The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
We mistake appearances for realities and misbestow our sympathy.
Had some of the more tender-hearted met Audubon when he returned
from one of his trips in the forests, his clothing in shreds, his
shoes gone, travel- stained and unkempt, alms would have been
unhesitatingly bestowed. And how amused would the great man have
been! He was too great to have been irritated. If, as it is
claimed, human happiness is the aim and object of
philanthropists, they seek the unattainable and destroy that
which they would save. A sudden wrenching from the one condition
to another is misery. The eagle would rather starve in his native
forests than feast in a cage. The Indian maiden who graduates at
Carlisle and who captures all the medals, returns to her blanket
and the dirt, dogs and squalor of her tribe as soon as she
reaches the reservation. There is a strain of the Huckleberry
Finn in all natures that resents a too sudden metamorphosis and
which will return to its rags, its back alley and empty cask.
Charlatans of the law and of literature inculcate the idea that a
change in conditions means the acquisition of unqualified bliss,
and they assume that the poor are necessarily unhappy and
endeavor to convince them--not a difficult task, that it is the
fault of someone else that they are not rich! Folly! The
hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in
rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in
squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience
real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they
become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only
to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them
too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them
entrance into the society which they would affect, or, if it
does, they find themselves ill at ease, out of place, miserable.
Those who imagine that all bliss comes from lucre or legislation
know little and are "ignorant of their own ignorance." They do
not know that "our own felicity we make is final, and that
through the cultivation of individual inherency and personal
sufficiency. They listen to the charlatans who, on the plea of
bringing balm, inflict incurable wounds; who would bring
happiness by sowing the dragon's teeth of discontent. "Coal-Oil
Johnny," who threw away hundreds of thousands of suddenly
acquired dollars, was a philosopher. The money put him out of
harmony with himself. It was to him a curse. And he wisely rid
himself of it. There is peace and pleasure in the jangling
discord and in the pains of effort, a peace which, otherwise, the
world can not give, a pleasure found nowhere else; and this peace
and pleasure are not to be sought by effort; are not to be
attained by effort; but are found in the effort itself. There is
pleasure in dressing a field or in painting a house, but not in
the dressed field or in the painted house. In other words, there
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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