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
She strikes me, in this, as a strange blend
of the comic and the tragic. The world neglected Burton. He
almost deserved it; so great a sacrifice as his wife consecrated
of her life to him would compensate for the loss of anything. You
admire it; but you catch yourself suspecting that this
consecration must have been, at times, an awful bore to him. He
was unfaithful to her, it is said, with ethnological intent, in
all the tribes of the earth. He had no morals to speak of. He had
no religion, having studied all. He was a pagan beyond
redemption, though his wife maintained that he was a Catholic.
Unfortunately, for her, his masterpiece refutes her
overwhelmingly. He wrote the most remarkable poem of the last
forty years, one that is to be classed only with Tennyson's "In
Memoriam" and the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. By this poem, and,
probably, by the revelation of the love he excited in one woman,
he will live. This poem expresses himself, and his conclusion,
after years spent in wandering, fighting, studying languages,
customs and religions. To understand the man and his poem, we
must understand what he did, and since the time of the Old
Romance, no man surpassed him in "deeds of derring-do." He was a
modern, a very modern, Knight of the Round Table. He was the
possessor of innumerable abstruse, and outlandish
accomplishments. He was a scientist, a linguist, a poet, a
geographer, a roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a
polyhedric personality, that caught and gave, something from and
to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890, at
the age of sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for him that
was almost worth dying for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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