“Over whose acres walked those blessed feet,
Which eighteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our redemption to the bitter cross.”
The story begins and ends in this great figure appearing visibly before our eyes, and we bow our head to acknowledge Jerusalem, the universal centre of pilgrimage—Judea, Galilee, the Holy Land.
A land which, if it could be possible to sweep it altogether out of earthly knowledge, would still live in the pages of one wonderful Book, and to the readers of that Book be of all countries the most familiar and well known. Many an untutored peasant, who knows no more of the road to our own capital than the half-mile of dusty highway under his own eyes, knows of the way to Bethany, signalised by many wonders—knows of the road to Gaza which is desert—knows of that road to Damascus where the traveller was solemnly arrested on his way; and is better aware of the wayside grave where her heart-stricken husband buried Rachel, “sweet Syrian shepherdess,” and of Absalom’s tomb which he built to preserve his name, than of where the royal ashes lie in our own land. Many a humble scholar, untaught in other history, is learned in the ancient wars of Israel, and apprehends Moab, and Edom, and Assyria with a stronger sense of reality than he can apprehend the Russian hordes embattled against ourselves; and sees Pi-ha-hiroth shut in with its mountains, Egypt behind and the sea before, as no description, however vivid, will ever make him see the marshes of the Danube, though he have a son or a brother militant on that disastrous shore to-day. Strong security has God taken for the universal remembrance of that beloved country, blessed by His own Divine preference: while there is a Bible, there must be a Judea; the landscape in all its glorious tints is associated for ever with the wonderful artist’s name; and neither its wretched population nor its heathen rulers, nor all its melancholy meanness and desolation, existing now, can make Christendom forget that this discrowned city is the city over which fell the tears of the Lord.
We have no Crusaders in these days; all that remains of our ancient chivalry finds holier work at home than that impossible redemption of the Holy Land, which God reserves for His own time, and His own hands; nor do we need to depend on the vagabond saint of antique times, the hero of scallop-shell and pilgrim-staff, for our knowledge of Palestine. Neither travellers nor reports are wanting, and we are by no means afflicted with monotony of tone or sameness of aspect in the revelations of our modern pilgrimages. The weary man of fashion who loiters over Palestine in search of a new sensation—the curt and business-like Divine who goes thither professionally on a mission of verification and proof—the wandering litterateur who has a book to make—the accomplished savant and man of science, follow each other in rapid succession. Dreamy speculation—decisions of bold rapidity, made at a glance—accurate topography, slow and careful—each do their devoir in making known to us this country of universal interest. Nor does even the lighter portraiture of fiction shrink from the Holy Land, though here our novelist is a statesman, as much beyond the range of ordinary novelists, as the locality of that last brilliant romance which it has pleased him “to leave half told,” differs from the English village or Scottish glen of common story-telling. To follow Disraeli and Warburton is no easy task, neither is it quite holiday work to go over the ground after Robinson and De Saulcy. Lieut. C. W. N. Van de Velde, the latest traveller of this storied soil, is neither a born poet, nor an accomplished bookmaker, nor a great divine; but whosoever receives his book into their household, receives a social visitor, distinct and tangible—a real man. It is impossible not to clothe the historian with an imagined person—not to see him sitting down to his extempore writingtable compounding his letters—not to form a good guess of the measures of his paces, of perhaps now and then a little puff of Dutch impatience, curiously wrought into a large amount of phlegm. From his first offset he comes clearly out from among the shadows—we are at no loss to keep the thread of personal identity, and are never dubious, in picture number two, about the hero of picture number one. A most recognisable and characteristic personage, we yet stand in no dread of our pilgrim. He makes nothing of his cockle-hat and staff, or his sandal shoon. Instead of calling to his reverent disciples to follow, he offers his arm to any good neighbour who will make the tour with him. You may help to set up the Aneroid, or level the telescope, if you will, but you cannot doubt for a moment that Lieut. Van de Velde takes the angle of yonder nameless villages as a conscientious duty, and when he makes his survey of a bare hillside or Arab desert, does it with the full-hearted and devout conviction that this is his highest capability of serving God; for you ascertain immediately that this is not an expedition of the pleasure-seeker, or a pilgrimage of the devotee. Surveying Palestine is the work of the traveller—his special end and object—and he sets about it simply as his vocation, an enterprise which gives consistence and necessity to all his travel.
One disadvantage of this accurate survey, as indeed of all scientific expeditions, is the bare chronicle of unknown villages, a confusion of barren names, and brief descriptions which take the life out of many pages of this narrative. Lieut. Van de Velde has a very pretty talent for making pictures in words, but to make a map in words is one of the driest and least profitable operations of literature. Toil after him as we may, it is impossible to keep in mind this long course which finds no track, and leaves none—a mere piece of elaborate geography, with only the point, here and there, of a hospitable sheikh, or a hastily-sketched interior, to reward us for the toilsome interval of road. This, however, is not a fault peculiar to M. Van de Velde, but belongs alike to all the more serious explorers of Palestine, to whom every fallen stone has, or ought to have, its separate history.
And notwithstanding this, which, indeed, is a necessary feature of the conscientious and painstaking mind visible in these pages, there is much of the picturesque in the travels of Lieut. Van de Velde. If his sketches are as graphic and clear as his descriptions, it is very much to be regretted that they are not added to this work, for we have nowhere seen more rapid and vivid landscapes with so little pretension on the part of the artist. We speak much of the poetic merit of transferring one’s own mind and individuality into the scenery described, and it is a poetic necessity—nevertheless, once in a way, remembering that the real poet who can do this is not a very common tourist, it is a refreshment to have the landscape without the traveller—the hills and the valleys as they lie, without Mr Brown in the corner taking their likeness. In these volumes our honest traveller offers to your view what he saw, sometimes in an honest fervour of admiration; but you cannot fail to be aware that his eye is on the landscape as he draws it, and not upon the central figure I which overshadows the scene. From first to last, indeed, Lieut. Van de Velde never sees his own shadow between himself and the sunshine, never is oppressed by his own claims to be looked at—in fact, is not troubled whether you look at him at all, but demands of you, most distinctly, to look at his picture, and claims from you an interest in it equal to his own. With strong religious feelings, and a mind deeply leavened with Gospel truths, and the Gospel history of which this soil is redolent, our pilgrim travels onward, not without perturbations, yet full of confidence in the special protection of God, and everywhere, a single-hearted Christian, seeks his own “edification,” and to promote the edification of others. We have said that his is not the pilgrimage of a devotee, yet it is undeniable that though too orthodox to expect any miraculous influence from these holy places, he yet looks for “impressions,” for a more vivid realisation of those great events to which our faith looks back, and a brighter apprehension of the Divine teachings which were first delivered in this favoured land. Here is an instance of one profane interruption of his devout meditations;—he is seated by Jacob’s well:—
“I placed myself in the same position, and could well figure to myself the woman with her pitcher on her head coming down out of the valley. He who knows all things, and whose free sovereign love has chosen His own to eternal life from the foundation of the world—He beheld her, the poor sinner, for whose preservation He had come down from heaven. He saw her as she came along under the olive trees, long before she was aware of His being there. And when she saw Him, she hesitated, perhaps whether she should approach Him, perceiving that he was a Jew. But what should she be afraid of, she the lost, who had lost all, for whom there seemed to be nothing but despair? Therefore she came on, and——
“Thus was I musing with myself, as I sat alone at the side of the well, and had just begun to read the fourth chapter of John, when I was suddenly roused by the blustering voice of a gigantic Arab, who had come up without my observing him, and addressed me thus, with all the characteristic repulsiveness and loathsomeness of the Arabs: