I’ve been dipping into the Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast (William Cowper Brann). He’s funny as hell, and wrote with an amazing style, redolent at one moment of the Elizabethans, at others of the Old West. He was like an American Thomas Nashe. Here he is upbraiding rich hypocrites who give to religious charities:
In other words, a man can’t draw on his bank account for the price of a corner lot in the New Jerusalem. He cannot acquire so much as a souphouse ticket in that city not made with hands by dying for the faith in the auto-da-fe. . . . Too many people give to the poor only because it’s ‘lending to the Lord’–and they expect Standard Oil stock dividends. They drop a plugged nickel in the slot expecting to pull out a priceless crown of gold,–they expect the Lord to present them with a full suit of heavenly raiment in exchange for a cold potato or a pair of frazzled pantaloons. I want no partnership with a man who tries to beat the God of the Jews in a trade.”
. . .
The supreme test of a charitable mind is toleration for the opinions of others,–an admission that perchance we do not know it quite all. It is much easier to give a $5 bill to a beggar than to forgive a brother who rides his pitiless logic over our prejudices. The religious world has contributed countless millions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but has never forgiven Tom Paine for brushing the Bible contemptuously aside and looking ‘Through nature up to nature’s God.’ Perhaps some future age will do justice to the memory of the man to whose daring pen we are so largely indebted for those dearly-prized privileges of free government, to the ablest advocate of human liberty the world has known, and whose piety was deep and fervent as that of St. Paul himself. But that cannot be until the freedom for which he toiled and prayed extends to the mind as well as the body; until the shackles are stricken from the brain as well as the hand,–until the sun of Knowledge dispels the empoisoned mists of Ignorance and divine Charity dethrones unreasoning Hate . . .
. . . and he goes on like that. The more I look back into American literature and come across some of these more obscure and largely forgotten American writers like Brann and Edgar Saltus (and let’s not forget that Melville was once among their number) the more it occurs to me that it is myth to say that there were not early American writers who were not just as (if not more) adept at disclosing the beauties of our language as English writers. American was decidedly *not* an “ill at ease language” for everybody.
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