Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/337

 When I heard that the biographer of P. T. Barnum was about to produce a life of Brigham Young, I trembled for the Saints in glory. I was a little afraid that Mr. Werner, being a biographer of the new school which discards the use of biographical whitewash, would put me into an unsaintly, if not into a positively frivolous, state of mind. Mr. Werner has not, in excessive development, what phrenologists used to call "the bump of veneration." He inclines with Anatole France and the late James Huneker to sweep prophets of all sorts rather bruskly into the large category of fakirs. To prepare and fortify my mind against the expectable mockery of an unbeliever, I thought it wise and just to read first an account of Mormon achievements by a member of the household of faith. I read a little book which, in its second edition, came recently to my desk, Levi Edgar Young's "The Founding of Utah."

Professor Young is descended from "a pioneer of 1847," and is related to the Patriarch. He is also a member of the First Council of Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and head of the department of Western History in the Pniversity of Utah. He looks back to 1847 as historians in Cambridge look back to 1620. Incidentally he looks back from a city which Rebecca West recently declared one of the most beautiful in the world. Whether he gazes out over the wide valley with its vast blue inland sea from the commanding height of the University on its mountain bench, or whether he strolls under the bright stimulus of the mountain air through the clean wide green avenues and parks of Salt Lake City, inevitably he judges his ancestors "by their fruits." They made the desert blossom like the rose, the pioneers of