He had his own way in everything save with Amelia Folsom. To her determination not to bend the knee, he owes the preservation of his character. Another young woman whom he took to wife when he was sixty-six attempted to discipline him, but without success. Even if she had not failed, his character would have been safe; that possession can not be ruined after sixty.
Like Achilles, Brigham Young had one vulnerable spot, but it was his heart, not his heel. Women acted upon him as the lamp does upon the moth. It was not face or figure, intelligence or charm that lured him. It was sex. Casanova was to him what a candle is to a phare. The illusion that most men develop when they approach senility, viz., that they are still attractive to young women, seized him early. When he was fifty-six years old, he said, preaching to his flock: “You think I am an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young, that I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than any of the young men.” His experience would seem to justify the boast, but with all his understanding of women he forgot that women marry for different reasons, some for position, some for protection, some for title. But what is Princess or Duchess compared to Goddess?
“I am a great lover of good women. I understand their nature, the design of their being and their work.” Had Brigham Young left out the only adjective in that sentence and added: “Once it mattered not to me that they were old or young, homely or plain, temperamental or indifferent, but now that I am old, I like them young and pretty,” it would have been an epitome of what women meant to him in the twilight of his life, as the following sentence epitomises his general estimate of them: “Let our wives be the weaker vessels and the men be men, and show the women by their superior ability that God gives husbands wisdom and ability to lead their wives into His presence.” After looking at the pictures of scores and more of Brigham Young’s wives, one is convinced that Mark Twain was right when he said the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitled him to the kindly applause of mankind, and the man who marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-hearted generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.
The hiatus in Brigham Young’s personality was on the æsthetic side. He had no feeling for beauty in any form or display and he could not distinguish between vulgarity and refinement in conduct, thought or speech. Rabelais alone outranks him in putridity of speech, and his sermon of the first Sunday of September 1861, when he talked to his flock about how they should dress, is offered in evidence.
Shrewdness, cruelty and industry were his dominant possessions. They radiate from the daguerreotype made of him when he was fifty, like scent from a lily. He was hirsute, heavy-jawed, thin-lipped and the corners of a mouth, that seemed framed for an oath or an obscenity, dipped deeply into his cheeks. He was thick-necked, barrel-chested and his hands and feet did not fit him, but they were adapted to a man who ruled with a rod of iron. The secret of his success he said was “I am a Yankee. I guess things and very frequently I guess right.” If he had added, “I see straight; I know that original sin is fear and that all mankind is born in it; and that the real pleasure of life is in gratifying the fundamental urges,” neither his personality nor his success would be enigmatic.
It would help the searcher after explanation of Brigham Young’s success as proselyter, exhorter, guide, executive, lover and tyrant to know about his parents and his brothers and sisters. They were all steeped in seriousness and saturated with religiosity. His father, who became the right-hand man in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was an unreasoning Methodist, an uncompromising moralist. His brother Joseph “was solemn and praying all the time and he had not been seen to smile for four years or to laugh for two.” His brother Phinias was a preacher who saw visions and his sister who mediated him to Mormonism was the wife of the Reverend John P. Green. He lived in a recreationless community to which a new religion was what the County Fair, Circus and Cinema are to remote rural communities to-day.
It was as natural for Brigham Young to go into Mormonism as for a duck to go into water. When he got in, he soon found it was a quick and safe way to prosperity, power and posterity. He put his religious enthusiasm out at compound interest and in twelve years it made him a Prophet, a Seer, a Revelator and a Realtor. He pitched his economic tent in the desert plains of Utah and he directed his co-religionists to thrust fertility upon them through irrigation and bent backs. Having no capacity for spending money, he soon began to experience the feelings of Crœsus. He realised that the surest way to wealth is to be a big earner, a small spender, and a prudent investor. He urged his flock to those ends and said: “I am your avatar.”
There were two things he liked to do: to dance and to make love. He was strangely susceptible to rhythmical movement and he loved to marry women and to beget children. He acknowledged twenty-seven of the former and fifty-six of the latter.
The day Mormonism was purged of polygamy, it ceased to be an object of popular interest and likely it will remain so unless the Ku Klux Klan or the Fundamentalists can be persuaded to concentrate on it, when it shall have again its day in court, but there will never be such days as those of Brigham Young.
Mr. Werner says he is convinced that Mormonism is a perfect example of religion carried to its illogical conclusions. If he would only tell us what religion carried to its logical conclusion is, it might help us to fathom his meaning. But nothing will help us understand what he means by “demented frog” and “neurotic horse” or why one of Joseph’s sisters was enceinte and not pregnant, or what there was about Brigham Young that made him “constitutionally, and by habit, incapable of languor,” for languor shall always mean for me feebleness, faintness of body, oppression from fatigue, disease or trouble. Brigham Young was a god, but he was also a mortal.