 Chapter 12 of the Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast. Volume 1 by William Cowper Bran. 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 12. Bradley Martin Belmasque. Après moi, le deluge. Mrs. Bradley Martin, Sartorial Kings and Pseudo-Queens, her dukes and doobarries, princes and pompadours, have strutted their brief hour upon the mimic stage, disappearing at daybreak like foul nightbirds or an unclean dream, have come and gone like the rank irruptation of some crappulous Sodom, a mal odor from the cloace of ancient capitals, a breath blown from the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots, a stench from the sepulcher of centuries devoid of shame. Uncle Sam may now proceed to fumigate himself after his enforced association with royal bummers and brazen bods, may comb the Bradley Martin-itch bacteria out of his beard, and consider for the tenth-thousandth time the probable result of his strange commingling of royalty-worshipping millionaire and sansculotic mendicant, how best to put a ring in the nose of the golden calf ere it become a phalaris bull and relegate him to its belly. Countless columns have been written, printed, possibly read, annant the Bradley Martin ball, all the preachers and teachers, editors and other able idiots pouring forth voluminous opinions. A tidal wave of printers ink has swept across the continent, churned to atrus foam by hurricanes of lawless gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab. The Empyrean has been ripped and the timpana of the two patient gods ravished with fulsome commendation and foolish curse, showers of Parthian arrows and wholesale consignments of soft soap darkening the sun as they hurdled hither and yon through the shrinking atmosphere. A man dropping suddenly in from Mars with a Nicaraguan canal scheme for the consideration of Uncle Sam would have supposed this simian hubbub and answering to do meant nothing less than a new epoch for the universe, it being undecided whether it should be oriferous or argentiferous, an age of gold or a cycle of silver. Now that the costly function has funked itself into howling farce and uncomfortable failure and the infascated revelers recovered somewhat from royal cats and jammer, we find that the majestic earth has not moved an inch out of its accustomed orbit, that the grass still grows and the cows yet calve, that the law of gravitation remains unrepealed and omnipotence continues to bring forth Masaroth in his season and guide Arcturus with his sons. For chance in time the American people may become ashamed of having been thrown into a panic by the painful effort of a pudgy parvenu to outdo even the Vanderbilt's in ostentatious vulgarity. Reverend Billy Cursan's Rainsford cannot save this country with his mouth nor can Mrs. Bradley Martin wreck it with her money. It is entirely too large to be permanently affected by the folly of any one fool. Preacher and parvenu were alike making a grand stand play. Now that the world has observed them and not without interest, let us hope that they will subside for a little season. This dame, du Barry extravaganza was not without significance to those familiar with history and its penchant for repetition, but was by no means an epoch maker. It was simply one more festering sore on the syphilitic body social another unclean maggot industriously wriggling in the melodious carcass of a canine. It was another evidence that civilization is in a continual flux, flowing now forward, now backward, a brutal confession that the New World aristocracy is using at present through the Armida Palace or Don Daniel of Dubaridum. The Bradley Martins are henceforth entitled to wear their ears interlaced with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their set. They won the burrow penant honestly, if not easily daylight being plainly visible between their foam crested cropper and the panting nostrils of the Vanderbilt's. They are now monarch of Raghfair, Chief Giastecuti of the boundless realm of Nessians and Noodledom. Mrs. Bradley Martin has triumphed gloriously, raised herself by her own garters to the vulgar throne of vanity, the deus of the almighty dollar. She is now Delphic Oracle of Doodle Bugs and Herophant of the Hot Stuff. Viva Regina, likewise rats. Like most of New York's aristocracy, she is of even nobler lineage than Lady Vair de Vair, daughter of a hundred earls, having been sired by a duly registered American sovereign early in the present century. His coat of arms was a Cooper's Ads rampant, a beer barrel Couchant and the motto, two heads are better than one. By wearing his neighbor's cast off clothes and feeding his family on cornbread and sowbelly, he was able to lay the foundation of that fortune, which has made his daughter, Facile Princep of New York's patricians, John Jacob Astor, who acted as royal consort to the Cooper's regal daughter in the quadril d'honneur, is likewise descended from noble knights of labor, and dames of high degree. He traces his lineage in unbroken line to that haughty Johann Jacob, who came to America in the steerage, wearing a limb burger, Lindsay Woolsey, and a pair of wooden shoes. Beginning life in the new world as a rat catcher, he soon acquired a gallon jug of Holland Gin, a peck of Burma Gin jewelry, and robbed the aborigines right and left. He wore the same shirt the year round, slept with his dogs and invested his grossions in such Manhattan dirt as he could conveniently transport upon his person. Thus, he enabled his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on unearned increment that some of them must force wear their fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Europe a society whose rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culture. Mrs. Bradley Martin does not exactly look every inch a queen, her horizontal having developed at the expense of her perpendicular, suggesting the rather robust physique of her father's beer barrels. Still, she is an attractive woman, having the ruddy complexion of an unlicked postage stamp, and the go as you please features of a Turkish carpet. Her eyes are a trifle to ferrity, but the osculatory power of her mouth in old Langzine must have been such as to give cupid spinal curvature. Her nose retreats somewhat precipitately from the chasm. But whether that be its original pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls is a secret hidden in her own heart. Like Willie Wally Aster, she finds the customs of this country too crass to harmonize with her super sensitive soul and spends much time dangling about the titled slobs on the other side. Some time ago, she purchased the Episcene young Earl of Craven as husband for her daughter in the humble hope of mixing cupid and cornets and may yet be grandma to some little Lord bunghole or fair Lady Ferkin. As a pusher in society, she can give points to Mrs. Potter Palmer, or the wife of a millionaire pork packer. Although she has seen the bluff of the notorious Smith Vanderbilt Belmont female and raised her out of her bunion repositories, she has probably not yet reached the summit of her social ambition. Bread to shabby gentility, Miss Alva Smith proceeded to splurge when she captured a Vanderbilt. She had probably never seen a hundred dollar bill until permitted to finger the fortune of the profane old ferryman who founded her husband's aristocratic family. She was a parvenu, a nouveau riche, and could not rest until she had proclaimed that fact by squandering half a million of the man's money, whom she subsequently dishonored on the ball, which Mrs. Bradley Martin set herself to beat. Having been divorced for a cause, she proceeded to crown her gosheries by purchasing for her lignus based daughter, a disreputable Duke who owes his title to a grand aunt's infamy, is the descendant of a plebeian who rose to power by robbing dead soldiers and prostituting his sister to a prince. Mrs. Bradley Martin has trumped two of her rival's cards, and a social game like Seven Up is never out till it's played out. The denunciation of the ball by Dr. Rainsford proved him not only a notoriety-seeking preacher, but a selfish parasite who lacks sufficient sense to disguise his hypocrisy. It contained not one word of protest against the amassing of enormous fortunes by the few at the expense of the many, not a single plea for justice to a despoiled people, not one word of Christian pity for their woes. It was simply a warning, foolishly flung from the housetop instead of whispered in the closet, that such reckless waste would breed discontent in the home of want, would make demagogues and agitators dangerous. Dr. Rainsford would not alter but conceal existing conditions. His theory is that robbery is all right so long as the people do not rebel, thereby imperiling the system by which they are despoiled. From his fashionable pulpit and sumptuous home he hurls forth his anathema marinata at those who would presume to abridge the prescriptive rights of the plutocracy, who doubt that grinding penury in a land bursting with fatness is pleasing to the all-father. He would by no means curtail the wealth of thieves or better the condition of Lazarus, but thinks it good policy for the former to refrain from piling his plate so high in the presence of the hungry plebs lest the latter cease crying for crumbs and swipe the tablecloth. Dr. Rainsford is a paid servant of thieves, his duly ordained pandorus. His duty is to tickle his master's jaded pallet with spiritual treacle seasoned with Jamaica ginger to cook up sensations as antidotes for ennui. If the agitators cause a seismic upheaval that will wreck the plutocracy, what is to become of the fashionable preachers? Dr. Rainsford would not abolish Belchazar's feast. He would but close the door and draw the blinds, that God's eye may not look upon the inequity, nor his finger trace upon the frescoed walls, the fateful men-men, tekel upharasen. Save thy breath, good doctor, to cool thy dainty broth, for mad with pride thy master hears, nor heeds the gavel of the goose beneath his walls, nor the watchdog's warning. Nor thy bone in peace for the people schooled to patients and amused with panaceas will scarce resent the trampling of one more parvenu upon their necks. Be she ever so broad of beam. If some years hence they should rise against the robbers, led on by dangerous demagogues, repine not for every dog sacerdotal or otherwise can but have his day. Turgid Talmadge must likewise unload. Talmadge, who presumes to teach not only theology but political economy, who interlards his sermons with strange visions of heaven, dreams of hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to make a people terrestrially prosperous. He, like thousands of able editors, apologizes for such vulgar extravagance by urging that it puts money in circulation, makes business better, and helps the people by supplying employment. Has the world passed into its dotage or simply become an universal asylum for idiots? If wanton waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam has but to squander in Balmask or other debauchery his 75 billions of wealth to inaugurate an industrial boom. To gratify their taste for the barbaric, to advertise themselves to all the earth as the eastern termini of westbound equines, the Bradley Martins wiped out of existence $500,000 of the world's wealth, leaving just that much less available capital for productive enterprises. They might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of that value. It is urged that labor was employed and paid quite true, but tell me thou resounding ministerial vacuum, thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product? What has society to show for the expenditure of this energy? A hole in its working capital, a hiatus in its larder caused by employing and sustaining labor not to produce but to destroy. Prodigality on the part of the rich personally benefits a few parasites, just as the bursting of a molasses barrel fattens useless flies. But waste by reducing the amount of wealth available for reproduction breeds general want. A thousand editors have screamed in leaded type that it were worse for the wealthy to hoard than waste. Thou lunatics, go learn the difference between a car and its load of cotton, a bolt of muslin and that wherewith it is measured. A nation's wealth and its exchange media. What does a man with the wealth he hoards? Does he not seek to make it earn an increment? Concentration of capital may be bad for the people, but destruction of capital takes the tools from their hands and the food from their lips. The court of Louis XV, which American snobs have just expended half a million trying to imitate, likewise made business better by wasting wealth. Madame Duberi posing as public benefactress and receiving no end of anconium from Paris shopkeepers, jewel merchants, and Mantua makers. Much money was put in circulation and labor employed in furnishing forth the transient splendors of players and prostitutes. But somehow France did not prosper. Finally, not even the pitiless screws of the tax farmer could ring blood from the national turnip. The working capital of France was so far consumed that her people stood helpless, perishing of hunger. Finally, Madame Duberi was supplanted as public benefactress by one with an even sharper tang to her tongue, namely La Belle Guillotine, who blithely led the quadrille d'Aunere, with a robespierre for concert, to music furnished gratis by the raucous throats of ragged Saint Scoulotte. Instead of lords and ladies treading the stately minuet inverse size saloons adorned with beauty roses, the bare feet of hungry men beat time to the fierce carmagnol on Parisian pavements. It is not a little suggestive that the participants in this foolish fandango should have turned for inspiration to the court of Louis XV, whose debauchery and depravity the historian declares had not been paralleled since the year of Tiberius and Commodus, that the Bradley Martin function should have been copied from the extravaganzas of a harlot. What glorious exemplars for New York's 400, a dissolute king and a woman thus apostrophized by Thomas Carlisle. Thou unclean thing, what a course was thine from that first trucker bed where thy mother bore thee to an unnamed father, forward through lowest subterranean depths and over highest sunlit heights of harlot dumb and rascal dumb, to the Guillotine ax which shears away thy vainly whimpering head of the 350 male revelers more than one hundred were costumed as Louis XV, while but three considered Washington worthy of imitation. Was this the result of admiration in New York's hopper suckles for this wretched roi fannyant, or king do nothing, whose palace was a brothel and whose harlots stripped his subjects of their paltry earnings and left them to perish? Louis XV, who permitted his country to be ruined, its revenues squandered, its provinces lost, and half a million men sent to an untimely death that a prostitute might be revenged for an epigram. Is that the kind of man our money lords admire? Louis lived until the Fleur de Lille of France was struck down in every land and dishonored on every sea, then died, deserted by his drabs, cursed by his country, and was consigned to the grave and the devil as unceremoniously as though he were a dead dog. And now more than one hundred men who have stripped the people to enhance the splendor of palaces don the royal robes of this godless rake and do homage to bogus dubaris. Small wonder that Dr. Rainsford feared such colossal impudence might serve to remind Americans how France got rid of royalty, might evoke a horse growl from the many-headed monster, might cause some dangerous demagogue to stir perchance-danton. Fit, patron saint, for our own plutocracy is this swinish king, once called Bien Am, the well-beloved, but after some thirty years of Bradley Martinism named Am Debut, a soul of mud, how much our super-select society resembles the Madame Dubaris, the Duke d'Aguillon, and Abbe Therese, who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head of the nations. Suggestive indeed that at the swellest of all swell affairs in the American metropolis, there should appear, according to the press dispatches, ten Madame de Pompadour, eight Madame de Maintenance, four Madame de la Valière, and three Catherine's of Russia. Good god, has our best society come to such a pass that its proudest ladies delight to personate notorious prostitutes? There was no Racine or Molière, no Charlotte Corday, or Madame de Stel. The men posed as profligate kings, the women as courtesans, yet in that same city young Mr. Sealy is arrested for looking at a naked dancing girl, and little Egypt has to cut it when she hears the cops. And what is the difference, pray, between a Pompadour and a five-point nymph dupave? Simply this, the one rustles in silks for diamonds, the other hustles and rags for bread, their occupation being identical. New York was Tory, even in revolutionary times. From its very foundation, it has been at the feet of royalty and mouthing of divine right. It is ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its idolatry, its knees and nose on the earth, its tail feathers in the air. But we had yet to learn that it considered that divinity which doth behead you king capable of sanctifying a woman's shame, transforming a foul Lehman into an angel of light. Catherine of Russia was an able woman, but a notorious harlot, foul as Milton's portraits of hell. A woman who as Byron informs us loved all he things except her husband. Is that why the masqueraders preferred the character of Empress Catherine to that of Martha Washington? Did they consider it more in keeping with the company? Strange that each Russian Empress was not attended by a few of her favorite grenadiers with the fair-faced Lanskoy, her boy lover thrown in as Lagniapp. More than 100 Louis the 15th and only 10 pompadours. What a pity. But we may presume that each pompadour like the frail original was in herself a host, eight maintenance, four valiers and only one Louis the 14th present to look after his personal property. How proud a genuine American gentleman, one untainted with royalist fever, would have felt to see his wife or daughter posing as the Lehman of Lanskoy, of Louis the 15th, or Le Grand Monarch, of whom three-eyed Billy of England once said that he selected young men for his ministers and corrupt old cats for his mistresses. Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers, and the be-disened gang didn't get half the fun out of it, that a party of country yaps will extract from a candy-pulling or a husking bee. The pompadours and doobarries didn't know how. Louis the 15th went around by himself in droves, stiff and uncomfortable as a Presbyterian Sunday school, wishing every time his rapier galled his keeps or tangled his royal legs that he had remained comfortably dead in that dog hole at Saint Denis. There was entirely too much formality for fun. The next time New York's toad-eaters give a balmask, they should disguise themselves as American sovereigns and their consorts. Of course it will be a trifle difficult for them to play the part of respectable people, but they will find even awkward effort in that direction refreshing and calculated to inspire them with respect for their country's flag. End of Chapter 12. The Bradley Martin Balmask Chapter 13 of the complete works of Bran the Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Cowper Brand. 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 13. A pilgrimage to perdition. Sir Edwin Arnold is a profound optimist and apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said to a reporter, The course of mankind is constantly towards perfection. I believe in humanity. I believe in the world's great future. The trend of human events emphasizes the truth of this statement. Though we may be horrified today by reading of a brute who butchers his wife. These events should not shake our faith. If we look at the matter philosophically, we will see that they are a diminishing series, and that the world is growing grander and nobler. End of quote. Optimism is a delightful thing, but is too frequently the result of ignorance. Sir Edwin is a learned and talented man, but he is evidently a stranger to the great world, which he discusses so complacently and approvingly. The savon reposing in a palace chair, which is rushing through the midnight storm at a rate of 50 miles an hour, regards his situation with composure. But the unlettered engineer whose eye is on the track, who notes every slippery curve, a swollen stream and overhanging boulder who feels the motive power of that proud train swaying and plunging like a restless demon beneath his feet is apt to be anxious enough. Sir Edwin is a palace car passenger on the great world train and knows little of the perils of the track. His coach rolls smooth. He takes his ease and indulges in optimistic moralizing while those who serve him look death in the face so frequently that they learn to mock him. They take desperate chances that may plunge them down to destruction and drag all else after. It has been my lot to look at life from the cab windows from the point of view of the man with the grimy hand and the soil jacket. While Sir Edwin has been contemplating with dreamy interest, the far away purple hills, I have been compelled to scrutinize less rain to objects closer at hand. Hence it is not strange that my opinion of the world should differ somewhat from that entertained by the speculative author of the Light of Asia. In brief, Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth and success which makes Earth a paradise for the few. I, something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs and which he contemplates so approvingly is but a gold leaf on the graven image. The bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos of fierce despair, which will someday rip it into a million ribbons, an act and all embracing French revolution that will sweep the car of progress back a thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood and fire. If Sir Edwin had explored the infernal vortex beneath his feet, he would not talk so complacently of the trend of human events. For the benefit of Sir Edwin and many other wealthy and cultured palace car passengers who amuse themselves with theories, who infer that because human slavery is abolished in the Occident and the thrones of the Orient are beginning to totter before the might of democracy, because science is marching on to triumph after triumph and no Spanish inquisition or English court of high commission longer casts its upas shadow a thwart the hearts of men. The great world is growing nobler and better. I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that perdition, which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well defined latitude and longitude is visual, tatual, in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from the cradle to the grave. It is no long journey to the portals of the netherworld. In many accostally church, the worshippers may hear during the rest in the doxology the shrieks of the damned. A walk of a few blocks at most in any of our great and many of our smaller American cities will enable us to enter that earthly Gehenna whose horrors the pen of Dante could scarce picture, which threatens to engulf the world. Even in Texas, a land so favored by the gods, so blessed with brave men and noble women, we may enter the perlius of the place of pain, across whose portal is inscribed the legend, O dark despair, may commune with all Gehenna's grizzly gorgons and witness the writhings of thousands of wretched creatures beneath the fierce fire whips of the infernal furies. Let us take a typical American city, not that here we are nearer the great red heart of hell than are the people of other lands. What is true of one is true in greater or lesser degree of every city throughout the world. We will suppose the city we are to examine to contain a million inhabitants. We will pause to contemplate its miles of broad streets and magnificent buildings, its imposing schools and scores of costly churches that rear their symmetrical spars far into the Imperian and fill the great dome with their melodious chimes, its marble fountains and costly plants which ravage the senses with sweet perfumes, its wealth and wisdom, luxury and learning, its philanthropic people and happy homes where peace reigns and plenty ever smiles. That is one side of the shield, the one upon which the Arnold's and Talimages have looked so long that they forget there is any other, that the golden veil may hide the face of a fury or a fiend. The clock is proclaiming night and sins high noon, follow me and I will show you why I do not believe in humanity quite so implicitly as does Sir Edwin. Why even Dr. Talmage has failed to wean me from the awful sin of pessimism. It is not necessary to linger long in the low concert halls and brothels where girls scarce in their teens are made the prey of the rum-enflamed passions of brutes old enough to be their grandsires, where old Ruiz, many of whose names are a power on change, bid against each other for half-developed maids whose virginity is certified to by a physician where green gocks from the country are made drunk with cheap wines sold to them at fancy prices by courtesans, plucked and turned over to a subsidized police if they protest, where hundreds of pure girls are entrapped, drugged and ruined every day of the world. These social ulcers are so protrusive have been written up so frequently by enterprising young reporters who naively suppose that to expose was to suppress that even optimistic Dr. Talmage must at least be cognizant that such places exist, even in Brooklyn which enjoys the supernal blessing of his direct administrations and from which moral mecca his sounding sentences are transmitted by the vicarious apostles of the press to all men who possess a penchant for light literature. One glance into the low gambling dens where haggard creatures created in God's image but long ago degraded below the brute level, nightly waste the few pints which they pick up, heaven alone knows how, perhaps by selling the virtue of their daughters, robbing their wives of ill-got gains or plundering the pockets of drunken laborers. We may pass by the opium joints where women of all ages and classes lie for hours stupid with filthy fumes at the mercy of bestial orientals and drunken negroes. Also those dives devoted to forms of debauchery so debased that many ablaze man of the world does not believe their existence more than a demoniacal dream. These are vortices of vice, too fearfully foul for eyes of ought but fiends, the air too putered for lungs that inhale that of pure and happy homes. We must shun those plague spots, else bear false witness to the world, for any true pen picture of their hell-born horrors would, like Medusa's awful face, turn all who gaze thereon to stone. We must content ourselves with traveling the perlius of perdition, the sulfur fumes of those profounder depths of degradation being too strong for lungs accustomed to chant optimistic lays, the glare of the burning, moral, too fierce for eyes used only to vernal meads and still waters. But even here in the purgatorium as it were, sights and sounds calculated to appall the stoutest heart are not wanting. Here stalks the demon poverty. He is by no means so hideous as some of his brethren of the infernal hierarchy and perchance we may inspect his dominions without succumbing to moral hysteria. Poverty, what do you know of it my well-fed optimistic friends? You pay your taxes, give a few pens to the beggar at the street corner, perhaps contribute a few dollars to this or the other relief fund that does not relieve and wonder that people do not go to work and earn their bread. There is always work for those who really want it, one of you complacently informs me. Are you quite sure in a city like this we are traversing? I have seen 50,000 men who really wanted work and could not find it. 50,000 unemployed, destitute and desperate people in one city. I was one of the number. Why didn't they scatter you will ask? Where there should they go and how? Take to the snow-clad country, be arrested as vags and hurt it as criminals? For my part I did scatter. Tramped 100 miles in a northern winter without food and found three days employment. Loading ice into boxcars. Many of those 50,000 idle men had families to support. How did they do it? Now you are getting into hell. Come with me and I will show you thousands of families in this city alone who have not had in six months as good a meal as could be picked out of your garbage barrel. Hundreds of families that sleep this winter night on the bare floor of filthy tenements are huddled like swine on an armful of foul rags and straw. Delicate women and children dying for lack of proper warmth and nourishment. Hundreds of men who regard it as a godsend to get arrested that they might have shelter from the piercing winds of the night and a bite to eat in the morning. Put your head into this ten cent lodging house if you want to get some new ideas regarding the trend of humanity. Glance into this low groggery but one of several thousand in this great city and size up the gang before being too sure that a pessimist is simply a person troubled with a super abundance of black bile. Of the million people who make up this great city probably six hundred thousand are already plunged deep in the abyss where look want and crime or trembling on its verge and the number who thus live from hand to mouth who feel that they have no stake in the country that God and man are against them is ever on the increase. That verdant sun-kissed crust upon which Arnold's complacently saunter and talmages proudly strut grows thinner year by year while the fires below wax even hotter, more turbulent, more explosive. Would you know how thin this crust actually is? How fissured and honey combed from beneath until it can scare sustain its own weight and the sulfur fumes ever rise through it like steam going through a sieve? Inspect the city government and note how and what constitutes the controlling power. When you learn as you will if you examine carefully that those thousands of vile drinking dents dictate who shall be our public servants and what laws we shall live under, that the madam of the fashionable bagneo is more potent at police headquarters than any delegation of the YMCA, that no whereas or resolution of philanthropists can withstand the fiat of the ward bosses, that everywhere there is collusion with criminals and jobbery perhaps you will not be quite so certain of the world's great future. Do you turn to the church to make good the promise of the optimist? Let us explore the amen corner and see how many pious souls we shall find there whose incomes are chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral purposes. Even while I write I see an old white-haired man whose power in prayer is the pride of his church making his rounds, collecting his monthly stipend from the keepers of negro brothels and the lowest grade of drinking dents, places where nightly assemble people of all ages, colors and sexes and enact scenes that might bring a blush to even the brazen front of Belial. The church? What is it doing to extinguish the well-nigh sureless ghana that threatens to engulf it? Drilling an auger hole here and there in the thin crust and pouring in a few drops of water or oil as the case may be, founding a few missions, distributing a little dole, sending a few bibles to the heathen to offset the much bad whisky supplied them by Christian countries, perfecting its choir and sending its pastor to the Orient to hunt for confirmation of holy scriptures amid the mummified cats of Egypt or the horrid trash of Palestine. What is true of the city is true though unless a degree of the country. If you think our agricultural brethren have no taste of hell, examine the list of mortgages. If you do not believe that Molach is the presiding deity of commerce, visit Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, or worst of all, our own Wall Street. In olden times men who despoiled others were called pirates and banditi were execrated by honest men, anathematized by the church, a price set upon their heads by the state, yet they never pretended to be other than what they were. They did their devilish work openly with the strong hand. Wall Street is a den of banditi who rob, not by open force, but by secret fraud. The tool of the 17th century freebooter was the flashing sword, that of his 19th century successor, the cowardly and sneaking lie. The first pillaged a few ships, towns, and castles, the latter plunders hundreds of thousands every year of the world and has the sublime audacity to come into court and plead that his business is both legitimate and necessary. And so rotten is society, so prostrate does it cower before the golden calf, that the buccaneer, instead of being bastinadoed or beheaded, is crowned with bays. How can we harmonize these stubborn facts with Sir Edwin's view that the course of mankind is constantly toward perfection? Of course we should look at the matter philosophically. The travel is that too many contend themselves merely with philosophizing and do not look at the matter at all, but only at some optimistic far-fetched theory thereof. It is very pleasant to close our eyes and believe, if we can, that the world is gradually working out its salvation, that it is steadily growing grander and nobler, to preach against the sins of pessimism. But unfortunately the stubborn fact is all too palpable, that the shadow of the social world grows ever broader and deeper, that while the sunlight guilds the mountaintops, the great valleys wherein are congregated the millions of poor people who have no work are buried in chimerion night. If Sir Edwin and Dr. Talmadge will but listen, they may hear shrieks of woe and wail, not unmingled with bitter curses cleaving that inky pawl. May hear voices proclaiming, let there be light, though the world blaze for it. Progress, we boast of progress, progress wither, from the slavery of the auction block and the catanine tails to that of the great industrial system where souls as well as bodies are bought and sold, where wealth is created as by the magic wand of a genie or the touch of gold accursed King Midas, while thousands and tens of thousands beg in God's great name for the poor privilege of wearing out their wretched lives in the brutal treadmill to barter their blood for a scanty crust of black bread and beg in vain, then finding the world against them, turn their hands against the world, become recruits to the great army of crime. From the childlike simplicity where a man saw and adored the deity in all his works, heard his laughter in the ripple of the stream, his voice in the thunderstorm, and saw his anger in the writhing boat, to the presentation of skepticism where he can see his creator nowhere and blinder than his barbarian ancestors, knowing more of processes but less of principles, protests that force is the only demurgus, dead matter, the only immortal. Progress towards greatness, greatness of what? Certainly not of the individual for the present conditions tend toward mediocrity. Greatness of state? What does eternity know of states that to promote their welfare immortal souls should be sacrificed? Why toil and travail suffer and sin for toy balloons which destiny will whistle down the winds? There are entirely too many self-commissioned watchmen who like Sir Edwin sit at ease in their boxes and cry all's well, meaning thereby that it is so with them. Too many seers who look into their own cozy back parlors and imagine that they are standing on a merseys hill and reading the riddle of human life. Too many listening enchanted to their own sweet voices and mistaking the sound for a worldwide peon of praise are at least the drowsy hum of human content. Such are blind heroes who complacently fiddle while Rome is, if not actually burning, yet filled to overflowing with combustibles ready to burst into flame. End of Chapter 13 A Pilgrimage to Perdition. Chapter 14 of The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast, Volume 1, by William Cowper Bran. 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 Brian Keenan. Chapter 14 The Platonic Friendship Fake. A charming little lady, the front elevation of whose name is Stella, takes pen in hand and gives the icon a red-hot roast for having intimated that platonic love, so-called, is a pretty good thing for respectable women to let alone. Judged by the amount of caloric she generates, Stella must be a star of the first magnitude, or even an entire constellation. She believes in the pure, passionless love described by Plato as sometimes existing between the sexes, the affinities of mind as distinguished from the carnal lusts of matter, and opines that the apostle must be gross indeed not to comprehend this philosophic and highly satisfactory companionship. Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high like a diamond in the sky. I plead guilty and cast myself upon the mercy of the court. I sourfully admit that my aestheticism is not 18 carats fine, but mixed with considerable slag. When I should have been acquiring the higher culture, I was either playing hooky or planting hogs. Instead of being fed on the transcendental philosophy of Plato, I was stuffed with mealy Irish spuds and homegrown punk and pie. When I should have been learning to relish pâté d'fois gras and love my neighbor's wife in a purely passionless way, I was following one of McCormick's patents around a 40-acre field, or arguing a point of ethics with a contumatious mule. That I am unable to appreciate that platonic yearning of soul to soul, that deep calling unto deep on which Stella dotes, is my misfortune rather than my fault. It appears to me too much like voting the prohibition ticket, or playing poker with confederate currency. When I love a woman, I love her up one side and down to other. I may be an uncultured and barbaric noodle, but I want to get hold of her and bite her neck. I want to cuddle her sunny curls on my heaving shirt front when I talk to her about affinities. I believe with Tennyson in the spirits rushing together at the touching of the lips, and I just let them rush. Men may esteem women and enjoy their society with never a thought of sex. I have many female friends, some white-haired grand-doms, some mere girls in short dresses. But for their kindly interest and encouragement, I would have cast aside the favour and fled to the desert long ago. The friendship of a noblewoman is life's holiest perfume. But that is not the affinity of souls, the supernatural spooning, the platonic yum-yum for which Ferre-Stella pleads. Love, as I understand the term, is to friendship's non-consuming flame what the fierce glare of the noonday sun is to the mild radiance of the harvest moon. It is something which makes two people of opposite sexes absolutely necessary to each other. It is a glory in which the soul is bathed, an almost savage melody that beats within the blood. It is—oh, damn it—it's that which transforms a snub-nosed dairymaid into a Grecian goddess, a bench-legged farmer boy into a living Apollo Belvedere. Love is love forevermore, differing in degree but never in kind. The Uranian is but the nobler nature of the Pandemian Venus, not another entity. Love is not altogether of the earth earthy. It is born of the spirit as well as of the flesh, of the perfume, as of the beauty of the great red rose. Few of those women who have led captive the souls of the intellectual titans of the world could boast of wondrous beauty. The moment man passes the pale of savagery, he demands something more than mere physical perfection in a companion. Purity, gentleness, dignity. Such are the three graces of womanhood that oft times make Cupid forgive a shapeless bosom and adore a homely face. The love of a parent for a child is the purest affection of which we can conceive. Yet is the child the fruition of a love that lies not ever in the clouds. Platonic affection, so called, is but confluence smallpox masquerading as measles. Those who have it may not know what ails them, but they've got a simple case of spoons all the same. If Stella were my dear heart's better part, and tried to convince me that she felt a purely platonic affection for some other fellow, I'd apply for a writ of injunction, or lay for my transcendental rival with a lignum of ID club loaded to scatter. Nobody could convince me that the country was secure. The platonic racket is being sadly overworked in swell society. Like charity it covers a multitude of sins. Married women go scouting around at all hours and in all kinds of places with platonic lovers, until the old man feeds a few slugs into a muzzle-loading gun and lets the platonism leak through artificial holes in the height of some gay gallant. When madame must have her bow, and maids receive attention from married men, there's something decayed in the moral denmarks. Mrs. Tilton thought she felt a platonic affection for Henry Ward Beecher, who was simply worshipping at the shrine of his genius, but she made as bad a mess of it as though she had called her complaint concubiscence. Even here in Texas, where we do preserve a faint adembration of the simplicity and virtue of ye olden time, it is no uncommon thing to see a chipper married female who moves in the best society, flitting about with some fellow who's recognized, as the servant say, as her steady company. But as we have improved on the Pompeian House of Joy, so have we added to the French fashion of married flirtation a new and interesting feature. The French allow maids but little liberty so far as male companionship is concerned. But we remove the bridal altogether, and while the matron flirts with the bachelor, the maid appropriates the lonesome Benedict. All the old social laws have been laid on the shelf, and life rendered a veritable go as you please. In real life there is no pure platonic affection, whatever may be tied in fiction. No man waits upon another's wife, provides her with carriages and cut flowers, opera tickets, and wine suppers, with never a suspicion of sex. And no maid who values her virtue will receive marked attentions from a married man. When a virgin finds an affinity, she should steer it against a marriage contract at the earliest possible moment. When a wife discovers one to whom she is not wedded, she should employ a bread-and-water diet to subdue her natural supernaturalism and reinforce her religion with a season of penitence and prayer. End of Chapter 14, Recording by Brian Keen Chapter 15 of The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Calper Brann 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 Betsy Walker, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chapter 15, Tientafua Though thorny the pathway neath our feet, though nothing in life be left that sweet, though friends prove faithless in trial's hour, and love a cursed and poisonous flower, though beelial stalk in priestly gown and virtue's reward is fortune's frown, though true heart's bleed and the coward's slave tramples in dust the fallen brave. Think not the unworthy acts of men will scape the recording angel's pen. The sword of God in ruin and wraith will surely fall, O cling to thy faith. Though worldly wise say it cannot be that there's a heaven for thee and me, though logic's banner they have unfurled and by its cold light now view the world, calling high God to the courts of man to be judged by human reasons span, and failing to grasp the power divine will blindly assert it doth not shine. Thy mother was wiser far than they in twilight hour when she knelt to pray, a radiant light on her sweet face, from eternal God's high dwelling place. Low here, low here, the false prophets cry, pointing out new paths unto the sky, far pleasanter than our father's trod with bleeding feet in the fear of God, while atheists laugh our faith to scorn and say that no man of woman born ever pierced the evil or caught a gleam of the mystic land beyond life's stream. That our fondest hopes, our prayers and sighs for life eternal beyond the skies, our superstitions conceived in fear and cherished by priest and lying seer. The martyr's blood, the penitent's tears, the inspired word of Judea's seers, the name of God on the sacred mount, the river that poured from rocky fount, in the burning sands beneath the rod, obedient to the will of God, the prayers and sighs in Gethsemane, the red tide gushing on Calvary, the radiant smile when life is done of saint that tells that heaven is one, shall we say tis all a priestly lie, and like soulless beasts lie down to die? Ah, better would be to ride in mail a weary quest for the holy grail, wield Saxon's steel against Saracen's sword around the sepulcher of our lord. Sea cross and crescent and mailed hand all plashed with blood in that sacred land, then doubt that heaven air shed its light deep into this world's long, troubleous night, that God hears our prayers, knows all our pains, that earthly sorrows are heavenly gains, that the graves the gate to lasting life, unsullied by sorrow, pain, and strife. Oh, better worship at Pagan Shrine, or prophet of Islam in at thine, to seek nirvana in Buddhist lore, or pray to Isis on Ephricks shore, better the dark mysterious rites of Ceres on Illusion Heights, better the Goebbah's fierce god of fire, oh, better to wake the trembling liar to any Savior than to be hurled godless and hopeless out of the world, to madly plunge in death's dark river, lost to life and heaven forever. In dark seas where the whirlpool rages stands the eternal Rock of Ages, amid dangers dire, mid-wreck, and wraith, God plants the banner of Christian faith, unworthy the sailor whose heart doth fail when the god of storms rides on the gale, cowered the soldier who shuns the grave, and thrice accursed the trembling slave, who in life's battles darkest hour renounce his god and denies his power. Then tiens d'affois through the bitter strife, oh, cling to the cross through death to life. End of Chapter 15 Tiens d'affois Recording by Betsy Walker Chapter 16 Thomas Carlisle Of a recent edition of Carlisle's Heroes and Hero Worship, it is said that 100,000 copies are already sold. The work has been on the market many years, and this continued popularity is indeed encouraging. It argues that the taste for the legitimate, the sane in literature, has not yet been drowned in the septic sea of the Fendicieco Slop, that despite the innervating influence of an all-pervasive sensationalism or ciberatism, there be still minds capable of relishing the rugged strong enough to digest the mental pabulum furnished by a really masculine rider. Carlisle ranges like an archangel through the universe of intellect, overturning mountains to see how they are made. Now cleaving the imperian with strong and steady wing, now shearing clear down to the profoundest depths of Emer's well at the foundations of the world. That his followers continue to increase argues well for the age, for he is a man whom weaklings should avoid if they would not be sawed in plain by mountain chains, for ever lost in pathless limbo's are drowned in the unmeasured deep. Even the strongest must perforce part company with him at times, else follow with the eye of faith. For his path off leads up into that far region where mortals can scarce breathe, over Valpergus' peaks through bottomless chasms and along the filmy edge of clouds. The admirers of Carlisle, may their tribe increase, are indignant because one Edmund Goss, in his introduction to the late edition of heroes and hero worship, alludes to the line of modern literature as an undignified human being growling like an ill-bred collie dog. They take Mr. Goss too seriously, dignify him with their displeasure. James Anthony Frude, a literary gun of much heavier caliber than Mr. Goss appears to us from this passing glimpse, once wrote, if I remember a right, in a similar vein of the grizzled sage. But the young kind critique has been forgotten, and its author is fast following it into oblivion, while the shade of Carlisle looms ever larger, towering already above the titans of his time, reaching even to the shoulder of Shakespeare. Goss? Who is this presumptuous fellow who would take Carlisle in tutelage, foist himself upon the attention of the public by making a peep-show of the great essayist's faults? There is, or was, a pugilist named Goss, or Goss. But as he did not deal foul blows to the dead, this must be a different breed of dogs. Sometimes, since, there lived a little Englishman named William Edmund, or Edmund William Goss, or Goss. But I had hitherto supposed that, becoming disgusted with himself, he crawled off and died. As I remember him, he was a kind of half-baked potaster, or heeble-bull, or Johanna's factotum in the province of dilatantism, a universal smart ally who knew less about more things than any other animal in England. He was one of those persistently pestiferous insects, tersely called by Carlisle, critic flies, a descendant of that placed by Aesop in St. Paul's cupola. They presumed to judge all things great and small by their half-inch vision. Take the measure of cathedrals and interpret to the world the meaning of brainy men. Unfortunately, the critic fly is confined to no one nation, is what might be called in vigorous Texanese, and all pervading damn nuisance. Mounted upon a mole, pimple, or other cutaneous imperfection of an intellectual colossus, it complacently smooths its wings and explains, with a patronizing air, that the bigon isn't half bad, but sagely adds that, had it been consulted, his two visible imperfections would have been eradicated. We'd dislike to see an insect leave its periods and semicolons on the immortal marvel, but it were idle to grow angry with a goss. This must be the English literary exquisite whom Americans have hitherto incidentally heard bellowing before the tent of this or the other giant and taking tickets. I mean the prig, not the pug. He is comparatively youthful yet and can, on occasion, digest a good dinner. For chance, when he is well past forescore, worn with long ears of labor, compared with which the slavery of the bagny were a blessing, and half dead with dyspepsia, he too will growl like a collie dog. But never a copper will the great world care whether he grumbles or grins. Should he even get hydrophobia, that fact would scarce become historic. The public marks and magnifies the great man's foibles, but forgets both the little fella and his faults. Jean-Jean may hide from the battle in a hollow log, and none hear of it, but let a demonsthanese lose his shield and the world cackles over it for two and twenty centuries. To digress for a moment, I believe the story of demonsthanese is cowardice, as damnable a lie as that relating to Colonel Ingersoll's surrender. Even in his day human vermin sought to wreck with falsehood those they feared. The world, unwisely I think, interests itself in the personality of a genius, and somewhat impudently embades his privacy. A young man may muster up sufficient moral courage to lie to his collars, and thus preserve the proprieties, but an aged valitudinarian who wants to get into a quiet nook and nurse himself may show scant courtesy, even brush the critic-fly of the genus Goss out the doors with a hickory broom. Carlisle belonged to the irritable race of poets, albeit he seldom imitated Pope's bad example, and tortured his rugged ideas into oleaginous rhyme. Lair is a strange wild melody in all his work, what he would call harmony and discord, suggesting that super-nervous temperament which is inseparable from the highest genius, and which degenerates so easily into acute neuroses, that madness to which wit is popularly supposed to be so near allied. Such natures or aeolian harps acted upon, not by viewless air, but by subtler, more impalpable power, which comes none no wince, and goes none no wither. One moment yielding soft melodies as of an angel's loop borne across sapphire seas, the next wailing like some lost soul or shrieking like humanities. The self-poised, the well-balanced man, of whom you can safely predict what he will do under given conditions, the man who never bitterly disappoints you and makes you weep for very pity of his weakness, will never appall you by exhibition of his strength. He may possess constructive talent, but never that creative power which we call genius because it suggests the genius. No man is a hero to his valet, says the adage. Carlisle assumes this to be the fault of the latter, due to the saw-dust or other cheap-filling in the head of the menial. Yet may not the valet be wiser in this matter than the world? The hero, the greatest genius, is not always a flame with celestial fire, impelled by that mysterious power which comes from beyond the clouds. Maybe, for most part, the commonest kind of clay, a creature in no wise to be worshipped. The eagle, which soars so proudly at the sun, will return to its airy with drooping wing. The condor, whose shadow falls from afar on Chimberazo's alabaster brow, cannot live always in the imperian, a thing ethereal and back to earth is no better than a carrion crow. To genius more than odd else, perhaps, distance blends enchantment. While we see only the bold outlines of the titan, we are content to worship, nay, insist upon it, but having scrutinized him inch by inch with a microscope, we realize that familiarity breeds contempt. Well, does Christ say that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, which is the origin of the hero and valet adage? I cannot understand why the world insists upon seeing the grand monarchy in his nightcap and Carlisle in his chimney corner. With the harem of Byron and the drunken orgies of Burns, the poaching of Shakespeare and the vanity of Bolterre, it has nothing to do, should content itself with what they have freely given it, the intellectual heritage they have left to humanity, and not pry into those frailties which they feign would hide. If Goldsmith wrote like an angel and talked like a fool, it was because when he wielded the pen there was only a wise man present, and all are affected, more or less, by the company they keep. We care not whether the gold in our coffers was mined by saint or sinner so that it be standard coin. Then what boots it what manner of men stole from heaven that Promethean fire which surges in the poet's song leaps in lightning flash from the orator's lips or becomes dark with excess of bright in Carlisle's natural supernaturalism? Judge ye the work and let the workmen growl like a collie dog if it eases dyspepsia. That Carlisle was an undignified human being, I can well believe, for he was the wisest of his day and dignity is the distinguishing characteristic of the dodo and the donkey. If Mr. Goss esteems it so highly, he might procure a pot of glue and adorn his vermaform appendix with a few peacock feathers, else take lessons in posturing from the turkey gobbler or editor of the Houston Post. Had Carlisle been born a long-eared ass, he might have been fully approved, if not altogether appreciated, by Goss, Frude, and other critic flies. When Dr. Samuel Johnson was told that Boswell proposed to write his life, he threatened to prevent it by taking that of his would-be biographer. We're curious to consider what crabbed old Carlisle would have done had he suspected the danger of falling into the hands of a literary back stairs Mrs. Grundy like Edmund Goss. In his heroes and hero worship, he treated his colossi far otherwise than he in turn has been treated by Goss and Frude. He first recognized the fact that they were colossi and no fit subject for the microscope. We hear nothing from him to remind us of Lemuel Gulliver's disgust with the yawning pores and unseemly blotches of the epidermis of that monster-brobbing nagging maid who set him astride her nipple. He reverenced them because they possessed more than the average of that intellect's strength which is not only of God, but is God. Then considered their life work as a whole, its efficient cause and ultimate consequence. He does not appear to have fought to inquire whether they had dyspepsia and how it affected them being engrossed in that more important question, these what-ideas were possessed with all and wrought out in what part these imminent volitions of the lords of intellect played in the mighty drama of human life. It is not my present purpose to review Carlisle's literary labors that were like crowding the bard of Avon into a magazine article. For three hundred years the world has been studying the latter and is not yet sure that it understands him. Yet Shakespeare is to Carlisle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible, the latter with the intangible. The first tells us what men did, the last seeks to learn why they did it. Carlisle is the prince of critics, is often lenient to a fault, but seldom deceived. Looks quite through the shows of things into things themselves. Uriel, keenest of vision, mid all the host of heaven, is his guardian angel. To follow him into the sanctuaries of great souls and become familiar with all their hopes and fears, to pass the portals of masterminds and watch the gradual evolution of great ideas and these cyclopean workshops, to mount the hill of Merza and from it, view the tide of time rushing ever into the illimitable sea of eternity and comprehend the meaning of that mighty farce tragedy enacted on the bridge of life. We're scarce, so easy as listening to the buzzing of the critic fly or dawdling over a French novel on a summer's day. Carlisle's sprinkling called a mystic and mystagogue he certainly is, a man who interprets mysteries. If the average reader urge that his interpretation is too often obscurum per obscurious, he might reply in the language of that other woefully undignified and shockingly impolite human being, Dr. Johnson, I am bound to find you in reason, sir, but not in brains. Carlisle was regarded by those writers of his day who clung to and revered the time-worn ruts as chief of the spasmodic school, the members were of were supposed to be distinguished by a stained and unnatural style. This school, which was satirized by Atune while editor of Blackwood's magazine, was thought to include Tennyson, Guilfelin and other popular authors of the time. I inclined to the view that no writer of whom we have any knowledge exhibits less affectation in the matter of style than does the subject of this essay. It is rugged and massive, but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine the author of Sardar Resardus and the French Revolution expressing himself in the carefully rounded periods of McCaulay, whose prose is half poetry and whose poetry is all prose. Carlisle seems to care precious little what kind of vehicle he uses for the conveyance of ideas so long as it does not break down. All his labor smells of the lamp, but the midnight oil, of which our modern ready writers evidently use so little, was consumed in considering what to say rather than how to say it. Not even Shakespeare possesses so extensive a vocabulary. The technical terms of every profession and subdivision of science come tripling to his tongue. But even the dictionary is not large enough for him, and he extends it this way and that, his daring neology creating consternation among the critic flies another ephemera. He wrote as he thought, hence his style, could not be other than natural. That of a tune was formed in the schools principally modeled by masters, made to fit a procrustian bed, and was therefore eminently artificial. If we apply the term unnatural to the matter instead of the manner of Carlisle and Tennyson, then away with genius, for intellectual originality is tabooed. No man is privileged to think his own thoughts. That is a law nowadays nowhere, except in the sanctum of the gal dial news, where Colonel Jenkins takes the editorial ayes and teaches it to soar an exact imitation of himself. Whether by the spasmodic method or otherwise, Carlisle dragged more true orients out of the depths than did any of his contemporaries. And that is saying much, for there were giants in those days, and they were neither few nor far between. The intellectual glory of the first half of the present century was scarce eclipsed by the Elizabethan era. It was in every truth a feast of reason and a flow of soul. Goethe and Jean-Paul were putting the finishing touches to their work while Carlisle, then a young man, was striving to interpret these so strange appearances to the English-speaking world, to hammer some small appreciation of German literature into the autotheistic British head. Tom Moore, sweetest Amir singers, and Lord Byron, Prince of Poets, were but five and seven years respectively his seniors. He saw the beginning and the end of their literary labors, as of those of Macaulay and Mill, Darwin, Disraeli, and Dickens. Much of his best work is done ere the death of Walter Scott, and he might have played as a schoolboy with the ill-fated Shelley. He had just begun his long life labor when Longfellow and Tennyson, Hugo and Bogner came upon scene, and together they wrought wisely and well in the mightest seed field which is the world. What a galaxy of intellectual gods! Now, all gone, returned home to High Olympus, the weird land left to the Alfred Austins, the William Dean Howells, and the Ian McLaren's. Gone, but not forgotten. Yet the world will in time forget, even the amaranthine flowers must fade. Of them all we see but the star that blazes the brighter as the years run on, and that one long mistaken for a mere erratic comet sounds substance, or uninformed nebula hanging like a splotch of semi-luminous vapor in a great void. Year by year the voice of Carlisle rings clear and clear from the eternal silence, and as we listen with rapt attention to the music of the spears becoming audible, intelligible to our dull ear, the waterloo and Lisbon earthquakes, the revolutions and the warring religions, all glory and shame, the wild loves and bitter hatreds of humanity, even birth and death. But minor notes in the grand symphony, the harmony of infinitude, the little man who has undertaken the management of the microphone, without suspecting its significance, distracts us with the unwished foreign utterly useless information that the voice coming from beyond time and space, out of the everlasting deep, once growled like a collie-dog. End of Chapter 16 Thomas Carlisle Recording by Scotty Smith Chapter 17 of The Complete Works of Bran The Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Cowper 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 Greg Giordano. Chapter 17 Requiescate in Pace The mortal remains of Jefferson Davis, for four eventful years, president of the Southern Confederacy, are now en route to their last resting place in Hollywood Cemetery, in the city of Richmond. New Orleans, the metropolis of the sunny Southland, surrenders with sighs and tears, the dust of the distinguished dead, to the keeping of the old capital of the Confederacy. There, where died the dream of a new nation, there where the dashing cavalier made his last desperate stand against the stubborn Puritan, there where the cause was irretrievably lost, where the stars and bars bade obisience to the stars and stripes, and the gray gigantic host faded from the tragic stage of the world, will be laid the dust of our honored dead to await the judgment day. Near the grave of Davis will spring a massive monument, which will forever remain a landmark in American history, I in the mighty epic of the world, more imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds. But to the student of mankind, none were more significant. To the historian, none more interesting. To the poet, none will appeal more powerfully to the long ages yet to be. It will be a new and grander memen in masonry, ever-sounding celestial music for him that hath ears to hear, when smitten by the golden shafts of justice's shining orb, when gilded with the celestial radiance of love and charity. Tomorrow the southern people will, with tender hands and loving hearts, finally commit their dead chieftain to the care of the impartial historian. May another Plutarch arise to paint him as he was, a thing extenuating, not set down in malice. May another Macaulay come forth from the feaken womb of the mighty future to add to the charm of history the music of his voice. When the generation that knew and loved Davis shall have passed from earth, when those who idealized him shall have crossed the narrow boundaries of time into eternity's shoreless sea, when those brave souls who set their breasts against the bayonet shall one and all be gathered into the great hand of God, when those who saw in him the incarnation of a principal and whose defense they had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, shall be no longer with us to warp our better judgment. Jefferson Davis will sink to the ordinary level as a statesman and a soldier. It will be seen that his intellect was of the common place, his judgment off times faulty, that he can have no claim on the bays that lie evergreen upon the brow of genius, but his dauntless courage, his devotion to his people, his purity of purpose, in a word his American manhood may well defy the crucial test of time in the analysis of the most exacting historian. The honors which the South pays to the memory of Jefferson Davis are as unique as they are pathetic. He stood for the division of the Union and the South rejoices that we are one nation and one people. He stood for the perpetuation of human slavery, and the South rejoices that the foul curse hath been lifted from her forever. Intensely loyal to the Union today, she be dues with her tears and covers with her rarest flowers, the beer of him who devoted his best energies to destroy it. The successful revolutionary leader is always lionized. The patriot who strives and fails remains dear to the people, so long as his cause awakes a responsive echo in their hearts. But where hitherto, in the great world's history, his chieftain been thus honored, when even those who bore the battles brunt give thanks to God, that his flag went down in defeat, to rise no more forever. It is the grandest tribute ever paid to American manhood. LibriVox Recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Greg Giordano. Chapter 18 Coronation of the Tsar American Todeism on Tap With more barbaric mummery, flummery, and vulgar waste of wealth than characterized even the late Marlboro Vanderbilt wedding, Nicholas II eyes was crowned Emperor of the ragtag and bobtail of creation, officially known as, quote, All the Russia's, end quote. Nick has a nice easy job at a salary considerably in excess of the average country editor, and he gets it all in gold rubles instead of post oak, cord wood, and green water melons. Albeit his felicity is slightly marred by an ever-present fear that he may inadvertently swallow a few ounces of arsenic or sit down on an infernal machine. Nick is emphatically an emperor who emps. He isn't bothered with do-nothing Congresses or populist politicians who want him impeached. When he saith to a man, come, he cometh, PDQ. To another, go, he getteth a hustle on him that would shame a pneumatic tire. Nick is the greatest monarch, quote, what they is, end quote. He is the divinely ordained chief geistictus of that motley aggregation of tallow munchers and unwashed ignorami whose every existence is a menace to modern civilization. The Goths and Visigoths were models of cleanliness and avatars of intelligence, compared with the majority of the seventy different breeds of bipederal brutes who acknowledge the rule of the Romanoffs. A Russian peasant smells like the Chicago River on a summer's day, or Tolstoy's Kreuzer Sonata. He is more disagreeable to the old factories than old John Jacob Astor's hide-house, from whose effuvia sprung the master spirits of Gotham's four hundred. He will eat what will send a coyote howling out of the country. To him a jug of train oil were his angel food, a keg of stale soap grease, a farial feast. During his entire life he enjoys but two baths, one when he is born, the other when he's buried, a religious fanatic, he obeys but one scriptural injunction. Be fruitful and multiply. Even the Russian ladies wash only to suit the dresses they wear, high-necked or decollete. The average Slav is as stupidly ignorant as any agency Indian. He respects no law but that of blind force. His Magna Carta is the dynamite bomb. He is courageous with the bravery of the brute, which has no conception of life's sacredness. Doubtless the rule of the bayonet is the only government possible for such a barbarous people, and the Romanovs have not allowed it to rust. The Tsar is the immediate ruler of nearly one hundred and thirty million semi-savages. His lightest word, their supreme law, while the chiefs of the robber hordes of Central Asia acknowledge him their official head. Such tremendous power in the hands of a weak-minded, vacillating monarch like Nicholas II. He ascended from Catherine the courtesan, and having in his veins the blood of cranks may well cause Western Europe to lie awake. Bonaparte declared that in a hundred years the continent would be all Russian or all Republican, by which he meant that unless this nation of savages, in Essay, and vandals in Posse, or stamped out, it would imitate the example of Alaric in Attila, and precipitate such another intellectual night as that known as the Dark Ages. In Western Europe, Republicanism is making but slight progress, while in the East the power of the Great White Con is rapidly increasing. In a struggle between the semi-savagery of the East and the civilization of the West, China and Turkey would be the natural and inevitable allies of the Tsar. Small wonder that the Great First Council trudged home from Moscow with a heavy heart. Some faint idea of the savage ignorance of Russia may be had from the history of the Siberian exiles, and the fiendish persecutions of the Jewish people. Siberia is the ice-hell of the Old Norse mythologists, into which men, women, and children have been indiscriminately cast on the bare suspicion of desiring to better the wretched condition of the Russian people. It's horrors which have long been a hideous nightmare to civilized men. Need no description here. The very name of Siberia causes humanity to shudder. It casts a shadow on the sun. The experience of the Jews in Russia was akin to that of the early settlers in America who were exposed to the unbridled ferocity of the Aborigines. Yet the so-called Christian nations dared to know more than Petitian the Tsar had these savage atrocities should cease. Feudal prayers to the hog-headed god of the Ammonites. The young man who has just been crowned at Moscow, and an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authorities ornamented with rubies as large as eggs, and ablaze with two thousand five hundred and sixty-four costly diamonds, while half his people are feeding on fetid oval, is a weak-faced pygmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine-bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed, perchance the same in which his great-grand-dom Catherine was wont to receive her paramours, he becomes the most powerful of princes. Haloed with, quote, that divinity which doth be hedge a king, end, quote, in all the earth rejoices to do him honor. For months past wealthy Americans have been hastening to Moscow to enjoy the barbaric fet and perchance pick up a greasy count, or scorbidic duke, for their daughters. They were not permitted to witness the coronation. But they could look at the Kremlin, stand in the street, and watch the Tsar and his wooden-faced wife sail by in their chariot of gold, and perhaps be cuffed out of the way by a court chamberlain. Surely that were felicity enough for fools, our boasted Republican government, whose shibboleth has ever been the equality of all men, that the harvester of the lowly hoop-pole stands on a parody with a prince swinging a gilded scepter and robbing a poverty-stricken people, considered that its paid representatives in Russia would be unequal to the task of spilling sufficient slobber over the chief representative of divine rights. The great arch-enemy of human liberty and sent special envoys to assist at the ceremony. These haughty American sovereigns were not permitted, however, to enter the sacred presence of the Tsar, attired in their regal robes, the dress of American gentlemen, but were required to dike out like English flunkies at a fancy feed. Quote, evening coat with plain metal buttons, white vest, knee-breaches, black silk stockings, no ornaments. End quote. Such was the U.K.C. issued to the envoys of Uncle Sam by the royal Sineshkhal. They obeyed with alacrity. Of course they did, had they been ordered to appear in their shirt-tails. One flap dyed green, and the other yellow, their legs painted like barber-poles and wearing asses' ears, they would have obeyed with alacrity, without ever a thought of advising the Sineshkhal to go to Siberia. The rear admiral in command of the Mediterranean fleet was ordered to cron-start with his flagship, sent to attend the coronation as the naval envoy of the United States, a journey of some thousands of miles and a minimum expense of one thousand dollars a day. To watch a young duke stick a million-dollar dog-muscle on his own foolish pate, while his female running-mate cavorted around with a dozen dudine supporting her tail-feathers. End quote. Jones he pays the freight, end quote, puts up for this egregious folly. It has cost the American taxpayers a quarter of a million dollars to have their misrepresentatives prancing around the Kremlin in short-stop pants and silk stockings, bowing and scraping like a Pullman porter who has just received a dollar tip from some reckless Texan. We have nothing in common with Russia. One government is the antithesis of the other. They are, on friendly terms, because they have practically no intercourse. Russia has no American possessions upon which we can pull the foolish manifesto of the erst while Monroe. There's no trade between the two countries. Hasn't been, since Russia unloaded her Alaskan glaciers upon us at a fancy price. It would have been eminently proper had Minister Breckenridge presented himself, tugged out in his best Arkansas jeans, instead of being attired like a troubadour, to which Nick exemptioned from the nihilists and expressed the hope that the occasion wouldn't swell his head. But there are absolutely no excuse for sending warships on an expensive cruise, and special envoys five thousand miles to make unmitigated asses of themselves. The unpalatable fact is that we are a nation of tow-eaters. President Cleveland is, in this respect at least, eminently representative of the American people. The axiom that, quote, like takes to like, end quote, accounts for his popularity. It was that which enabled him to beat Jim Blaine. When the grand Duke Alexis was in this country, upper tendons slapped over him so persistently and offensively that the young man incontinently fled. The adulation he received from American bells made him such a misogynist that he never got married. The girl who got an introduction to the Duke was pointed out for years thereafter as a special favorite of fortune. The obituary of a Louisville lady who died a short time ago contained the startling announcement that she had actually danced with the Duke. Every chappy who was permitted to pay for a mint julep, absorbed by this subject of a crack-brained czar, secured a certificate to that effect and had it framed. In 1892, when more than the usual number of Russians were going hungry to bed, America undertook to abrogate the law of the survival of the fittest by sending the starving wretches a shipload of provisions. Dr. T. D. Witt Talmadge, Dr. Louis Klopsch, and other prominent Americans were sent over as commissioners to give out the grub. While in Russia they were permitted, as a special concession, to speak to the Cisarovich who afterwards succeeded to the crown. Of course these American sovereigns were, quote, overcome with such a concession, could hardly get their breath, end quote, even in short pants. They all wrote it up for the American press, and now Dr. Klopsch is rehearsing every detail of that important event, the crowning felicity of his life. He tells us how the commissioners, quote, received full instructions as to dress. What a bountiful repast, end quote, they enjoyed with the crown prince's servants, while millions were starving to death. How they cooled their heels in the hall for an hour or two, while their invisible host finished his cigar. How their hearts fluttered when the Senate call gave them their final instructions in court etiquette. Not to expectorate on the carpet were scratched the furniture, then trotted them in. How the crown prince graciously permitted them to stand, with uncovered heads, for a few moments in his august presence, and then managed to get rid of them without actually kicking them downstairs. He shook hands, with the party as a signal for them to pull their freight. And to this good day, Dr. Talmadzh and Klopsch will not use toilet paper with the hand that has been pressed by royalty. But the charity commissioners reeked a terrible revenge on the crown prince, whose starving people they were feeding. For thus insulting American manhood, they sent him a handsomely bound copy of Talmadzh's book. The fact that he has not broken off diplomatic relations with the United States may be accepted, however, as a framefacia evidence that he's not yet read it. Perhaps he added insult to injury by sending it to the Siberian exiles. The Zaritsa, or Empress, is a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She is rather handsome, but her face, like that of all those born to the House of Hanover, is expressionless as a clothing store dummy, hard as a blue steel hatchet. Princess Alice, as she was known in England, was a very devout Protestant, but she promptly abjured the religion in which she was raised and changed her name to Alexandra, the Adornova, for the blessed privilege of sharing an emperor's bed and board. Thrift is a characteristic of Queen Victoria's kids, and their religious scruples count for naught when weighed against a crown. CHAPTER XIX OF THE COMPLETE WORKS OF Bran the Iconoclast, Volume I, 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 XIX THROWING STONES AT CHRIST Are you throwing stones at Christ and the Christian cause? Pause, reflect before you answer. Not all the stones are thrown by the atheist, the agnostic, the infidel? No, the most cruel stones, the ones that wound most deeply, are thrown from the pulpit itself. The kiss of Judas strikes deeper than the spear of the Roman Legionary. The denial of Peter is more cruel than the crown of thorns. Are you throwing stones at Christ and the Christian cause? You in the amen corner stand forth and answer me. Drop that catechism. Release that cradle. Take your lips from that crucifix. Now look me in the eye and speak the words of truth and soberness. Are you a property owner? Have you buildings rented to keepers of dives and banyos? Do you come here on Sunday and pray the Lord to protect the young from temptation, while you are the silent partner of criminals? Have you ever contributed to send missionaries to Madagascar money that was received from people whose business it is to debauch your neighbor's sons, and, if possible, degrade his daughters? No, thank God for that. Do you know of any member of this church who is so guilty? You suspect as much? Then why do you not go on your knees to him and beg him to turn from his evil ways? Do you not know that by keeping silent you tessedly endorse his infamy, that you bring the Christian cause into contempt, that you make it a byword and a reproach, that you are throwing stones at Christ? No, do not sit down yet. What are your worldly possessions? How much did that diamond in your shirtfront cost? What was the expense of that costume worn by the woman who worships at your side? You surprise me, worth fifty a thousand dollars, wearing diamonds, buying a thousand dollar dresses. For what? To wear to church, in which to worship him who had not wear to lay his head. And a thousand people in this one city alone in abject poverty. And the greatest of these is charity. What a cruel stone is selfishness to throw at Christ. Is that your minister in immaculate broadcloth and shiny boots, turning the leaves of his Bible with lily fingers? Pardon me that I did not recognize him. You see, I have been reading of John the Baptist with his rayment of camel's hair, of Christ with his single garment, trapping barefoot, unshaven and unshorn over Judea's blazing hills. Stand up, thou vice-gerent of the Hebrew carpenter, and let me question thee. You will not? I have no authority? Yet publicans and sinners question thy master, and he answered freely and with all gentleness. Are thou greater than he? Are you throwing stones at Christ and the Christian cause? Be careful, think well before you answer. In a minister of God a mistake in this matter were little better than a crime. Are you inculcating the spirit of Christ or belial of love or hate? What do ye when mocked, reviled, your purposes called in question? Do you go to the mocker, extend to him a brother's hand, and strive by moral suasion to lead him out of the depths of everlasting darkness into the bright effulgence of heavenly day? Do you turn the other cheek to the smiter and pray, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do? Or do you mount the pulpit with a splinetic heart, and, with frantic gestures and a voice hoarse with passion, denounce the criticism as infernal rubbish? Are you seeking the salvation of souls or notoriety? Are you striving to foment discord in your community or cast oil upon the troubled waters? Are you striving to establish on earth the universal brotherhood of man and common fatherhood of God or throwing stones at Christ and the Christian cause from the cover of a canting hypocrisy? Do you strive when criticized to transfer the criticism from yourself to the Savior? Do you brand men who dare to differ from you as blasphemers, as though you were one with God and that to question your superior wisdom and goodness were equal to deny the Almighty? Do you, by presumption where you should be meek, by belligerency where you should act the peacemaker, by dogmatism where you should humbly seek the light, by denunciation where you should propitiate, call down the world's contempt on the cause you profess to serve, cast stones at Christ? It is written, judge not lest ye be judged. Do you always heed the law, carefully refrain from resolving yourself into an inquisitorial court, becoming both prosecutor and judge and condemning those who chance to differ from you? Why so hot, little man? The world rolled on, oh, so many weary years before the fates kindly sent thee to set it right. It will go on much in the same old way after both thee and thy work have been forgotten. To the stones cast at Christ by professed unbelievers, we need give, but little heed. They reign harmless as Parthian shafts on the shield of Achilles. Never was Atheist a gobalc ridden. Never was Infidel argument penned that touched the core of any religion, Christian or pagan. They but serve as driving sand of the desert to scour the eating rust from the Christian armor. Seldom indeed does the avowed Infidel cast a stone at Christ. He contents himself with holding up to the world scorn the mummeries in which dogmatizers have invested the teachings of the grandest man that ever died for truth. God created nothing in vain. Even the Atheist has his uses. Nay, even this planetic preacher may fill an important niche in the great world's economy. May be a real blessing in disguise. Very remarkable is it that Christ's holy cause, best prospered, was purest, most powerful for good, when most persecuted. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. From the auto-defei arose the anthem that thrilled the pagan heart. From prison cells poured forth peons of praise that caused princes to kiss the cross. From the outlawed conventical went forth a holy zeal that carried millions to the throne of grace. From the gloomy midnight meeting there burst a light that illumined the world. The stones cast by avowed enemies were the steps by which the cause of Christ mounted from poverty and obscurity to thrones and wealth, to name and fame. The wings with which it encircled the great round globe, the power that enabled it to break down the barriers of the most obdurate hearts. It is the stones cast by professed friends, the stones of selfishness and pride, of intolerance and vain glory, of hate and discord masquerading in the garb of love and law, that caused the wounds on Calvary to bleed afresh, the tears in Gethsemane to flow anew, the crown of thorns to once more burn the throbbing brow, the scourge to fall across the naked shoulders of the Son of God. Are you throwing stones at Christ and his cause? End of chapter 19 Throwing Stones at Christ Recording by Brian Keenan