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
Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife's life was one
continuous act of love for him that he ignores and her life was a
failure, too, since she never succeeded in making the world
worship him as she did. Still "the failures of some the
infinities beyond the successes of others" and all success is
failure in the end. Still again, it is better to have loved in
vain than never to have loved at all, and fine and bold and brave
as was Richard Francis Burton, his wife, with her "strong power
called weakness," was the greater of the two. She wrote no
"Kasidah" of complaint, but suffered and was strong. St. Louis,
August 16th, 1897.
* * *
MARRIAGE AND MISERY.
BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.
Charles Goodwin, editor Salt Lake Tribune, puts into the mouth of
a figurative John Bull, who is lecturing his children, the
following sentence:
"Why, ours is an old family. One of our ancestors was knighted
by Henry VII for stealing cattle from the Scotch some time in the
fifteenth century. I am tracing up the lineage, and I believe we
are all barons. I expect to get the title confirmed, and then
each one of you boys must sell himself to a beautiful American
girl for from 75,000 to 250,000 pounds. Under the rose, it will
help the stock damnably, for your mother was a barmaid. Things
are working all right, my lads. Our conquest of the United States
still goes on."
Apropos of a snub given the Prince of Wales by an American girl,
Lillian Russell--even our much-married Lillian--raises her voice
in protest at international marriages, and incidentally American
snobbery.
What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the
international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public
opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and
personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to
the physically and financially anaemic nobility across the water,
to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and
into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage.
The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly
chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead
solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their
Fifth Avenue Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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