Part 18

Let me return to Brigham Young. I saw the Prophet but twice--once in the street and once in his own house, where the interview took place which I have described. The day after that on which I last saw him he left Salt Lake City and went into the country--some people said to avoid the necessity of meeting Mr. Colfax, who was just then expected to arrive with his party from the West. My impressions, therefore, of Brigham Young and his personal character are necessarily hasty, and probably superficial. I can only say that he did not impress me either as a man of great genius, or as a mere _charlatan_. My impression is that he is a sincere man--that is to say, a man who sincerely believes in himself, accepts his own impulses, prejudices and passions as divine instincts and intuitions to be the law of life for himself and others, and who, therefore, has attained that supreme condition of utterly unsparing and pitiless selfishness when the voice of self is listened to as the voice of God. With such a sincerity is quite consistent the adoption of every craft and trick in the government of men and women. Nobody can doubt that Napoleon I. was perfectly sincere as regards his faith in himself, his destiny, and his duty; and yet there was no trick of lawyer, or play-actor, or priest, of which he would not condescend to avail himself if it served his purpose. This is not the sincerity of a Pascal, or a Garibaldi, or a Garrison; but it is just as genuine and infinitely more common. It is the kind of sincerity which we meet every day in ordinary life, when we see some dogmatic, obstinate father of a family or sense-carrier of a small circle trying to mould every will and conscience and life under his control according to his own pedantic standard, and firmly confident all the time that his own perverseness and egotism are a guiding inspiration from heaven. After all, the downright, conventional stage-hypocrite is the rarest of all beings in real life. I sometimes doubt whether there ever was _in rerum naturâ_ any one such creature. I suppose Tartuffe had persuaded himself into self-worship, into the conviction that everything he said and did must be right. I look upon Brigham Young as a man of such a temperament and character. Cunning and crafty he undoubtedly is, unless all evidences of eye, and lip, and voice belie him; but we all know that many a fanatic who boldly and cheerfully mounted the funeral pile or the scaffold for his creed had over and over again availed himself of all the tricks of craft and cunning to maintain his ascendancy over his followers. The fanatic is often crafty just as the madman is: the presence of craft in neither case disproves the existence of sincerity.

I believe Brigham Young to be simply a crafty fanatic. That he professes and leads his creed of Mormonism merely to obtain lands and beeves and wives, I do not believe, although this seems to be the general impression among the Gentiles who visit his city. I am convinced that he regards himself as a prophet and a heaven-appointed leader, and that this belief prevents him from seeing how selfish he is in one sense and how ridiculous in another. Any man who can deliberately put on such a coat in combination with such a pair of boots, as Brigham Young displayed during my interview with him, must have a faith in himself which would sustain him in anything. No human creature capable of looking at any two sides of a question where he himself was concerned, ever did or could present himself in public and expect to be reverenced when arrayed in such uncouth and preposterous toggery.

I cannot pretend to have had any extraordinary revelations of the inner mysteries or miseries of Mormonism made to me during my stay at Salt Lake City. Other travellers, nearly all other travellers indeed, have apparently been more fortunate or more pushing and persevering. I fancy it is rather difficult just now to get to know much of the interior of Mormon households; and I confess that I never could quite understand how people, otherwise honorable and upright, can think themselves justified in worming their way into Mormon confidences, and then making profit one way or another by revelations to the public. But one naturally and unavoidably hears, in Salt Lake City, of things which are deeply significant and which he may without scruple put into print. For example--there was a terrible pathos to my mind in the history of a respectable and intelligent woman who, years and years ago, when her life, now fading, was in its prime, married a man now a shining light of Mormonism, whose photograph you may see anywhere in Salt Lake City. She has been superseded since by divers successive wives; she is now striving in a condition far worse than widowhood to bring up her seven or eight children, and she has not been favored with even a passing call for more than a year and a half by the husband of her youth, who lives with the newest of his wives a few hundred yards away. I am told that such things are perfectly common; that the result of the system is to plant in Utah a number of families which may be described practically as households without husbands and fathers. I believe the lady of whom I have just spoken accepts her destiny with sad and firm resignation. Her faith in the religion of Mormonism is unshaken, and she regards her forlorn and widowed life as the heaven-appointed cross, by the bearing of which she is to win her eternal crown. Of course the Indian widows regard their bed of flames, the Russian women-fanatics behold their mutilated and mangled breasts with a similar enthusiasm of hope and superstition. But none the less ghastly and appalling is the monstrous faith which exacts and glorifies such unnatural sacrifices. These dreary homes, widowed not by death, seem to be the saddest, most shocking birth of Mormonism. After all, this is not the polygamy of the East, bad as that may be. "Give us," exclaimed M. Thiers in the French Chamber, three or four years ago, when Imperialism had reached the zenith of its despotic power--"give us liberty as in Austria!" So I can well imagine one of these superseded and lonely wives in Salt Lake City, crying aloud in the bitterness of her heart, "Give us polygamy as in Turkey!"

That the thing is a religion, however hideously it may show, I do not doubt. I mean that I feel no doubt that the great majority of the Mormon men are drawn to and kept in Mormonism by a belief in its truth and vital force as a religion. I do not believe that conscious and hypocritical sensuality is the leading impulse in making them or keeping them members of the Mormon church. I never heard of any community where a sensual man found any difficulty in gratifying his sensuality; nor are the vast majority of the Mormons men belonging to a class on whom a severe public opinion would bear so directly that they must necessarily wander thousands of miles away across the desert in order to be able comfortably to gratify their immoral propensities. To me, therefore, the possibility which appears most dangerous of all is the chance of any sudden crusade, legal or otherwise, being set on foot against this perverted and unfortunate people. Left to itself, I firmly believe that Mormonism will never long bear the glare of daylight, the throng of witnesses, the intelligent rivalry, the earnest and active criticism, poured in and forced in upon it by the Pacific railroads. But if it can bear all this then it can bear anything whatever which human ingenuity or force can put in arms against it; and it will run its course and have its day, let the Federal Hercules himself do what he may. Meanwhile it would be well to bear in mind that Mormonism has thus far cumbered the earth for comparatively a very few years; that all its members there in Utah counted together would hardly equal the population of a respectable street in London; and that at this moment the whole concern is ricketty and shaky, and threatens to tumble to pieces. I know that some of the ruling elders are panting for persecution; that they are openly doing their very best to "draw fire;" that they are daily endeavoring to work on the fears or the passions of Federal officials resident at Salt Lake by threats of terrible deeds to be done in the event of any attempt being made to interfere with Mormonism. Many of these Mormon apostles, dull, vulgar and clownish as they seem, have foresight enough to see that their system sadly needs just now the stimulus of a little persecution, and have fanatical courage enough to put themselves gladly in the front of any danger for the sake of sowing by their martyrdom the seed of the church. "That man," said William the Third of England, speaking of an inveterate conspirator against him "is determined to be made a victim, and I am determined not to make him one." I hope the United States will deal with the Mormons in a similar spirit. At the same time, I would ask my brothers of the pen whether those of them who have visited Salt Lake City have not made the place seem a good deal more wonderful, more alluringly mysterious, more grandly paradoxical in its nature, than it really is? I feel convinced that if people in Lancashire and Wales and Sweden had all been made distinctly aware that Salt Lake City is only a dusty or muddy little commonplace country hamlet, where labor is not less hard and is not any better paid than in dozens or scores of small hamlets this side the Missouri, one vast temptation to emigrate thither, the temptation supplied by morbid curiosity and ignorant wonder, would never have had any conquering power, and Mormonism would have been deprived of many thousand votaries. For, regarded in an artistic point of view, the City of the Saints is a vulgar sham; a trumpery humbug; and I verily believe that it has swelled into importance not more through the fanatical energy of its governing elders and the ignorance of their followers, than through the extravagant exaggeration and silly wonder of most of its hostile visitors and critics.

THE LIBERAL TRIUMVIRATE OF ENGLAND.

A year ago I happened to be talking with some French friends at a dinner-table in Paris, about the Reform agitation then going on in England. "We admire your great orators and leaders," said an enthusiastic French gentleman; "your Bright, your Beales"--and he was warming to the subject when he saw that I was smiling, and he at once pulled up, and asked me earnestly whether he had said anything ridiculous. I endeavored to explain to him gently that in England we did not usually place our Bright and our Beales on exactly the same level--that the former was our greatest orator, our most powerful leader, and the latter a respectable, earnest gentleman of warm emotions and ordinary abilities whom chance had made the figure-head of a passing and vehement agitation, and who would probably be forgotten the day after to-morrow or thereabouts.

My French friend did not seem convinced. He had seen Mr. Beales's name in the London papers quite as often and as prominently for some months as Mr. Bright's; and, moreover, he had met Mr. Beales at dinner, and did not like to be told that he had not thereby made the acquaintance of a great tribune of the British people. So I dropped the subject and allowed our Bright and and our Beales to rank together without farther protest.

Here in New York, where English politics are understood infinitely better than in Paris, I have noticed not a little of this "Bright and Beales" classification when people talk of the leaders of English Liberalism. I have heard, with surprise, this or that respectable member of Parliament, who never for a moment dreamed of being classed among the chiefs of his party, exalted to a place of equality with Gladstone or Bright. In truth the English Liberal party (I mean now the advancing and popular party--not the old Whigs) has only three men who can be called leaders. After Gladstone, Bright, and Mill there comes a huge gap--and then follow the subalterns, of whom one might name half a dozen having about equal rank and influence, and of whom you may choose any favorite you like. Take, for example, Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. Stansfeld, Mr. Thomas Hughes, the O'Donoghue, Mr. Coleridge (who, however, is marked out for the judicial bench, and therefore need hardly be counted), and one or two others, and you have the captains of the advanced Liberal party. The Liberals are not rich in rising talent; at least there seems no man of the younger political generation who gives any promise of commanding ability. They have many good debaters and clever politicians, but I see no "pony Gladstone" to succeed him who used to be called the "pony Peel;" and the man has yet to show himself in whom the House of Commons can hope for a future Bright. The great Liberals of our day have apparently not the gift of training disciples in order that the latter may become apostles in their time. Like Cavour, they are too earnest about the work and do too much of it themselves to have leisure or inclination for teaching and pushing others.

Officially Mr. Gladstone has been, of course, for several years the leader of the party. He is formally invested with all the insignia of command. He is indeed the only possible leader; for he is the only man who has the slightest chance just now of commanding the allegiance of the old Whigs with their dukes and earls, and the young Radicals with their philosophers, their Comtists, their Irish Nationalists, and their working men. But the true soul and voice and heart of the Liberal party pay silent allegiance to John Bright. He is, by universal acknowledgment, the maker of the Reform agitation and the Reform Bill.

Mr. Disraeli has over and over again flung in the face of Mr. Gladstone the fact that Bright, and not he, is the master spirit of Radicalism. Of late the Tories have taken to praising and courting Bright incessantly and ostentatiously, and contrasting his calm, consistent wisdom with Gladstone's impetuosity and fitfulness. Of course both Bright and Gladstone thoroughly understand the meaning of this, and smile at it and despise it. The obvious purpose is to try to set up a rivalry between the two. If Gladstone's authority could be damaged that would be quite enough; for it would be impossible at present to get the Whig dukes and earls to follow Bright, and the dethronement of Gladstone would be the break-up of the party. The trick is an utter failure. Bright is sincerely and generously loyal to Gladstone, and is a man as completely devoid of personal vanity or self-seeking as he is of fear. No personal question will ever divide these two men.

Gladstone is beyond doubt the most fluent and brilliant speaker in the English Parliament. No other man has anything like his inexhaustible flow and rush of varied and vivid expression. His memory is as surprising as his fluency. Grattan spoke of the eloquence of Fox as "rolling in resistless as the waves of the Atlantic." So far as this description conveys the idea of a vast volume of splendid words pouring unceasingly in, it may be applied to Gladstone. A listener new to the House is almost certain to prefer him to any other speaker there, and to regard him as the greatest English orator of the present generation. I was myself for a long time completely under the spell, and a little impatient of those who insisted on the superiority of Bright. But when one becomes accustomed to the speaking of the two men it is impossible not to find the fluency, the glitter, the impetuous volubility, the involved and complicated sentences, the Latinized, sesquipedalian words of Gladstone gradually losing their early charm and influence, just as the pure noble Saxon, the unforced energy, the exquisite simplicity, the perfect "fusion of reason and passion" which are the special characteristics of Bright's eloquence, grow more and more fascinating and commanding. Perhaps the same effect may be found to arise from a study or a contrast (if one must contrast them) between the political characters of the two men.

It is a somewhat singular fact that one English county has produced the three men who undoubtedly rank beyond all others in England as Parliamentary orators. The Earl of Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright are all Lancashire men. But Gladstone is only Lancashire by birth. His shrewd old Scotch father came to Liverpool from across the Tweed, and made his money and founded his family in the great port of the Mersey. The Gladstones had, and have, large West Indian property; and when England emancipated her slaves by paying off the planters, the Gladstones came in for no small share of the national purchase-money. When the great Liberal orator came out so impetuously and unluckily with his celebrated panegyric on Jefferson Davis, a few years ago, some people shook their heads and remarked that the old planter spirit does not quite die out in the course of one generation; and I heard bitter allusion made to the celebrated declaration flung by Cooke, the great tragedian, in the face of an indignant theatre in Liverpool, that there was not a stone in the walls of that town which was not "cemented by the blood of Africans." But, indeed, Gladstone's outburst had no traditional, or hereditary, or other such source. It came straight from the impulsive heart and nature of the speaker. His strength and his weakness are alike illustrated by that sudden, indiscreet, unjustifiable, and repented outburst. Thus he every now and then disappoints his friends and shakes the confidence of his followers. A keen, intellectual, cynical member of the Liberal party, Mr. Grant Duff, not long since publicly reproached Mr. Gladstone with this trick of suddenly "turning round and firing his revolver in the face of his followers." Certain it is that there is little or no enthusiasm felt toward Gladstone personally, by his party. Admirers of Mr. Disraeli are usually devotees of the man himself. Young men, especially, delight in him and adore him. Mr. Gladstone is followed as a leader, admired as an orator; but I have heard very few of his followers ever express any personal affection or enthusiasm for him; but it is quite notorious in London that some of his adherents can hardly control their dislike of him. Mr. Bright, although a man of somewhat cold and reserved demeanor, and occasionally _brusque_ in manner, is popular everywhere in the House. Mr. Gladstone is not personally popular even among his own followers. What is the reason? His enemies say that he has a bad temper and an unbending intellectual pride, which is as untrue as if they were to say he had a hoarse voice and a stammer. The obscurest man in the House of Commons is not more modest; and there is nothing ungenial in his manner or his temper. But the truth is that people cannot rely upon him, or think they cannot, which, so far as they are concerned, amounts to the same thing. His strongest passion in life--stronger than his love of figures, or of Homer, or even of liberty--is a love of argument. He is always ready to sacrifice his friend, or his party, or even his cause, to his argument. Add to this that he has a conscience so sensitive that it can hardly ever find any cause or deed smooth enough to be wholly satisfactory; add, moreover, that he has an eloquence so fluent as to flow literally away from him, or with him, and the wonder will be how such a man ever came to be the successful leader of a great party at all. He is always reconsidering what he has done, always penitent for something he has said, always turning up to-day the side of the question which everybody supposed was finally put away and done with yesterday.

You can read all this in his face. Furrowed with deep and rigid lines, it proclaims a certain self-torturing nature--the nature of the penitent, self-examining ascetic, whose heart is always vexed by doubts of his own worth and purity, and past and future. Decidedly, Gladstone wants force of character, and force of intellect as well. He is not a man of great thought. Every such man settles a question, so far as he is himself concerned, finally, one way or the other, before long; sees and accepts what the human limitations of thinking are; recognizes the necessity of being done with mere thinking about it, and so decides and is free to act. There is intellectual weakness in Gladstone's interminable consideration and reconsideration, qualification and requalification of every subject and branch of a subject. But there is also a strong, genuine, unmingled delight in mere argument--perhaps as barren a delight as human intellect can yield to.

Last year there were three Fenian prisoners lying under sentence of death in Manchester. Their crime was such as undoubtedly all civil governments are accustomed to punish by death. But there was considerable sympathy for them, partly because of their youth, partly because the deed they had done--the killing of a policeman in order to rescue a political conspirator--did not seem to be a mere base and malignant murder. Some eminent Liberals, Mr. Bright among the rest, endeavored to obtain a mitigation of the sentence. The Tory Government refused; then a point of law was raised on their behalf, and argued in the House of Commons. The point was new, the Tory law-officers, dull men at the best, were taken by surprise, and broke down in reply. Yet there was a reply, and legally, a sufficient one. Mr. Gladstone saw it; saw where the point raised was defective, and how it might be disposed of. He sprang to his feet, pulled the Tory law-officers out of their difficulty, and upset the case for the Fenians. Now this must have seemed to a conscientious man quite the right thing to do. To a lover of argument the temptation of upsetting a defective plea was irresistible. But most of Mr. Gladstone's Irish followers, on whom he must needs rely, were surprised and angry, and even some of his English friends thought he might have left the Tories unaided to hang their own political prisoners. Gladstone's conduct was eminently characteristic. No impartial man could honestly say that he had done a wrong thing; but no one acquainted with political life could feel surprised that a leader who habitually does such things, is almost always being grumbled at by one or other section of his followers.