Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 23

They shake their puny hands at heaven because not provided with a terrestrial Paradise, when they ought to be giving thanks that I'm not the party who holds the sea in the hollow of his hand. I'd make good Baptists of the whole caboodle--would hold them under water long enough to soak out the original sin. A man complains because Fortune doesn't empty her cornucopia into the pockets of his pantalettes while he whittles a pine box and talks munic.i.p.al politics instead of humping himself behind an enterprising mule in the cotton-patch. If his sweetheart jilts him, he's in despair, and if she marries him he wishes he were dead. He has the mulligrubs because he cannot plant himself on a Congressional cus.h.i.+on, or because he finds his wife awake and nursing a curtain lecture to keep it warm when he falls through the front fence at 5 o'clock in the morning. It seems never to have occurred to these Werterian wailers that the happiest existence is that of the lower animals--that the human being of fine brain and keen sensibilities cannot possibly be content. It is this very unrest, this heart-hunger that drives a man on to n.o.ble deeds--that lifts him out of the gutter where wallow the dull, dumb beasts and places him among the G.o.ds. Of suffering and sorrow were born all life's beauty. The kiss of Pyramus and Thisbe is an ecstasy of pain. The hope of immortality sprang from breaking hearts. Nations rise through a mist of tears. Every great life-work is an agony. Behind every song there lurks a sigh. There's an element of sadness in humor itself. The Virgin Mother is known as Our Lady of Pain. The cult of Christ is hallowed by the blood of self-sacrifice and known as the Religion of Sorrow. The first breath of life and the last gasp are drawn in suffering; and between the cradle and the grave there lies a monster-haunted Sahara. Yet men choose the ignis-fatuus called Happiness, and mourn that they cannot cover it with a No. 6 hat. They should pray the G.o.ds to transform them into contented goats and turn them out to gra.s.s. People who cannot find happiness here begin to look for it in heaven. Eternal beat.i.tude is another ridiculous rainbow. Nirvana is nonsense. If there be a life beyond the grave, it means continued endeavor, and there can be no endeavor unless there's dissatisfaction.

The creature cannot rise superior to its creator--and the universe is the result of G.o.d's unrest. Had he been perfectly content he would not have made me.

Carlyle--not Mugwump Carlisle of Kentucky, but Thos.

Carlyle of Great Britain-the lord of modern literature-- says the h.e.l.l most dreaded by the English is the h.e.l.l of not making money. We have imported this English Gehenna, duty free, despite Mr. Dingley, and now the man who doesn't succeed in acc.u.mulating dollars is socially d.a.m.ned.

How many of this generation can understand the remark of Aga.s.siz that he had no time to make money?--can realize that such occupation is not the sole end of man?-- that time expended in the acc.u.mulation of wealth beyond the satisfaction of simple wants is worse than wasted?

It is so because from our numbered days we have stolen years that should have been devoted to soul-development, filled with the sweets of knowledge; hallowed by the perfume of love, made gracious by n.o.ble deeds--because we have blasted life's fair fruitage with the primeval eldest curse. Omar strikes one true chord when he doth sing:

"A book of verses, underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou Singing beside me in the wilderness-- O wilderness were Paradise enow!"

Diogenes was content with a tub while Alexander sat him down by the ever-moaning sea and wept his red bandanna full of brine because he didn't know that the empire of Czar Reed yet remained unconquered. And now both Diogenes and Alexander have "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were," and little it matters to them or to us whether they fed on honey of Hymettus and wine of Falernus or ate boarding house hash off a pewter plate and guzzled Prohibition busthead out of a gourd.

The cynic who housed in a tub and clothed himself with a second-hand carpet is as rich to-day as he that reveled in the spoil of Persia's conquered king and kicked the bucket while enjoying a case of katzenjammer. King and cynic, tub and palace, lantern and scepter--all have perished; and he that butchered thousands to glut his greed for what fools call glory, s.h.i.+nes less brightly through the murky shadows of the century than he that made a n.o.bler conquest of himself. The haughty empires one did rear have long since crumbled into dust; the wild goat browses in their deserted capitals, the lizard sleeps upon their broken thrones, and the owl hoots from their forgotten altars and ruined fanes; but the philosophy of the other lives on from age to age, to point the folly of such mad rainbow-chasing as that of him who thought to make the world his monument.

Know ye not that the poorest beggar is an earth- pa.s.senger also, that thy brother, traveling his millions of miles per day?--where, think you? Among the stars.

For him as for thee does Aurora gild the morning and Apollo hang the evening sky with banners of burnished gold; for him as for thee doth Selene draw the limpid waters behind her silver car around the rolling world and Bootes lead his hunting dogs afield in their leash of celestial fire. Ten centuries hence the dust of the millionaire will have mingled with that of the mendicant, both long forgotten of men; ten centuries hence the descendants of those now peddling hot wiener-wurst may proudly wear the purple, while the posterity of present monarchs creep through life as paupers. A thousand years are but as one tick of the mighty horologe of time--and the allotted life of man but three score years and ten! And this brief period we expend, not in living, but in providing the means of life; not as creation's lords, but as slaves to our own avarice, the most pitiful pa.s.sion that ever cursed mankind.

If there be a G.o.d, be thou his messenger unto men; if there be no G.o.d, then have thy unfortunate fellows the more need of thee. Wait not until a man is driven to crime by the iron law of necessity, a woman to dishonor, a child to beggary, then organize some fake relief society for thine own glory, but put forth a helping hand in time to avert the sin and shame. The most pitiful failure in all G.o.d's universe is the man who succeeds only in making money. A thieving fox will grow fat by predacity while an honest dog starves in the path of duty. And we have too many sleek Reynards prowling 'round the sheep-pens and dove-cotes of this people, too few faithful Gelerts doing stubborn battle with predaceous beasts.

There's one cla.s.s of people whom we cannot brand as arrant knaves and put in the pillory, yet who are a curse to any country. These are your Laodiceans in religion and politics, your luke-warms, your namby-pamby milk- and-cider set who are neither cold or hot. These are your eminently proper people, your stereotyped respectables.

They accept the Gospel as true, not that they can comprehend it, but rather because they lack sufficient mental vigor to deny it. They join the church and align themselves with that political party to which the local nabobs belong. "What will people say?" is to them the all- important problem. They have followed some old bell weather or lead-gander into the wire-gra.s.s pasture of Respectabilia. They observe all the proprieties--at least in outward appearance. These are the animals whose vis inertia perpetuates all the abuses of wealth and power-- whatsoever has the approval of two or more generations of infamous rascals is so eminently respectable. These are the people who are so profoundly shocked by the alleged slang of Hugo and vulgarities of Goethe, while compelling their daughters to read the Canticles. They have a conniption fit and fall in it because some shapely danseuse kicks up her rhythmic heels on the vaudeville stage, then organize Trilbys auctions, kissing bees and garter raffles for the glory of G.o.d. Their ideal is expediency and their moral law the Eleventh Commandment-- Don't get caught. These are the people who stone the prophets of progress. They are to the social organism what a pound of putty would be to the stomach of a dyspeptic. They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of the giant of civilization. "What will people say?"

Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it--it will have become respectable--and you couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus'

Auticyrian h.e.l.lebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison him!" because he denied the old falsehood that the world is flat; of Servetus, "Burn him!" because he dissented from the ipse dixit of another heretic; of Socrates, "Poison him!" because he laughed at the too amorous G.o.ds of Greece; of Robert Emmett, "Hang him!" because he wasn't a Cleveland-Bayard Anglomaniac; and they said of Jesus Christ, "Crucify him!" because he intimated the fas.h.i.+onable preachers of his time were a set of splenetic-hearted hypocrites. That's what people say; but occasionally there's one to answer that 'tis not in the power of all Xerxes' hosts to bend one thought of his proud heart--"they may destroy the case of Anaxarchus, himself they cannot reach." It is not what foolish sound is shaped by a deal of stinking breath and blown adown the wind to be forgotten like the bray of an asthmatic burro, to perish like the snows of yesteryear, that should be our concern--not what the idle gabble of Mrs. Grundy proclaims us, but what we actually are. Public opinion is an ever-s.h.i.+fting rainbow. The "heretics" of one age are the saints of the next: the "cranks" of our own time may be the philosophers of the future; the despised rebels of a century ago are the men whose graves we bedeck with our garlands. Soon or late, those who court the many- headed monster, who "flatter its rank breath and bow to its idolatries a patient knee," are trampled beneath its iron heel; but those who take duty for guiding star and are strong enough to withstand the gibes of malice and the jeers of ignorance will find that the years are seldom unjust. It has been well said that one eternity waited for us to be born, that another waits to see what we will do now that we are here. Do what thou canst and do it with all thy might, remembering that every fice that doth bark at thee this day, every goose that stretches forth its rubber neck to express its disapproval, will be dead in h.e.l.l a hundred years hence, its foolish yawp gone silent forevermore, but that thy honest act affects in greater or less degree all G.o.d's universe.

I am neither a Jeremiah with a lung full o' lamentations, nor a Jonah rus.h.i.+ng round like a middle of the roader and proclaiming, "Yet forty days and the woods will be on fire." I do not believe that we can pick ourselves up by our own embroidered boot-straps and hop blithely astride a millennium built to order by McKinley, Bryan, or any other man; but I do believe that the human race is slowly but surely working the subsoil out of its system, is becoming ever less the beast and more the G.o.d. Nations grown corrupt with wealth and age may fall, but others strong in youth and innocence will arise. Old faiths may be forgotten, but from other and purer altars will ascend the smoke of sacrifice. Freedom may be wounded grievously in her very temple by Anglomaniacs who needs must have a royal master, yet her banner, torn but flying, will stream triumphant over the grave of tyranny. The black night of barbarous ignorance may often engulf the world, but "Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The Star of Bethlehem cannot go down in everlasting darkness--the bow of promise gleams softly luminous behind the thunderbolt. I care not whether the Noahian tale be true that never again will the s.h.i.+fting axis of the earth pour the sea upon the plain--the rainbow is nature's emblem of peace, her cestus of love, and in its splendor I read a promise that never again will this fair earth of ours be swept with sword and fire, deluged with blood and tears. Not to the past, but to the future, do I look for the Saturnian age, when the demons of need and greed will be exorcised, when love will be the universal law, the fatherhood of G.o.d the only faith. Such, my friends, is the rainbow to which I have turned my feet.

It lies afar, across dismal swamps o'er whose icy summits only the condor's shadow sweeps--across arctic vast and desert isles beyond tempestuous ocean rank with dead men's bones and the rotting hulls of s.h.i.+ps. I shall not attain it, nor shall you; but he that strives, though vanquished, still is victor. A dreamer, say you? Ah yes, but all life is but a dream, mystic, wonderful, and we know not when we sleep nor when we wake. I love to dream so when the storm beats upon the great oaks, h.o.a.ry with their hundred years, and they put forth their gnarled arms and grapple with the blast, when the lightning cleaves the inky sky with forked flame and the earth rocks neath the thunder's angry roar. When the dark clouds roll muttering unto the East and the evening sun hangs every leaf and twig and blade of gra.s.s with jewels brighter than e'er gleamed in Golconda's mines; when the mock-birds renew their melody and every flower seems drunken with its own incense, I look upon the irisate glory that seems to belt the world with beauty and my heart beats high with hope that in years to be the storm-clouds that o'ershadow the souls of men will recede also--that time shall come when the human race will be one universal brotherhood, containing neither a millionaire nor a mendicant, neither a master nor a slave.