Copyright 1913, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

CHAPTER 20

A PATRON OF ART

EARLY in the history of the settlement, there appeared in Utah people who were of little use in the production of material wealth -- musicians, painters, actors, dancing and fencing-masters. If these obtained the favour of King Brigham, they were assisted to make a living in their own way. A teacher of music or dancing was encouraged to open a school, and royal edict went forth that this school must be patronized. It was as much a matter of course that a boy belonging to the "first families" should take regular lessons in music and dancing as that he should be able to repeat his catechism. The first fencing-school opened in Salt Lake City failed, or at least did not prosper; Brigham was not sufficiently interested in this exotic form of physical culture to dragoon his followers into supporting it. But the dancing-schools grew and throve year by year. Even before the Great Trek, the Mormons had been famed as inveterate dancers; and in the new Zion, going to the dances became almost a matter of religion. Brigham himself was an excellent dancer; and he and his apostles were frequent attendants at balls. It was a mark of great favour when Brigham led out some woman on the floor for a cotillion. In fact, when Brigham -- or any of his lieutenants of the church, -- danced twice at any one ball with an unmarried lady, the gossip was as unctuous and conclusive as when Louis le Grand paid especial attention to some new favourite. Every one assumed that in the near future, there would be a new polygamous marriage.

As illustrating the grotesque mingling of this rather laboured culture with the hardships of frontier life, we may note that for years throughout the outlying settlements of Utah, the standard price of a ticket to a dance was an order on the tithing-house for a bushel of wheat.

Music was held in at least equal honour with dancing. We have seen how Brigham, on coming out from Nauvoo to cheer the pilgrims, camped on Sugar creek, brought the Nauvoo band with him, and played and danced the people into good humour before assembling them to "lay down the law" that should rule them during their westward march. Choral singing was developed very early in the Utah settlement; and to this day, there is probably no other community of equal numbers in America that has half so many trained part-singers as Salt Lake City.

Music -- at least in its choral and orchestral forms -- is the one art which demands discipline rather than individuality. Yet one of the most individual of all arts was highly honoured in Brigham's empire; the art of the drama.

Brigham loved the theatre, and very soon established dramatic performances in Salt Lake City. The actor was a person even more highly considered in the community than the singer or dancing-master. As a rule, the actor had some other vocation, nominally, at least. He was usually a priest, and often a polygamist. Two of Brigham's favourite clerks were actors in his stock company. And it has been said that Brigham himself did not disdain to take part in a performance. Several of Brigham's daughters became actresses; and at least three of these became plural wives in prominent families, continuing their work on the stage in the intervals of child-bearing.

Several notable additions to the American stage have come from the Mormon community.

This frank and genuine recognition of dramatic art by the "powers" made Salt Lake City a very pleasant port of call for even the most celebrated actors. Several men and women of international reputation on the stage were induced by Brigham to spend a season in Salt Lake City, playing in his stock company, George Paunceforte, James A. Herne, and Julia Dean Hayne were some of these, and the last has the honour of having interposed a successful barrier to Brigham's matrimonial ambitions. He fell in love with this excellent actress, and pressed his suit with all the ardour of a boy of eighteen, but was firmly if gently rejected. This is the only publicly known instance when Brigham wooed in vain.

But while Brigham countenanced and encouraged such departures from narrow utilitarianism as provided entertainment for himself and contentment for his people, he set his face against other professions which most people do not class as useless. Like the pious colonist of early Pennsylvania, Brigham wanted no "beggars nor olds maydes, neither lawyers nor doctours, with licence to kill and make mischief."

The opposition to doctors, indeed, came near being ingrained in Mormonism. There are few religions which in the first callow confidence of youth have sense enough to keep from taking a fling at the practice of medicine; and the creed of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon is not among these exceptionally gifted faiths. Joseph "healed" Brigham of malarial fever at Nauvoo -- though the exorcised devils came back so promptly that the cured man had to be carried on a mattress to the house of his friend; and there he lay four days before even his iron will and magnificent strength enabled him to continue his journey. Brigham "ministered to" a sick Indian child not long after his arrival in Utah; and got much credit -- at least from church historians -- from the miracle of cure which he worked. The fact that Brigham's cousin, Willard Richards, was himself a physician doubtless helped modify the original hostility to medicine; but it is not entirely gone, even yet. During early days in Utah, the ordinary rule in dealing with sickness was reversed. When a man was ill, the elders came first to anoint and "administer" to him, and pray over him, and urge him to exert his faith for recovery. If these measures failed, and the Lord did not see fit to heal the patient, the doctors were given a chance. It is worth noting that Brigham did not allow his own illness to progress very far before calling in a physician to relieve Providence from further worry about so important a case.

Brigham's dislike for the legal profession was rather a business-manager's abhorrence of waste, than a tyrant's jealousy of the restraints of law. Restraint touched him so seldom that he had little chance to develop this form of antagonism. He felt that time and money spent in litigation were time and money wasted. It never occurred to his direct and forthright intelligence that the forms which consumed time might on occasion preserve liberty -- nor did he think of liberty as a thing in itself worth preserving. Every religious community has practised some form of arbitration in the settlement of its internal disputes; but the Mormons worked it out in greater detail than any others, and applied it to far more complicated affairs.

On February 14, 1849, Salt Lake City was divided into nineteen wards, each presided over by a bishop. This bishop was not merely an ecclesiastical officer, but a civil one as well. He was a sort of mayor over a little municipality, and also a judge or kadi who was charged with the punishment of minor offences and the settlement of all ordinary disputes. If two of the brethren could not agree, the case was brought before the bishop, who heard both sides and gave judgment. A sort of indefinite appeal to higher church powers was permitted, but was not often exercised. So long as society was simple, and all disputants belonged to the same church, there was little injustice, and a vast saving of time and expense by this method. Brigham used often to score these bishops' courts in unsparing terms; but in this as in all things when checking or trying to guide his people, Brigham's barb was far worse than his bite. In the main he was a just man; his position forced him to desire justice in the vast majority of cases; he had power at any time to end these bishops' courts with a word and he did not speak that word.

This is as good a place as any to note one error into which nearly every Gentile writer on Mormon institutions has fallen. Every one has taken Brigham's scolding sermons as proof of the awful iniquity of the people who were addressed in such terms. The folly of this is surely obvious, yet it has somehow escaped attention. The outsider who took literally the terms of a domestic curtain lecture would be laughed at; yet grave and sober historians have made a similar mistake, and quoted Brigham's scathing rebukes of sin as proof that his people were peculiarly sinful. They prove the speaker's vehemence, and little more. To hear Brigham lecture his people on their shortcomings, one would have thought them all villains; and to hear him praise his people when they were threatened by Gentiles, one would have thought them all saints.

The truth is that Brigham was a sort of scolding housewife to the whole Mormon community. He jawed it into order. We shall have something to say later about the remarkable ecclesiastical machinery by which he maintained his power and authority; but the mechanics of the system were after all of less moment than the dynamics of the man. He was anything rather than a polished orator. He was a good, direct, forceful speaker, charged to the brim with that untranslatable thing known as personality. He was rather coarse, though seldom offensively so. He assumed the right to scold and lecture and berate his people on every imaginable topic, and they granted the claim. He scolded polygamous wives for quarrelling -- his own wives among the number. He scolded women for their fondness for ornaments, a favourite topic with church orators from the days of Chrysostom, at least. He "roasted" the sheepmen of Utah for their bad luck in raising lambs; jawed men by name for laziness, for slackness in tithe-paying, for failure to keep discipline in their families. All these topics were threshed out in public, at the tabernacle; and incredible as it may seem, all were written down and printed by church authority. The man who will take the trouble to read fifty pages of the Journal of Discourses may not find his respect for Mormonism increased. But if he has any knowledge of evidence, or sense of proportion, he will not take these frank jawings from the pulpit as proof of any unusual wickedness in the congregation.