The Sun.
London, England, 1865-06-19 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Mr. Hepworth Dixon's New Work.

The Holy Land. By William Hepworth Dixon.
Two volumes. Chapman and Hall.

Frankly—let us acknowledge the fact at once—we
can hardly contrive to speak of this work dispassion-
ately. For—becauge of his havingwritten it—we owe
Mr. Dixon a debt of gratitude. And we do so for a
simple reason enough, for a reason, as it appears
to us, that is pretty plainly indicated by the very
title selected by our author for this his honest,
manly, earnest, eloquent record of his recent wan-
derings through the plains and cities of Palestine.
Thither he went, thence he has returned, with a
sense above all things that it is, essentially and
unmistakably, the HOLY LAND. A region sacred
alike to Jew, and Moslem, and Christian. A
country consecrated to the veneration not only of
the People of God, but, yet more peculiarly, yet more
essentially, to the veneration of the whole human
race, of the chosen Peoples of God, under their
one comprehensive title of the Gentiles. From the
moment of his disembarkation upon the shores of
Palestine, down to the moment of his re-embarkation
upon his return voyage homewards, Mr. Dixon has
so far trodden lightly, by reason of his ever-present
consciousness that it was indeed a sacred region he
was traversing, that his narrative breathes through-
out a spirit of profound and unaffected reve-
rence. Lightly though he treads, however, ho
treads firmly. As if adopting (might we so express
it) the Oriental token of respect by the doffing of
the shoon or the sandal upon the very threshold, he
permits us here to note, not once, as it were, the
mere conventional outline of either shoon or sandal,
but, in lieu of that, step by step, as we follow him
in these wanderings of his to and fro upon the sacred
soil of Palestine, the delicate and sensitive in-
dentation of the human footprint. He has written
in his time many works more highly elaborated.
He has written none more beautiful. He has vindi-
cated the character of Bacon the Philosopher. He
has vindicated the character of Penn the Philan-
thropist. He has contended in the lists of histori-
cal controversy with a literary athlete as redoubt-
able as Lord Macaulay. But he has done nothing
worthier of his powers, he has achieved nothing more
honourable to his nature, to his heart as a man, to
his brain as a student, to his soul as a Christian,
than the composition of these two noble volumes
about the Holy Land. The spirit, moreover, in
which he has penned them is nothing less than
exquisitely refreshing to us in this age of Kinglake
and Renan. Diametrically opposed, in the general
tone of it, to the detestable cynicism of " Eiithen,"
the work here under review is, rather than that,
conceived somewhat after the charming manner in
which "The Crescent and the Cross" was penned by
the graceful and scholarly hand of Eliot Warbur-
ton. With this difference, however, that far more
distinctly than is anywhere recognisable in that
picturesque record of travel in the regions peopled
promiscuously by the Moslem and the Christian,
Hepworth Dixon's record of his travels in the Holy
Land are coloured, are suffused, flavoured, saturated,
are, in a manner, radiant throughout with distinct
evidences of his earnest sincerity as a Believer.
Nevertheless, it should be premised at once, if only
in simple justice to our author, that in all this there
is no ostentation of devotional fervour on his part.
There is, so far as we can appreciate it, no affecta-
tion whatever of a sense of religious awe, such
as in writing about the localities, such as in
visiting them, he has not actually himself experi-
enced. In one word he has penned these pages not by
any means as a zealot. While, let us add, in another
word or two, that he has returned from Palestine to
describe to us all that he has there seen and visited and
thought in that Holy Land as a Christian—not the least
atom in the world, so far as we have read his pages,
not for one single instant, as a Controversialist.
Throwing aside for a while his " Bradshaw" and his
" Murray," he has, so to speak, taken with him
into Palestine as his single but all-sufficient guide-
Book, the Bible—the Old and the New Testament.
At every turn, too, he shows himself to be perfectly
familiar with its record, with all those sacred words of
Holy Writ about the Holy Land. So far as we have
been enabled to estimate, through these volumes,
the author's general character or temperament as a
believing Christian, not as a Christian merely by
name, but as a thoroughly believing Christian, we
have been unable to detect in him anywhere the in-
dications of his being in any way a bigoted sec-
tarian. Far asunder may be our views—far
asunder, most probably, are our views—upon many
points of a purely doctrinal character, upon points,
too, the majority of them of the most vital im-
portance as affecting the whole framework of our
common Christianity. Yet, seizing upon those other
grand root-points of belief which are acceptable, so
to speak, to all Christians indiscriminately, our
author reveals an almost instinctive aptitude in
the avoidance of what might otherwise have
outraged the susceptibilities of those who are
not precisely or absolutely of the same way
of thinking as himself—telling us, for the most
part, all that he has to tell us, less as a
Protestant, less as a member of the Church of
England, than, purely and simply, in a far
larger and more comprehensive sense, as a
Christian. It is this sedulous avoidance of all
controversy in these volumes, coupled with
their earnest sincerity throughout, that will,
or we are much mistaken, tend to render them
very widely acceptable. Together with all this, more-
over, the work is wonderfully realistic as a delinea-
tion of the Holy Land. It is full of word-painting.
Its pen-and-ink sketches of the sacred localities
visited are in truth like so many mental photographs
reflected upon page after page, from the retina of
the author's clear, minutely observant, exquisitely
sensitive organ of vision. As if bent upon carrying
out literally the old Horatian precept, he plunges—
and with the grapple of an anchor too—in medias res.
The monosyllable " Plash," is in effect the first
word of the first sentence of the first page of this
goodly book of his about the Holy Land. That
word being simply the intimation of the dropping
of the anchor off Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, from the
srn Austrianyrnßagusian captain, the
iotebcoraetW, I%a'nitdhthteheltalian name (B. Vapore),
the boat that had carried our traveller from the
shores of Europe to those of Palestine. As signifi-
cantly indicative at the very outset, it might
be said at the very threshold of that Morning
Land, of his keen-witted observation of everything
about him—of things at once so old and yet so new,
so old to the knowledge and yet so new to the
sight—we would direct attention to the casual
mention upon page 20 of the first of these two
volumes, to the purely casual, and yet, as it seems to
us, the especially significant mention there made of
the Aga who sits at the Water Gate of Jaffa, the
gate that faces the sea, watching with imperturbable
gravity all the odd sights, scenes, faces,
and figures
that pass in through that narrow entrance, through
that mere slit in the wall, through that small cut-
ting in the rampart, through which everything
coming into Palestine from the West, from all the
countries, and climates, and peoples of Europe must
pass, after being hoisted up from the canoes bringing
them to land from ship-board ! Articles as miscel-
laneous, we are told, as pachas, bitter beer,
cotton cloth, negroes, antiquarians,
dervishes, Mus-
covite bells and Circassian shoes, French clocks
and English damsels, monks and Jews and Bashi-
Bazouks After having described very whimsically
the manner in which all these motley things and per-
sons are hoisted up from the canoes into the gateway,
in the sight, under the very nose of that imperturbable
Aga, our author mentions his having, one hot and
idle day, witnessed a Seraskier's hareem hoisted
thus out of the boat into the town, adding
thereupon—" If yon Aga in the white turban and
fl.wing skirt had been blessed with any sense of
humour, he would have died of his duty, perhaps
years ago." The significance of this incidental
morsel of whimsicality lying simply in the fact of its
betokening so very plainly, at the outset, that, while
our author goes there, so to speak, with his head
uncovered, ho goes there, too, with his eyes wide
open. He sees and notes all the things around
him just exactly as they are. He puts no
adventitious gloss upon them. He beholds
them, he describes them, exactly as they ap-
pear to him, invested with all their ineffable and
divine associations—yet he observes them and
depicts them, at the name time, for all that, exactly

as they are in themselves. The squalid, the gro-
tesque, the ruined, the arid, he has a glance for,
quite as watchful, as any directed by him to the
fertile, the beautiful, or the sublime. His descrip-
tions are uncompromisingly truthful, while, added
to all this, his mere manner as a narrator has
a freshness of its own. Depicting one of his
Oriental followers, Yakoub, he speaks of him
as he knew him, first of all superficially and
then afterwards when he " came to know him
worse." Just as, later on, in the same whimsical
fashion he makes mention of his cavalcade winding
across the desert—" man, horse, ass, and camel
forming a caravan about seventy weak." So un-
compromising is he in his honest outspeaking that
he blurts forth, in despite of his own loyal Protes-
tantism—after mentioning the circumstance that in
Palestine equals salute each other, if Moslem, by
the soft Syrian phrase of " Peace be with you ;"
if Christians by " the sign of the cross"—adding
thereto, " This salutation (the sign of the cross)
is made with singular grace by the beggar in his
rags" —he blurts out, we say, the blunt
acknowledgment —" An English traveller
making no sign of the cross when he greets
a brother, is commonly supposed by the Syrians to
be a Turk." It is, however, when he comes to the
delineation of the principal scenes of the Holy
Narrative that the vivid and picturesque eloquence
of his manner attains its most obvious excellence.
At his earliest mention of Jerusalem he observes
very impressively that that ancient capital of Judea
is a holy place to nearly all the children of men !
" The Jew," he there writes, " is going up to Zion
that he may die in the city of his fathers, and
mingle with the dust of patriarch and seer ; the
Christian that he may kiss the stone of redemption,
and light his taper at the sacred fire ; the Moslem
that he may gaze on the seat of judgment and
write his prayer under the dome of the Rock."
By a single phrase sometimes he pictures a whole
region—as where he talks of the city of Ramleh, in
the sandy wilderness, as " surrounded by empty
cisterns and teeming cemeteries." Occasionally, too,
he casts down for ever into the dust, simply by proving
them to be erroneous, some of our most dearly-
cherished imaginings in regard to the East. Instance
this, his mention of the native Syrian as no horse-
man ! We hear so much, he says, of the Arabian
horses, and we know so well about the Bedouin's
flights that we are apt to consider those Orientals as
a nation of horsemen. All which, he tells us, is
in truth no more than a dream. The
Bedouin rides for his safety in the Desert,
and depends on his speed ; but the Arab of
towns and of settled life never mounts a horse. When
he does not care to walk he mounts an ass." Yet
we cannot but think that Mr. Dixon goes just a trifle
too far when he adds, almost immediately after this,
that even " the warriors of Pharaoh, though they
yoked their horses to chariots, never (sic) got upon
their backs !" Surely that immortal chaunt of exul-
tation, " the horse and his rider are thrown into the
sea" is proof positive to the contrary, in reference
to those very warriors of Pharaoh, those haughty
squadrons of the cavalry of the Egyptians ! Some
among his intimations of surprise, again, as an
European traveller in Palestine have been already
notified by earlier excursionists from the West into
the East. Eliot Warburton, we think it was, who
anticipated Hepworth Dixon's humorous naïveté in
marvelling over the reversal of all our national con-
ventionalities, yonder in Syria, by reason of all the
women there wearing the trousers, while their hus-
bands and sons wear the skirts ! Stranger, however,
than even this to the later traveller's eyes was
the fact that yonder in Palestine the prettiest and
youngest damsels might often be seen with their
faces covered to the eyes and their bosoms naked
to the waist--the yelek being worn open while the
chemisette beneath it was often cut away from the
bust completely ! Many a time by the simple apt-
ness of a comparison, our author brings home to
our western apprehension, upon the instant, a truth
that could hardly have been so vividly realised by
any more lengthened or highly elaborated description.
Speaking of the glory of Babylon when in its pride,
he says that a poor Hebrew loitering then and there
through its streets was like a Savoyard in the
Rue Royale or a Shetlander at Charing-Cross. Just
as immediately before that, he has enabled us Lon-
doners to form some proximate notion of the mag-
nificence of the Babylonian architecture by observing
that there are ruins there of palaces, to which St.
James's would be a kennel for dogs and lions !
Or, again, when discriminating among the various
sects, or castes, or classes, or however they
may be the more correctly designated, among the
Jews of old—does he not realise them to us,
instantaneously, by the touch of one felicitous com-
parison ? Likening the Pharisees to the early
Puritans, and referring, in so many words, to those
staunch old Hebrew Tories, the great body of the
Sadducees ! It is seldom that Mr. Dixon permits his
forcefulness of manner, we mean in the mere empha-
sis of composition, to run him into anything like
extravagance, as where in depicting the almost mad-
dening thirst produced by the drought of a journey
through the desert, he would have us believe that
" a gulp of fresh water, even though it be warm and
putrid, cools the burning tongue 1" In him we have
no untravelled Cockney relating to us his foreign
experiences with evidences—at every turn (of the leaf)
—of what might be termed a wholly unsophisticated
bewilderment ! Calabria, Granada, Morocco, the
wild regions above Smyrna, have already been
traversed by him before this his latest excursion
abroad into the holy regions of Palestine. Whither-
soever he goes among those sacred localities, he is
always equally alive, as it seems to us, to their
natural peculiarities, and to the lovely and awful
sanctity of their sublime associations. The village
of Emmaus, described by him as one of the most
beautiful spots in the hill country of Judea, he
passes through, as a matter of course, with the
thought that there it was that the Master
walked with Caiphas and His disciples. When
he pauses before the convent of Ain Karm,
it is to remind us that it is built upon the
site of the dwelling-place of Elizabeth and of the
birth-place of John the Baptist. Nearer and nearer
as he draws towards the Holy City—" Rock," ho
tells us, "white and blinding, rock broken into frag-
ments, rock burnt into powder, stretches before and
behind !" We are tempted, however, to give the
whole of this picturesque paragraph complete, pre-
cisely as it is written, as it will then afford the
reader some juster notion of its strange and weird
impressiveness :
The road goes zigzag over the limestone rock, the
waste and stones increasing as you approach the Holy
City. Vegetation almost ceases ; in a cleft you may find
a bramble, and in some happy hollow you may descry
an olive ; but the rule is otherwise. Rock white and
blinding, rock broken into fragments, rock burnt into
powder, stretches before you and behind. At length,
when the long reach of wall, twining gloriously rugged
and picturesque round the bases of cathedral, synagogue,
and mosque, appears in sight, the eye clings fondly to the
figure of a single palm, shooting gracefully up from a
garden in the city near the Bethlehem Gate ; and on the
right, in a deep natural trough, to an olive plantation, in
the midst of which nestles the Convent of the Cross. The
aspect of the land is stern and desolate, and the great city
itself seems to spring from the centre of a rolling plateau
of stones and graves.

In this awful manner it is, that first breaks upon the
Pilgrim's vision the holiest spot in all that Holy
Land, the City of the Judgment, of the Passion, of
the Redemption, of the Crucifixion. Conspicuous
—austere—venerable—Jerusalem there reveals
itself to the eye in the midst of a region to all
appearance scarred, and riven, and withered, and
blasted into an everlasting sterility by the stupen-
dous and portentous events of which it was the
arena, events removed from us now by a distance
very nearly two thousand years. In touching upon
themes like these, our traveller writes—it is high
praise to say so, doubtless, but it is praise that he
eminently well deserves—always befittingly. With
the solemnity of a believer, with the fervour of a
Christian, with abundant evidences of his familiarity
with the biblical history, and beyond all this with
the eloquence of one who shows himself to be
throughout completely master of his own language.
Sometimes, and not unnaturally, his style seems
to be coloured by that of Holy Writ, or by that,
again, of the inhabitants of the Orient regions
he is traversing. In this mood it is, for example,
that he remarks upon the fact of no law being
acknowledged in the vast countries lying between
the Jordan and the Euphrates, countries, as he re-