University of Virginia Library

BRANN, THE FOOL.
BY ELBERT HUBBARD, EDITOR OF THE PHILISTINE.

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

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

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

Brann was a Fool.

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

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

He graduated at the University of Hard Knocks and during his short life took several post-graduate courses.

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

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

Discreet and cautious little men are known by the company they keep. The Fool was not particular about his associates; children, sick people, insane folks, rich or poor —it made no difference to him. He sometimes even sat at meat with publicans and sinners.

He was a Mystic and lived in the ideal. This deeply religious quality in his nature led him into theology, and he became a clergyman—a Baptist clergyman.

But no church is large enough to hold such a man as this; the fool quality in his nature outcrops, and the jingle of bells makes sleep to the Chief Pew-Holder impossible.

So the Fool had to go.

Then he founded that unique periodical, which, in three years, attained a circulation of 90,000 copies. This paper was not used for pantry shelves, lamp lighters, or other base utilitarian purposes. It cost ten times as much as a common newspaper, and the people who bought it read it until it was worn out. All the things in this paper were not truth; mixed up amid a world of wit were often extravagance and much bad taste. It was only a Fool's newspaper!

In this periodical the Fool railed and jeered and stated

facts about smirking Complacency, facts so terrible that folks said they were indecent. He flung his jibes at Stupidity, and Stupidity sought to answer criticism by assassination.

Texas has a libel law patterned after the libel law of the State of New York. If a man takes from you your good name you can put him behind prison bars and place shutters over the windows of his place of business.

The people who thought Brann had injured them did not invoke the law. They invoked Judge Lynch——

A mob seized the Fool, and, placing a rope about his neck, led him naked through the October night, out to the Theological Seminary, which they declared he had traduced.

There they smote him with the flat of their hands, and spat upon him. It was their intention to hang the Fool, but better counsel prevailed, and on his signing, in terrorem, a document they placed before him, they gave him warning to depart to another State. And on his promising to do so, they let him go.

But the next day he refused to leave; and his flashing wit still filled the air, now embittered through the outrage visited upon him.

His enemies held prayer-meetings, invoking Divine aid for the Fool's conversion—or extinction. One man quoted David's prayer concerning Shimmei: "Bring Thou down his hoar head to the grave in blood!" And others still, prayed, "Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."

But still the Fool flourished his bauble.

Then they shot him.

That hand which wrote the most Carlylean phrase of any in America is cold and stiff. That teeming brain which held a larger vocabulary than that of any man in

America is only clay that might stop a hole to keep the wind away. That soul through which surged thoughts too great for speech has gone a-journeying.

Brann is dead.

No more shall we see that lean, clean, homely face, with its melancholy smile. No more shall we hear the Fool eloquently, and oh! so foolishly, plead the cause of the weak, the unfortunate, the vicious. No more shall we behold the tears of pity glisten in those sad eyes as his heart was wrung by the tale of suffering and woe.

His children are fatherless, his wife a widow.

Brann the Fool is dead.—The Mirror.

April 14th, 1898.