Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
land which taught Greece her letters—and through Greece, Rome—and
through Rome, the world—that venerable cradle of culture and
refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages—those
Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
shortcomings we still excuse—not because they were savages, but
because they were the chosen savages of God.
The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written—one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of that solemn land:
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
motionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them
where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
It would be easy to quote pages here—a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival, and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and personal—inclusively so—it might better have been left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
LXIII. IN WASHINGTON—A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written, about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the position of private secretary—a position which was to give him leisure for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August, he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in discussing the matter in person.—[In a letter home, August 9th, he referred to the arrangement: “I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.”]
There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement. When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing: