Four well-known journalists have died during the month: Joseph M. Levy, proprietor of the London Daily Telegraph, who died on October 12th; "Long" John Wentworth, an old journalist, but best known in Chicago politics, whose career closed on October 16th; Colonel R. M. Pulsifer, former owner of the Boston Herald, who committed suicide on October 19th; and Napoleon N. Thieblin, a New York financial writer, who died of consumption on November 1st. The obituary record is also augmented by the death at Tashkend of Colonel Nicholas Prejevalski, the famous Russian explorer, just as he was about to start on an exhibition to Thibet.
REVIEWS.
History of Tennessee.—The Making of a State, by James Phelan. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)—This book is to us a great delight. It illustrates so clearly what we have often said, that the success of an author is not so much in what he has to say as in the manner of saying it. This is an English rendition of the French axiom that style is thought. Anyone doubting this has only to remember that Shakespeare translated to any other language than his own is poor stuff. We laughed ourselves into tears once over the play of "Hamlet" rendered into French. The melancholy Dane became a grotesque mountebank, and Shakespeare's thoughts the dreariest sort of commonplace. It is the same of all.
Now, we have had histories and histories. Those of the dull, plodding workers in the worm-holes of time lift out the dust, and dust it remains until taken in hand by genius, and the dust is changed to gold. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp"—but the stamp makes it currency, and it is prized as it passes from hand to hand.
We have histories of States, we have histories of Tennessee—and they are too solemnly stupid, it is said, for consultation. The consultations are so rare that moth, mold, and mildew eat in and destroy them unmolested. We are erecting at an immense expense a huge building at Washington to hold the bound commonplaces of authors. How much better it would be to have a commission of good fellows go through and consign to the flames, or to the Young Men's Christian Association, or the common-school libraries, all the unreadable books! What a bonfire we should have of histories alone! The dry theological husks of learning would give Satan material for his furnaces for some days.
To return to our mutton—and it is tender, appetizing, digestible mutton. We have had histories of States and histories of Tennessee. They are all full of solid facts. Yet if a man can be found who will make affidavit that he has read any one of them with comfort to himself, we shall doubt his sanity or his truthfulness. Here is a young man, and a Member of Congress at that, who takes the same dry bones of fact, and through the magic touch of his pen, lo! the old skeletons take on flesh, drink in life, and through the roseate atmosphere of romance the records are fascinating, and one closes the book with the feeling that pervades our being at the close of a grand opera well rendered, when in the silence the feelings yet vibrate like the waves of the sea when the winds that have vexed them are still.
For the first time we waken to the fact that the earlier settlers of Tennessee were not common people. As a well-painted landscape is more prized than the real view, because of the art, so Mr. Phelan has given us a local coloring that makes these hardy pioneers picturesque and poetic. They make a charming background for such men as John Sevier, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, and other noted characters who toiled and wrought, killed and got killed, while the State was forming.
Mr. Phelan tells us in his charming way of the struggles and hardships, the wanton wrongs and wars, until the forests were felled, the swamps drained, fields opened, highways and railroads built, and the wilderness changed in less than three generations to farms and villages, where the busy hum of human life took the hearing from the cry of wild beasts, the yell of Indians, and the sharp crack of the murderous rifles in the hands of robbers.
Our space will not permit our giving much of this fascinating volume. The author seeks to rescue John Sevier from an undeserved oblivion. At the same time he relegates that historic myth Daniel Boone to his deserved contempt as a land-shark and speculator. It is a great comfort to find a man of genius and a student withal going through these sham gods of the past, and puncturing their bran-stuffed bodies until they collapse into insignificance. What a task some iconoclast of the future will have among our war heroes of the late armed conflict! How the great generals whose fame, like kites, has been made of newspapers, will tumble from their pedestals, while the real heroes are lifted into place!