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
The daily press announces that there is to be another Cleveland
baby. It is to make its debut some time this month. "Mrs.
Cleveland has been sewing dainty garments all summer." "Presents
of beautiful baby clothes are arriving from friends and
relatives." Same old gush, gush, gush! slop, slop, slop! that has
set the nation retching three times already. Good Lord! will it
never end? The fecundity of that family is becoming an American
nightmare. Will the time ever come when a married woman of social
prominence can get into "a delicate condition" without having the
fact heralded over the country as brazenly as though she had
committed a crime? There being little hope that the daily
press--"public educator," "guardian of morality," etc.--will
suffer a renascence of decency, we can only appeal to Grover not
to let it happen again. He certainly owes it to the nation to
apply the soft pedal to himself. In no other way can he protect a
long-suffering nation from seasickness, or his estimable wife
from the unclean harpies of the press. I do not believe that Mrs.
Cleveland is particeps criminis in these pre-natal proclamations
to which the h'upper suckkles of New York are so shockingly
addicted. I do not believe that she cares to have the public
contemplating her profile portrait just previous to a
confinement. Of course it will be urged that a woman of much
native delicacy could never have married so crass an animal as
Grover Cleveland, have taken him fresh from the embraces of an
old harlot like Widow Halpin; but these forget that he held the
most exalted position of any man on earth, and his $50,000 per
annum had been touched by the genie-wand jobbery--forget that
"--pomp and power alone are woman's care And where these are
light Eros finds a feere; Maidens like moths, are eer caught by
glare, And Mammon wins his way where Seraphs might despair."
Probably she has regretted a thousand times that she bartered
her youth and beauty for life companionship with a tub of tallow,
mistaken at the time for a god by a purblind public, but even
though it be true, as often asserted, that the old boor gets
drunk and beats her, a woman could scarce apply for divorce from
a man who has twice been president. Furthermore, association with
such a man will lower the noblest woman to his level. Every
physiognomist who saw Frances Folsom's bright face, its
spirituelle beauty, and who looks upon it now and notes it
stolid, almost sodden expression, must recall those lines of
Tennyson's:
"As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee
down.
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule,
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the
fool."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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