KATE FIELD'S NEW DEPARTURE.
By Edward Increase Mather.
Miss Kate Field has been so exclusively identified with artistic and literary success that her new departure as a lecturer on existing political evils has excited no little surprise and comment. An exceptional degree of public interest as well as of purely private and personal regard has followed her almost, indeed, from childhood; partly due, it may be, to a certain indefinable magnetism of temperament which always makes the place where she chances to be at the time seem a social centre, and somewhat, too, from a life that has not been without its picturesque setting of scenery and circumstance. "Kate Field was started right,"—remarked Miss Frances E. Willard of her one day. "As a child Walter Savage Landor held her on his knee and taught her, and she grew up in the atmosphere of Art." The chance observation made only en passant, never the less touched a salient truth in that vital manner in which Miss Willard's words are accustomed to touch truth. She was, indeed, "started right." The only child of gifted parents, endowed with a rare combination of intellectual and artistic talent; with a nobility and genuineness of nature that has ever been one of her most marked characteristics; attuned by temperament to all that is fine, and high, and beautiful,—it is little wonder that her life has presented a series of advancing achievements. She has studied, and read, and thought; she has travelled, and "sipped the foam of many lives;" and a polished and many-sided culture has added its charm to a woman singularly charming by nature and possessed of the subtle gift of fascination. When very young she studied music and modern languages abroad in Florence, and in London. To music she especially devoted herself studying under Garcia and under William Shakespeare, the great English tenor, whose favorite pupil she is said to have been. Walter Savage Landor conceived a great fondness for her, gave her lessons in Latin, and left her at his death a valuable portfolio of old drawings. In some verses addressed "To K.F." he alludes to her as:—
Modest as winged angels are,
And no less brave and no less fair.
His interest was richly repaid by the young girl who, after his death, wrote reminiscences of Landor in a manner whose sympathetic brilliancy of interpretation added an enduring lustre to his life and achievement. In her early girlhood as, indeed, in her womanhood, her brilliancy and charm won all hearts. It was in Florence that she met George Eliot, and a moon-light evening at the Trollope villa, where Marion Lewes led the girl, dream-enchanted, out on the fragrant and flowery terrace, left its picture in her memory, and exquisitely did she portray it in a paper on George Eliot at the time of her death. By temperament and cultivation Miss Field is admirably adapted to interpret to the world its masters, its artists. Her dramatic criticism on Ristori ranks among the finest ever written of the stage; her "Pen Photographs of Dickens's Readings" have permanently recorded that memorable tour. Her Life of Fechter wins its praise from the highest literary authorities in our own country and London. She has published a few books, made up from her fugitive articles in the Tribune, the London Times, the Athenæum, and the magazines, and more of this literature would be eminently refreshing and acceptable. It is no exaggeration to say that among the American writers of to-day no one has greater breadth, vigor, originality and power than Kate Field. She is by virtue of wide outlook and comprehension of important matters, entirely free from the tendency to petty detail and trivial common-place that clogs the minds and pens of many women-writers. Her foreign letters to the Tribune discussed questions of political significance and international interest. Miss Field is a woman of so many resources that she has never made of her writing a trade, but has used it as an art; and she never writes unless she has something to say. This fact teaches a moral that the woman of the period may do well to contemplate.
Yet with all the varied charms of foreign life, passed in the most cultivated and refined social circles of Europe, Kate Field never forgot that she was an American, and patriotism grew to be a passion with her. She became a student of English and American politics, and her revelations of the ponderous machinery of the British Parliament, in a series of strong and brilliant press letters, now collected into the little volume called "Hap-Hazzard," was as fine and impressive in its way as is her dramatic criticism or literary papers. All this, perhaps, had paved the way for her to enter into a close and comprehensive study of the subject which she is now so ably discussing in her notable lectures on the social and the political crimes of Utah. The profound and serious attention which she is now giving to this problem stamps her lectures as among the most potent political influences of the time. Miss Field's discussion of Mormonism is one of those events which seem pre-determined by the law of the unconscious, and which seem to choose the individual rather than to be chosen by him. In the summer of 1883, by way of a change from continental travel, Miss Field determined to hitch her wagon to a star and journey westward. She lingered for a month in Denver where she received distinguished social attention and where, by special request, she gave her lecture on an "Evening with Dickens" and her charming "Musical Monologue." Of this Dickens' lecture a western journal said:—
"Charles Dickens was the novelist of humanity, and Kate Field is, to-day, his most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter. Those who were so fortunate as to attend her reading last evening enjoyed an intellectual pleasure not soon forgotten. They saw a slender, graceful woman, dressed in creamy white, with soft laces falling about her; with low, broad brow, and earnest, sympathetic eyes, under a cloud of soft dark hair. With a rich and finely modulated voice of remarkable power of expression, she held her audience for two hours spellbound by the magic of her genius."
In Colorado Miss Field enjoyed an unique and picturesque holiday. Picnics and excursions were gotten up in her honor; special trains were run; she rode on horseback with gay parties of friends twenty-five miles a day; she joined friends from New York who were camping out on "The Needles," and she made a visit to the San Juan Silver-mining district. Among other diversions she had the honor of naming a new watering place, located on "The Divide," an hour by rail from Denver, to which, in honor of General Palmer who has practically "made" that region, Miss Field gave the name of Palmero, the Spanish for Palmer.
How unconsciously Miss Field came to study the problem presented by the peculiar institutions of Utah is curiously indicated in a letter from Salt Lake City, under date of Jan. 16, 1884, which she wrote to the Boston Herald, and which opens thus:—
"I know of nothing that would do Bostonians so much good as a prolonged trip across this continent, giving themselves sufficient time to tarry at different points and study the people. For myself—about half a Bostonian—I became so ashamed of sailing east year after year, that last summer I made up my mind to hitch my wagon to the star of empire and learn as much of my own country as I knew of Europe. I started from New York in July, expecting to be absent three months, and in that period obtain an intelligent idea of the far West. After passing two months and a half in wonderful Colorado and only seeing a fraction of the Centennial state, I began to realize that in two years I might, with diligence, get a tolerable idea of this republic west of the Mississippi. Cold weather setting in, and the fall of snow rendering mountain travelling in Colorado neither safe nor agreeable, I came to Utah over the wonderful Denver & Rio Grande railroad, intending to pass a week prior to visiting New Mexico and Arizona. My week expired on the 22nd day of October and still I linger among the 'saints.' I am regarded as more or less demented by eastern friends. If becoming interested in a most extraordinary anomaly to such an extent as to desire to study it and to be able to form an intelligent opinion therein is being demented, then I am mad indeed, for I've not yet got to the bottom of the Utah problem, and if I lived here years, there would still be much to learn. Despite this last discouraging fact, I have improved my opportunities and am able to paragraph what has come under my own observation or been acquired by absorption of Mormon and Gentile literature. If the commissioners sent here by Congress to investigate the Mormon question, at an annual expense of forty thousand dollars per annum, had studied this question as earnestly as I have, they never would have told the country that polygamy is dying out. One or two members of that commission know better, and sooner or later they must tell the truth or stultify their own souls."
This extract reveals how deeply the anomaly of Mormon life had at once impressed her. Miss Field was too keen and cultivated an observer not to see beneath the surface of this phase of living a problem whose roots struck deep into national prosperity and safety. The distinguished essayist and critic, Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, said of her study of Mormonism:—
She undertook a perfectly original method of arriving at the truth, by intimate conversations with Mormon husbands and wives, as well as with the most intelligent of the "Gentiles." She discarded from her mind pre-conceptions and all prejudices which discolor and distort objects which should be rigidly investigated, and looked at the mass of facts before her in what Bacon calls "dry light." Cornelius Vanderbilt, the elder, was accustomed to account for the failures and ruin of the brilliant young brokers who tried to corner the stocks in which he had an interest, by declaring that "these dashing young fellars didn't see things as they be." Miss Field saw things in Utah "as they be." She collected facts of personal observation, analyzed and generalized them, and, by degrees, her sight became insight, and the passage from insight to foresight is rapid. After thorough investigation, her insight enabled her to penetrate into the secret of that "mystery of iniquity" which Mormonism really is; while her foresight showed her what would be the inevitable result of the growth and diffusion of such a horrible creed.
The winter lapsed into spring and still she lingered in Salt Lake City. She relinquished all pleasure for the real work of studying deeply the anomaly of a Polygamous hierarchy thriving in the heart of the Republic. Every facility was accorded to her by United States officials, military officers, leading Gentiles and Apostates. Prominent "Latter Day Saints" offered her marked courtesy. She pursued this research unremittingly for eight months and when, at last, she left Salt Lake City, the leading Gentile paper, the Tribune, devoted a leading editorial to Miss Field's marvellously thorough study of Mormon conditions, and, on her departure, said:—
"Miss Field is probably the best posted person, outside the high Mormon church officials, and others who have been in the church, on this institution, in the world, and its effects upon men, women and governments. With a fixedness of purpose which nothing could swerve, and with an energy which neither storm, mud, snow, cold looks, the persuasions or even the loss of friends, could for a moment dampen, she has held on her course. In the tabernacle, in the ward meeting house, in the homes of high Mormons, and, when these were closed to her, in the homes of the poor, she has worked upon the theme, while every scrap of history which offered to give any light upon the Mormon organization she has devoured. Mormonism has been to her like a fever. It has run its course and now she is going away. If she proposes to lecture, she ought to be able to prepare a better lecture on Mormonism than she has ever yet delivered; if a book is in process of incubation it ought to be of more value than any former book on this subject. Lecture or book will be intense enough to satisfy all demands. The 'Tribune' gives the world notice in advance that Miss Field has a most intimate knowledge of the Mormon kingdom."
Returning to the East she stopped on the way in Missouri and at Nauvoo, Illinois, looking up all the old camping-grounds of Mormonism, and meeting and interviewing people who had been connected with it, including two sons of Joseph Smith, Miss Field opened her course of lectures on this subject in Boston last November, before a brilliant and distinguished audience, including the Governor and other officials of state, Harvard University professors, and men and women eminent in art, literature and society. She dealt with the political crimes of the Mormons, arguing that the great wrong was not, as many had believed, polygamy, but treason! Polygamy, though "the cornerstone of the Mormon church," was not inserted in its printed articles of faith and was not taught until the unwary had been "gathered to Zion." The monstrosity of the "revelation" on celestial marriage; the tragic unhappiness of Mormon women; the elastic conscience of John Taylor, "prophet, seer and revelator" to God's chosen people, were vividly depicted. Her extracts from Brigham Young's sermons, and from those of his counsellors, are forcible arguments on the Gentile side. Indeed, throughout her entire discourse, Miss Field clinches every statement with Mormon proof, rarely going to Gentile authorities for vital facts connected with her subject. The lecturer's sense of humor betrayed itself now and then, when, with fervor, she related an incident in her own experience, or quoted a "Song of Zion." The refrain of one of these songs still rings in our ears:
Then, oh, let us say
God bless the wife that strives
And aids her husband all she can
To obtain a dozen wives!
The prodigious contrast between the preaching and practice of polygamy was fully displayed. Mormons claim that there is a vast difference between bigamy and polygamy; that only good men are allowed to take plural wives; that no saint takes more wives than he can support, and that a muchly married "man of God" exercises the most rigid impartiality in the bestowal of his affections upon his various women. Miss Field upsets these beautiful theories by graphic pictures drawn from life, and cited Brigham Young himself as "a bright and shining lie to the boast of impartiality." Brigham Young's coup d'etat in granting woman suffrage in 1871 was illuminated, and emphasized by the assertions:—"A territory that has abolished the right of dower, that proclaims polygamy to be divine, that has no laws against bigamy and kindred crimes, that has no just appreciation of woman, is unworthy of self-respecting humanity, woman suffrage or no woman suffrage." Miss Field makes in these lectures a telling exposition of the doctrine of blood atonement, passing on to these Mormon missionaries and their methods, and the people who become "fascinated with the idea of direct communication with heaven through the medium of a prophet," and to whom the missionary brethren prudently "leave the mysteries of polygamy to the imagination," while they inculcate the importance of "gathering to Zion." She outlined the educational status and the discouragement given by Brigham Young to all educational progress. Of Mormon treason she says:—
"Five years after the United States had established the Territory of Utah its people were in armed rebellion because the government dared to send a Gentile governor and national troops to Utah."
Nor does she spare the United States in its responsibility for these crimes. "The United States to-day," said Miss Field, "is responsible for thirty years' growth of polygamy, with its attendant degradation of woman and brutalization of man." As an illustration of this conclusion, she told a most interesting story of which Governor Harding of Utah, Brigham Young, Benjamin Halliday, Postmaster General Blair, Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were the characters. The story is a dramatic and significant bit of Mormon history, related for the first time. It led up to an earnest and eloquent peroration of which the final words were: "'I'll believe polygamy is wrong when Congress breaks it up; not before!' exclaims a plural wife. Men and women of New England! You who forge public opinion; you who sounded the death knell of slavery, what are you going to do about it!"
William Lloyd Garrison used to tell his friends that it was worth an admission fee just to see Kate Field on the platform, as she made so lovely a picture. Her attitudes—for they are too spontaneous and unconscious to be termed poses—are the impersonation of grace, and, aside from the enjoyment of the intellectual quality and searching political analysis of her lectures, is that of the artistic effect. She gave a course of three lectures on this "Mormon Monster." They were efforts whose invincible logic, graphic presentation and thrilling power held spellbound her audience. They were a drama of social and political life, and almost unprecedented on the lyceum platform was this eloquence and splendor of oratory, combined with the trained thought, the scholarly acquirement, and the finished eloquence of its delivery. This course of lectures finished there was a popular call for Miss Field to repeat one at Tremont Temple which, by invitation of Governor Robinson, the Mayor and a number of distinguished citizens, she consented to do. The triumph was repeated. From Boston she was invited to lecture in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Washington. Press and people were alike enthusiastic. It is to the work of Miss Kate Field more than to any other cause, that the present disintegration of Mormon treason is due. Other travellers in Utah have made but the briefest stays, and have been ready to gloss over the tale. Miss Field is telling the truth about it, and she does it with a courage, a vigor, an honesty, and a power that renders it one of the most potent influences in the national life of the times. Kate Field holds to-day the first place on the Lyceum platform of America. She has a rare combination of judicial and executive qualities. She is singularly free from exaggeration, and her sense of justice is never deflected by personal feeling or emotional impulse. She has that exceptional balance of the intellectual and artistic forces that enables her to give to her lecture a superb literary quality, and to deliver it with faultless grace of manner and an impressiveness of presence rarely equalled. In Kate Field America has a woman worthy to be called an orator.