that any of our readers will accuse us of prudery. We are willing to concede special privileges to art. Its province is to portray the beautiful and the most beautiful thing on all God's earth is a perfect female form. The painter or sculptor who loves his art may be permitted to reproduce in modest pose a naked female figure, but he should not be allowed to force it upon the attention of a mixed multitude. Let him place it where it will only be seen by those who seek it. A man may take his mother, wife, even his sweetheart to look upon such work of art, and they may be better, purer, nobler for having worshiped at the shrine of beauty. But to compel them to stand before it with a mixed multitude to most of whom it suggests but grossest sensuality is a brutal crime against modesty, so much for the female nude. What man would take a woman near and dear to him to look upon a nude male statue or painting, not a detail of which has escaped the loving care of the artist? Certainly few western or southern men would do so. Worship of the beautiful may pardon the nude female figure, but the nude male figure never. Hercules nude is but an animal, an Apollo, a nightmare. To place nude male figures indiscriminately about the great fair buildings where they must be seen by modest maids, whether they will or no, and that while insolent strangers enjoy their confusion is the very apotheosis of brutality. The idea that such an outrage upon divine modesty will cultivate and refine people sounds like one of Satan's satires. We honor the uncultured west for making a heroic kick and trust that it will keep on recalcitrating until every unclean statue forced upon its attention in the name of art is forever disfigured. The protest of the west proves that its mind is still pure, that it has not yet reached the plane of culture where modesty perishes in the frost of formalism. The liberty accorded art has degenerated into license. The beautiful is no longer sought but the bizarre. It is not the massy shoulders of Hercules, the rounded arm of Juno, the beautiful bust of Hebe, the godlike pose of Apollo or the shapely limb of Aphrodite that painter and sculptor seek to reproduce. It is an effect, similar to that of Boccaccio or a fragrant French novel. It is not against the true in art that the west is rebelling, but against the vulgar. Chapter 34 There's One Comes After A Sketch None so poor, but they may build fairy castles in the air. None so wretched, but they may fondly gaze upon the fickle star of hope, flaming ever in that heaven we see by faith. A man, worn with suffering and sorrow and sin, was toiling homeward in the night from a far hunter's camp, wither he had been banished by a doctor's edict. Rest from labor lest ye die. That, indeed, is a misfortune, he had said, and redoubled his vigils at the desk. Then they brought his little son, the last gem in the sacred circle of home, whose breaking up broke his heart, and placed the child upon his knee. He looked at his fair face and said, I will go. A man for whom the shadows should still be falling toward the west, but old before his time, deep scarred by angry storms, battered and bruised like some presumptuous mortal, who had seized his puny spear and plunged into such wars as the Titans were want to wage upon the Grecian gods. The jaded steed stumbled along the dark and dangerous way, while its rider dreamed with wide open eyes and sometimes muttered to himself in that jury solitude. There's one comes after, in dying I do not die, in losing I simply pass the sword from sire to son. I may but fill a ditch for a better to mount upon and win the mural crown. What then, if that other be? The owl hooted as he passed, and from the thick it came the angry snarl of wolves, how human he bitterly exclaimed. Hoots and hungry howls all along life's path, a weird pilgrimage in the dark. He nodded, his head bowing almost to the saddle-bow, then awoke humming he knew not why. As long as the heart knows passion, as long as life, as long. His dog, a powerful mastiff, bristled and uttered an angry growl as a great gray wolf slunk along in the dry grass but a few yards distant. The brutes followed the wounded, he muttered, and I am stricken deep. He unslung his heavy fouling piece and fired. The eyes of the brute gloat, like green globes of phosphorescence and the light of the gun, then sank down with a howl that drew its comrades about it, not to sook her and to say, but to tear her and rend. He watched them a moment muttering again, how human. And turning to an aged oak that spread its branches wide, built a fire of brush and bivwacked. But he could not sleep. The blue devils were playing at height and seek within his heart, and phantoms that once were flesh came trooping from out the gloom and hovered round him. He put out his hands to them, he cried to them to speak to him, but they receded into the darkness from whence they came. The grave gave up its dead, only to mock him, to emphasize his utter desolation. He embraced the sturdy oak as though he would draw strength from its stubborn heart, which had defied the storms of a thousand years. Then sank prostrate at its base, and with only dumb animals to notice weakness, wept his only strong men weep when shivered by the bolts of destiny. One left, but one of those I loved. My strength is broken, my labors are in vain. I can, but die. Yet must I live lest the one in whom is centered all my hopes doth fall in evil ways, and also come to not. He dreamed of the days that were dead, and of those rushing upon him from the mystic future, each bearing its burden of sorrow. He tried again life's thorny path, from the cradle to manhood's somber noon, a path strewn with wreck and wreath, and wet with blood and tears. Again the well-known forms came from beyond the firelight, and, winding their shadowy arms about his neck, wept for his loneliness. He tried to embrace them, to gather them to his heart as in the old days, when they welcomed his homecoming with glad acclaim. But clutched only air, his kisses fell on vacancy. As they receded into the gloom he followed, crying, Stay, stay! and wandered here and there through bogs and briars and over the rough rocks, calling them each by name with many an endearing term, until he felt exhausted and, putting forth his hand to break his fall, encircled the neck of his faithful dog and lay there bruised and bleeding. Then other phantoms came, two women, one old, one young, bearing a ghastly burden, around which little children wailed. They laid it down at his feet, a horrid thing, with wide-staring eyes and gaping wounds all wet with gore, and the elder bowed herself upon it and kissed the rigid hands, the lips and hair, and moaned that she was left childless in her age. But the younger stood erect, imperious, the frightened children clinging to her skirts, and calling him by a name that froze his blood, made him look upon her widowhood. It was self-defense, he doggedly replied, as he met the glance of her squornful eyes. Oh, ego-tiss, she cried. Must a man die that a dog may live? Must a mother's gray hairs be brought in sorrow to the grave? Must the heart of a wife be crushed within a bloody hand, and children never know a father's loving care, that such a thing as thou mayst yet encumber this fair earth? Precious indeed must be that life purchased at such a price. But again the forms that had fled returned, and one, a frail, sweet-faced woman, with a world of pity in her eyes, stood between him and his accuser. She took the squornful woman's hand, and gently said, Sister, to us thee or me, to us thine or mine. And in the music of her voice the ghastly object vanished. The hoot of the owl and the howl of the wolf grew faint and far away. He fell into an uneasy slumber, and saw himself aged and gray, trying to keep pace with a fair youth, who mounted with free and graceful step a mountain whose summit was crowned with a light of everlasting day. Steeper and Steeper grew the path, yet he strove with failing strength. The youth reached out a strong hand to him and said, Lean on me, but he put it back grainforsely, No, no, climb thou alone, farther I cannot go. On, onto the summit, where breaks the great white light, and there is no death. The youth struggled with the steeps, and overcame them one by one, and mounted higher, and ever higher, until he stood where never man had stood, the glory of the gods upon his face, the immortals upon his brow. And people wondered and said to him, Who is it that stands upon the mountaintop, who only tread the gods? And he answered, It is I, it is my other self. And they said, The poor old man is mad, let be, let be. The dog crept closer to its master, and laid its head upon his breast. The vision changed, and he sat by a sea-cold fire, in chambers that once had echoed the glad voices of those whose graves were mid the sowing pines. He held his one treasure to his heart, and sank to it the old ditties that his mother was want to sing, once soothing her babe to slumber, until the golden head drooped low upon his breast. He wove about it fond dreams of what should be in the years to come, when, grown to manhood, it entered the arena of the world. A bony hand stole over his shoulder and seized the child, and looking up he beheld death standing by his chair. He clasped his treasure close, and struggled with the gristly spectre, but it only mocked him, and tearing the child from him fled into the outer void. He struggled to his feet, and from his parched lips there burst a cry that echoed and re-echoed through the dark woods, and went sorrowed back from the distant hills. At dawn the rustics found him, lying cold as his rocky bed. The beaded dew upon his grizzled beard, his horse with head low hanging over him, his dog keeping watch and ward. End of Chapter 34 There's One Comes After Recording by Jim Gallagher Chapter 35 Of The Complete Works Of Bran The Iconoclast Volume 1 By William Calper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 35 Poor Old Texas Tuas said in days of old that misfortune never comes singly. The fates are turning upon Texas an unkindly eye. She is overwhelmed quite, sunk in the cerbonian bogs of dark despair. First our mighty democratic majority slipped up on the hoggy and banana peel, and drove its vertebrae through the crown of its convention plug, while unfeeling populace and republicans jeered and flouted us. Then our blessed railway commission lost its linchpin, and the soulless corporations heaped coals of fire upon our heads by reducing rates, thereby making our boasted wisdom a byword and a reproach. The cyclone swooped down upon us from Kansas, and swiped our crops, making our boasts that here was an Elysium beyond the storm-belt sound as hollow as Adam's dream of Eden after he was lifted over the garden wall. Still we bore up and presented a bold, if not an unbroken front to a carpent world. But the vials of wrath were not yet exhausted. Pandora's box had not yet emptied itself of all its plagues. Our sorrow's crown of sorrow was yet to come. It is here our humiliation is accomplished. Our agony is complete. A lone highwayman has held up and robbed a populace passenger train in Texas, in West Texas, the rendezvous of the sure enough bad man who catches catamounts and clips their claws, who defies whole barrows of jersey lightning, and uses the bucking bronco for his laughter, yay, his sport. Shades of Ben Thompson and Luke Short, has it come to this? That a rank stranger can lasso a Texas train, drive the passengers under the seats, plunder them at his pleasure with no one to molest or make him afraid. Half a hundred Texans trumbling at sight of one gun were a sight worth seeing, and they did not even know it was loaded. Gone is our ancient glory, our rep is irachievably in the terrain. Henceforth, when a pilgrim from the pathless southwest registers at an eastern hotel, the bellboys will not fall over each other to do him honor as a dime novel hero, nor the gilded clerk ensure his life before politely requesting him to pay in advance. The last lingering shadow of our greatness half departed, the tender foot will trample upon us, and the visiting capitalist neglect to ask us up to the bar. The fair ladies of other lands will no longer worship us as the picture-esque knights of a reckless but romantic chivalry. They will remember that in a whole trainload of Texans, there was not one who would fight even on compulsion. We'll sweep by with frigid hotelor, leaving us to weep for the days that are no more. Alas! Poor Texas! End of Chapter 35. Poor old Texas. Chapter 36. The Seventh Commandment A correspondent wants to know what I think of the single standard of morals, which assumes that tampering with the seventh commandment is as demoralizing to men as to women. The single standard of morals, like the single standard of money, would be a magnificent thing where there at least double the present amount of raw material for it to measure. I hope to see the day when the Libertine will be relegated to the social level of the prostitute where he logically belongs. But we are not dealing now with theories but with actual conditions. I trust that I may speak plainly on this delicate subject without offending the uncoquid or giving the purient puppeteers a pain. I believe the sexes should be equally pure. When I make a world, all my women shall be pure cause of virtue, and all my men he virgins. I'll construct no Messalinas nor Cleopatra's, no lovelaces or Sir Lancelot's. I'll people the world with St. Anthony's and Penelope's, Joseph's and Rebecca Merlindy-Johnson's. I'll apply the soft pedal to the fair scream of passion and pull all the barbs from the arrows that whizz from the love-god's bone. Life will not then be quite so exhilarating, but it will be much better worth the living. Meantime, a little spraining of the seventh commandment is, by no means so demoralizing to men as to women, despite the frantic protests of those who would drag the millennium in by the ears by forcing them upon society willy-nilly the single standard of morals. Man is the grosser animal, has not so far to fall. The shock to his sensibilities is not so serious. He is not so amenable to shame. A coat of black paint ruins a marble Diana, but has little appreciable effect on an iron Hercules. Illicit intercourse is not so demoralizing to men as to women, for the further reason that it is not considered so great a crime. An act is demoralizing or degrading in proportion as the perpetrator thereof considers it criminal, as it lowers his self-respect. And men regard their chronolyneic peccancy as a venial fault, while women consider such lapses on the part of their sex as grievous sin. Hence the lightning of lust scares blackens the pillar, while it shatters the vase. The moral effect of an act is determined by the prevailing standards of ethics. Were polyandry the general practice, a woman could have a multiplicity of husbands and be considered pure. Where polygamy is the rule, a man may have a multitude of wives and be regarded as moral. Ethical codes ever adapt themselves to conditions. Solomon was one of the most honorable men of his age, but were he alive today, he would be branded as a shameless lecher, a contumatious criminal. There have been religions existing through long ages and extending over vast empires, in which the organs of generations were considered as sacred symbols and prostitution in the perlioles of the temple regarded as pleasing to the gods. It is easy enough for a bigoted ignorance to brand those people as barbarians, but in many provinces of art and science they have ever remained our masters. The tents of the maidens, in quote, were simply places where fair religious enthusiasts sold themselves to the first stranger who offered them a piece of silver and laid their gains upon the altar of the gods. The robber barons of old time Germany, the diplomatic liars of a medieval Italy, the thieves of ancient Lassa de Mon and the polygamist of biblical Palestine considered themselves as respectable people, and as they were so regarded by their compatriots they were not morally degraded by their deeds. But the robber and the liar, the thief and the polygamist of this age are cattle of quite a different color. There has been a radical change in the moral code. The peccadillos of the past have become the crimes of the present. The cross, once an obscene pagan symbol, has been transformed from an emblem of reproduction to one of destruction. The tents of the maidens are struck, Corinth no longer implores the gods to increase the number and enhance the beauty of its courtesans. Vides Pandemos has given place to Our Lady of Pain and the obscene Dionysius fled before a crucified Christ. No more does the fair religious postulant play the baccante in flower-strewn palaces while naked cupids crown the brimming cup and sandaled feet beat time on the polished cedar floors to music that is the cry of brute passion in the blood. Kneeling in the cold gray dawn upon the stones she clasps a marble cross. The wanton worship of the flesh has passed with the world's youth. But though much of men's crassness has been purged away in times great crucible, he is still of the earth earthy and clings tenaciously to his ancient prerogative of polygamy. When he marries, society does not really expect him to respect his oath to forsake all others. Regards it as a formal bow to the convenances, I promise with a mental reservation annex. But it considers a woman's vow as sacred and the breaking thereof as rankest blasphemy. He is allowed but one wife, but he may have a score of mistresses and society will placidly wink the other eye. Until some tearful maiden requires him to share the shame she can no longer conceal or an injured husband goes agonizing. This should not be so, but so it is. There be fools, both male and female, who will rise up to exclaim that this is false, but that it is gospel truth is proven every day in the year in every community on the American continent. Men with reputations for licentiousness that would shame old Silenus are cordially received in the most exclusive society. They are found at every highfalutin function, bending over the white hands of the most accomplished ladies in the land, on every ballroom floor encircling the waist of debutants, in the parlors of our best people paying court to their young daughters. The noblest women in this world become their wives, fondly undertake their reformation, while indignantly drawing their skirts aside lest they come in contact with the tawdry finery of females whom these lawless satyrs have debauched. Of course, when a woman learns that her reformatory work has proven a failure, drear and dismal she complains bitterly, may even demand a divorce. Yet she could count upon the fingers of one hand the hubbies whom she would trust behind a sheet of paper with a wavered daughter. She doesn't believe a little bit in the virtue of the genus male, yet insists that her own husband be a saint, assumes that her own charms should cause him to regard all other women with indifference, and when she learns of his polygamous practices suffers all the pains of wounded pride. If a woman be homely as a boy dark hedge, she may suppose the world supercharged with St. Anthony's, for she has not been much sought, but if she be beautiful and has mingled much with men, she realizes all too well that the story of Joseph is a foolish romance, or that Mrs. Potiphar was quite passe, and though she be pure as a vestal virgin of Rome's best days, she secretly despises the man with whom she does not have to stand just a little bit on the defensive. Of course, she demands that her male acquaintances shall be gentlemen, and treat her with due courtesy and respect. But it nettles her, not a little, to learn that her charms are altogether ignored. She likes to feel her power to know that she is good in the eyes of men, something desired, that her virtue is a priceless jewel over which she must ever keep close guard. Hence she likes best the male she is compelled to watch, while a man has absolutely no use for wife or mistress upon whose fealty he would not lay his life. The result is that when a woman commits one sexual sin, she puts hope behind her. Her feet take hold on hell. She sinks lower and lower until she becomes the shameless associate of bummers and bods. She is made to feel that she has murdered her womanhood, that the red cross of cane blazes upon her brow. Realizing that she is a social outcast, a moral pariah, she becomes reckless, defiant, and finally glories in between the fool who trusts her. No matter how fair the mountain upon which she has left to feed, she will batten on the moor. Love was her excuse when first she went astray, and she hugs the delusion to her heart that Cupid can sanctify a crime. But where honor spreads not its wings of snow, love perishes in the fierce semen of lust. The man with whom she enters the primrose path feels that he is as good as his fellows. He may watch with a sigh her descent into the noisome regions of the damned, but comforts himself with a reflection that she would have found her way to Hades without his help. That, quote, virtue as it never will be moved, though lewdness courted in a shape of heaven, so lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will set itself in a celestial bed and prey upon garbage. Close, quote. That had he played the prude, she would have found another, and perhaps a baser, paramour. He knows that the stain of letcher is on his soul, but draws comfort from the fact that such is the common heritage of his sex, forgets his victim and struggles toward the stars. He is financially honest, generous, and guards the honor of wife and daughters as God's best gift. His amorous dalliance with others, instead of weaning him from his wife, causes him to regard her with greater veneration, to contrast her purity with his own pollution, her virtue with another's vice. Paradoxical as it may appear, there are no men in this world who so reverence good women as those who are notorious for their illicit amours. I am not, of course, speaking of the consorts of common courtesans, of human hogs, but of the men who people the red-light district with their cast-off mistresses. Pitiful as it may appear, it hurts the men more to trifle with the Eighth Commandment once than to break the Seventh a thousand times. He is worst demoralized by stealing a mangy mule than by ruining a maid. The male letcher may be in all things else a lord. The thief is considered altogether and irremediably corrupt. Society will tolerate the one if his offense be not too flagrant, but to the other it refuses even the shadow of forgiveness. For three centuries the world has been trying to explain away Shakespeare's poaching, but it has not thought it worthwhile to even apologize for his sexual perversity. Washington caught his death while keeping an assignation with a neighbor's wife. But there's little said about it. He's still the father of his country, including seventy million people of all classes and colors. Had the slight exposure which brought on a fatal sickness been the result of prowling in his neighbor's barn instead of his boudoir, his name would be an anathema for evermore. The world forgives him for debauching another man's wife, but it would never have forgiven him had he rated the same man's hin roost. It does not mean by this that a scrawny poet is more of importance than family honor. It simply means that the man who steals a poet is a cowardly thief, while the one who ignores the advances of a pretty woman is an incorrigible idiot. Ben Franklin could have mistresses scattered all over the city of brotherly love, and Dan Webster consort with all the light women of Washington, and still be men of genius beneath whose imperial feet Columbia was proud to lay her shining hair. But had either been caught sneaking from a neighbor's woodpile with a two-cent bundle of packets, the world would have rung with his infamy. The complaint against Demoth's sonnese is not that he was a libertine, a man before whose hunted eloquence, maiden modesty, and wifely virtue were his wax, but that he threw away sword and shield and fled like a mule-eared rabbit before the spears of Macedon. I digress longer enough to say that I have patiently investigated the story of the great Orters' flight, and am fully convinced that it was a foul political falsehood, just as the current story of Colonel Ingersoll's cowardice and capture is a religious lie. Of course society has to make an occasional example, and its moral maleficence, like death, loved a shiny mark. It damned Breckenridge for getting tangled up with a desiring maid in a close carriage, and relegated him to the political wilderness. Yet twice elevated to the presidency the most disreputable old false stuff that ever vibrated between cheap beer joints and ham-fatted old washerwoman who smelled of stale soap suds and undiodorized diapers. Cleveland told the truth when he had to, and was made a little tin Jesus of by the moral jabber-walks. Breckenridge, an indefinitely better and brainier man, fessed up, and couldn't go to Congress from the Steadhorse District of Kentucky. When society goes hunting for scapegoats, it usually manages to get a net lodged in its esophagus while relegating a mangy dromedary to its internal economy. Such are the conditions which prevail today. But I am far from agreeing with the dictum of Pope that, quote, whatever is, is right, close quote. Had the world ever proceeded on that principle we would still be honoring robbers and liars, thieves, and polygamists. The wider license accorded man harmonizes neither with divine law, decency, nor the canons of common sense. We place womanly virtue on a pedestal and worship it while tacitly encouraging men to destroy it. We overlook the fact that a man cannot fracture the Seventh Commandment without considerable assistance. We should adopt a loftier standard of morality, nobler ideals for men. Because he is more earthly than woman it does not follow that he should be made altogether of a muck. He has made some little progress since the day of Judah and Tamar, David and Bathsheba. He no longer consort with courtesans on the public highway, nor pins up half a hundred wives in a harem, then goes broke buying concubines. He has learned that there is such a thing as shame. Assumes a virtue, though he has it not, seeks to conceal his concubiscence. What in one age society drives to a semblance of concealment, in the next it brands as criminal. Hence we may hope that at no distant day the single standard of morals will become more than an iridescent dream, that Josephs will not be confined altogether to gum-chewing members of the YMCA. We may eventually reach that moral plane where the male debauche will be considered a moral outcast, but the time is not yet, and until its advent illicit commerce will continue to be more demoralizing to women than to men. Of course there are exceptions to the rule. There are women who rise superior to the social law. George Eliot, Queen Elizabeth, Sarah Bernhardt, and others have trampled the social edict beneath their feet, and refused to consider themselves sinners, have left an outraged world to scorn and stood defiant, sufficient unto themselves. Those women were intellectual Amazons whom not but the writhing bolts of God could humble, whose genius flamed with a white light even through the done clouds of lechery. But we cannot measure the workaday woman by the few whose minds might, like the elements furnished forth creation. A Bernhardt is great, not because of her social sin, but despite thereof. With her art is the all-in-all, sex but an incident. She is strong enough to mount the Imperian, despite the Lernaean serpent-coil which drags others to perdition, to compel the world to tolerate, if not forgive, the black stain in her heart because of the divine radiance which encircles her head. Occasionally there is a woman who can sacrifice her purity, without sinking to the slums through loss of self-respect, can still maintain the fierce battle for fame, can be grand after she has ceased to be good. Mrs. Grundy can rave and every orthodox goose stretch forth its rubber neck to express its disapproval. But instead of bending beneath the weight of scorn, instead of sinking into the mire of the slough upon which she has set her feet, she seems like old Anteus, together fresh strength from the earth with which to write her name among the immortals. Queen Elizabeth is, to this good day, the pride of orthodox England. She had more brains than all its other monarchs combined. Yet by solemn act of parliament it was decreed that the first bastard born to the Virgin Queen should ascend to the throne of Britain. Thus was the highest possible premium placed upon female luxury, and it was placed there after due deliberation by a God-fearing, Catholic-hating, Episcopalian parliament. Fortunately for Mrs. Wetton, the present governmental figurehead, jolly old Liz, either availed herself of some of the preventatives, so extensively advertised in great family newspapers, or neglected to own her illegitimate offspring. I cannot help but think that a love-child by Elizabeth and the courtly Raleigh would have been a great improvement on any of the soggy-headed things spawned by the House of Hanover. I do not apologize for nor condone the sexual frailties of distinguished females. The noblest career to which any woman can aspire is that of honest wifehood, and if she attains to that she is, though of mediocre mind, infinitely superior to the most famous wanton. It is worthy of remark that most distinguished women since the days of Sappho and Simiramis have been impure, while not a few great men have been remarkable for their continency. Woman has been called the weaker vessel, and certain it is that men stand the glamour of greatness, the temptations that come with riches, the white light that beats upon a throne, much better than do Eve's fair daughters. As a man becomes great, he respects more and more the accumulative wisdom of the world, becomes obedient. As a woman becomes great, she grows disdainful and rebellious. Thus it is that while in the common walks of life woman is infinitely purer than man, as we ascend into the higher realms, whether in art, letters, or statecraft, we discover a tendency to reverse this law until we often find great men anchorites and great women trampling on the moral code. There may be some who explain man's larger sexual liberty on physiological grounds, excuse it on the hypothesis of necessity. Physicians of the ultra-progressive school have even gone so far as to assert that continence in man is the chief cause of impotency, have pointed out that it is usually the wives of good men who go wrong, and insisted that to the former hypothesis must be attributed the latter fact. I am unable to find any reason in physiology why such a rule should not work both ways. I have said somewhere that man is naturally polygamous, and I might have added with equal truth that woman is naturally polyandrous. The difference is that women's sexual education began earlier and she has progressed somewhat further from a state of nature wherein free love is the law. Man early began to defend his prerogatives to strengthen the moral concept of his mate with a club to frame laws for the protection of his female property. The infraction of established custom soon came to be considered a social crime, an offensive which even the gods took cognizance. Woman's polyandrous instinct yielded somewhat to education. She was compelled to make the sacrifice upon the altar of society. Thus was female continence not a thing decreed by heaven or natural law, but was begotten of brute force. We see a survival of the old animalistic instinct in prostitution and the all too frequent illicit intercourse prevailing in the higher walks of life. Unquestionably, the Seventh Commandment is violative of natural law as applied to either sex. But most natural laws must be amended somewhat ere we can have even a semblance of civilization. Hence we cannot excuse men's peccadillos on the broad plea that it's the nature of the brute. Joseph and St. Anthony, Gautama and Sir Galahad, are ideals toward which men must ever strive with all his strength if he would purge the subsoil out of his system, would mount above the gutter where wallow the dumb beasts and take his place among the gods. The custom of thousands of years to the contrary not withstanding, it is damnable that a wife should be compelled to share a husband's caresses with lewd women. Tennyson assures us that as the husband is, the wife is. Fortunately for society this is false. Still there are thorns in the bed and rebelling in the heart of the woman who must play wife to a loveless or a lancelot. It is not true that it is the wives of good men who go astray. It is the wives who are naturally corrupt or morally weak. A talented lady contributor to the iconoclast once asserted that it is not for good women that men have done great deeds. Perchance this is true, for men who do great deeds are goaded thereto, not by the swish of Cronolin, but by the immortal gods. Such acts are bred in the bone, are born in the blood and brain, yet certainly is not for bad women that men soar at the sun, for every man worth the killing despises corruption in womankind. He worships unbended knee and with uncovered head at the shrines of Minerva and Dion, but amuses himself by stealth at that of the Pandemian Venus. When Antony deserted his Roman wife for Egypt's sensuous queen, he quickly became an innervated ass, and his name since force was Ichabod. Great Caesar dallied with the same dusky wanton, but ever in his intrepid heart ruled that woman above reproach. Alexander of Macedon refrained from making the wife of Persia's conquered king his mistress. Napoleon found time even among the thunders of war to write daily to his wife, and when he finally turned from her, it was not to seek a fairer flame, but to place a sun upon the throne of France. Grant stood forth in an era of unbridled license, unsullied as a god. Great men have been unfaithful through their marital vows, but it has been those of mediocre minds and India rubber morals who have cowered at the feet of mistresses, who have thrown their world away for richy kisses shared by others. While it is true that the world's intellectual titans have seldom been hevergins or feathered saints, they did not draw godlike inspiration from their own dishonor. End of Chapter 36. The Seventh Commandment Chapter 37 of Brand the Iconoclast Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Michelle Fry, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Chapter 37. Optimism vs. Pessimism The Preacher and the Apostle I am in receipt of a long letter from a Missouri minister in which, to my surprise, he says, I regret to note that you are a pessimist. Permit me to express the hope that so powerful a journal as the Iconoclast will yet espouse the sunny philosophy of optimism, which teaches that all that is, accords with the plan of the creator, and works together for the ultimate good. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. I had not hitherto suspected that I was inoculated with the awful microbes of pessimism. But if my reverend friend is a professor in the sunny school of optimism, I certainly do not belong to that sect. If all that is, accords with the plan of the creator, did not Christ deserve to be crucified for bringing about new conditions, and Galileo to go to jail for interfering with the stupid ignorance of certain Catholic cardinals? Can even the Missouri minister be held guiltless when he attempts to turn my thinking apparatus around and make it operate from the other end? Surely he should not interfere in even so slight a particular with the plan of the creator, who may have been moving in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform, when he gave the supposedly pessimistic bend to my mind. Nay, if my Christian friend do but have the rheumatism, should he not refrain from pole-dressing himself, lest he throw the celestial machinery out of gear? If changes wrought in religion, science, and government, etc., constitute a portion of the plan, we must concede it to have originally been a very faulty affair, quite upsetting the optimistic theory that whatever is is right. The terms pessimism and optimism are handled very loosely in these latter days. In the modern acceptance of the terms, the first may be defined as a chronic intellectual bellyache, the latter as an incurable case of Mossbackism. The thorough pessimist believes the world is going in hot haste to the damnation bow-wows, and that nothing short of a miracle can head it off. The full-fledged optimist carries concealed about his person and abiding faith that God ordereth all things well, that he not only designed the mighty universe, but is giving his personal attention to the details of its management. Really, I do not believe I am a pessimist to hurt, or that my reverent critic is so dangerously ill of the optimistic disease as he imagines. Perhaps he has been living too high for great intellectual effort, were he in the condition of some millions of his fellow creatures, the cuticle of whose abdomens is flapping against their vertebrae, like a wet dish-rag wrapping itself around a wire-closed line, perhaps there would not be quite so much sunshine in his philosophy. The man with whom the world goes well is apt to prattle of the ultimate good when considering the woes of other people. The basis of optimism is for ordination, the foolish faith, that before God created the majestic universe and sent the planets whirling about the blazing sun, that before the first star gleamed in the black overhanging firmament, or a single mountain peak rose from the watery waste, he calmly sat him down and mapped out every act of moral man, decreed every war and pestilence, the rise and fall of every nation, and fixed the date of every birth and death. That may be excellent orthodoxy, but it is not good sense. I reject the theory that all the happenings here below, accord with the plan of the Creator, work together for the ultimate good. Hence I am not an optimist. I dare not accuse my Creator of being responsible for all the sin and sorrow, suffering and shame, that since the dawn of history has bedewed the world with blood and tears. I do not believe the plan of the Creator contemplated that millions of people should perish miserably by war and famine and pestilence. I do not believe the black buck who ravishes and murders a white babe is one of the great moral agents of the Almighty, nor that the infamous act has any possible tendency to promote the ultimate good. And did I believe so, I would keep my shotgun loaded just the same. I do not believe that the blessed God intended there should ever be a liar or a thief, a prostitute or a murderer in this beautiful world. I do not believe that the Creator entered into a compact with the devil or a covenant with the cholera. And if not, then all that is does not accord with the plan of the Creator. If that be pessimism, make the most of it. That there is a divine plan I do not doubt, but I believe it to be broader, deeper, more worthy of the great Demurgus than that which pictures him telling a priest how to carve his pantaloons, or sacrifice a pair of pigeons, then standing idly by with his hands under his coattails while some drunken duffer beats the head off his better half with a boot jack or a bronze brute rips the scalp from a smiling babe. If that's the kind of a hairpin who occupies the throne of heaven, I don't blame Lucifer for raising a revolution. I would have taken a fall out of him myself, even had I known that my viscera would be strewn across the face of the shrinking universe. God gave us life and this grand old globe for habitat. He stored it with everything necessary to the health and happiness of the human race, poor at his treasures forth with a hand so bounteous that though its population were doubled, trebled, it might go on forever, and no mortal son of Adam need suffer for life's necessaries. The gaunt specters of want and pestilence are not of his creation. They were born of greed and ignorance. God sent no devil with hoops and horns to torment and tempt us. He gave to us passions necessary to the perpetuation and progress of the race and divine reason wherewith to rule them, then left us to work out our own salvation aided by those silent forces that are pressing all animate and inanimate life onward to perfection. Reason needs no celestial guide, no heavenly monitor, for it is the grandest attribute of God himself. Where reason sits enthroned, God reigns. For more than half a million years man has been toiling upwards impelled by that mysterious law that causes the pine to spring towards the sun. Sometimes the advances by leaps and bounds is when some giant intellect, some son of God, especially gifted with the attributes of his sire, brushes aside the obstructions at which lesser men toil in vain. Sometimes the car of progress stands still for a thousand years, else rolls slowly back towards brutishness. There being none of sufficient strength to advance the standards further up the rugged mountainside, nearer the celestial city. Thus ever in ebb and flow, gaining and losing, only to regain, nations rising and falling, but to serve as stepping stones were upon mount a nobler race, a grander people, the irrepressible conflict of the godlike with the beast-like in man goes bravely on. In half a million years we have come far, one many a fair field from the dominion of darkness. We no longer dwell in caves and hollow trees, fighting naked with the wild beasts of the forests for our prey. We have erected temples to the god that dwells not only in the heavens, but here on earth, in the brain and heart of the human race. We have made matter so far subject unto mind that nature's mighty forces have become our obedient bond slaves. We have built societies, nations, weighed the world and measured the stars. We have acquired not only knowledge and power, but love and modesty. The procreative passion no longer crawls a hideous thing, but sores a loft, a winged psyche. Thus one by one through the long ages have we built up within ourselves the attributes of the most high toward whom our feet are tending. Life is no longer mere animalism, content to gorge itself with roots and raw meat and sit in the sun. The ear craves melody, the eye beauty, the brain dominion, while the soul mounts to the very stars. Thus far have we come out of the valley of darkness, led on not by those who believe that all there is accords with the plan of the creator, but by those whose battle cry has ever been, forward forward let us range, let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. Every reformation yet wrought in religion, science or politics, was the work of men who declined to accept the doctrines enunciated by the Missouri divine. If I am a pessimist, I am in such excellent company as Confucius and Christ, General Washington and Mr. Gladstone, Professor Morse and Dr. Pasteur, while my critic is training with the gang that poisoned Socrates, bribed Iscariot and crucified the Saviour, and the world persists in judging a man by the company he keeps.