acres upon acres of the yellow marigold, a | arabesques; the floors are of tesselated noxious flower to travellers, for it was marble; marble columns support the roofs found to occasion a very bad form of hay- of carved wood which run along one side; fever. Early in April the patches of corn were ripening under the scattered oaks, and the shaggy brown buffaloes were wallowing in the muddy marshes; and on the shoals in Crocodile River the long brown reptiles which give it its name might be seen basking in the sun. In the beginning of April the camp was moved to the edge of the hills, and here they had an invitation to dinner from the emir of the Howarith Arabs, whose tents were pitched in the plain below. They accepted the invitation, and found a large party assembled to meet them, very polite and quiet in manner. At P. M. dinner was served in a large wooden bowl four feet in diameter. The substratum of the feast was composed of bread and vegetables, above which was piled rice and roast lamb cut into small pieces, while over all was poured an ample libation of melted butter. Three brass spoons were courteously proffered to the English guests; but as they were no longer strangers in the country, they boldly thrust their right hands into the savory mess, and made a comfortable meal. Then came May. The corn was reaped, the flowers were gone, and the treeless plain was again a withered desert scorched with the fiery heat of the sun, which made the survey party thankful to march south into a wild, hilly country where there were pleasant olive-groves. The natives of this region had never seen an Englishman, and the ruins around owed their dilapidation rather to the destructive influences of the weather than to the hand of man. They were now completely worn out by the heat of the sun and the fatigues of the campaign, and resolved to take a few weeks of relaxation in a cool retreat in the mountains above Damascus. Emerging from a rugged gorge in a chain of barren hills, the traveller suddenly sees beneath his feet a cool, delicious paradise of murmuring waters and shady groves, through whose masses of dusky foliage rise the white minarets and domes of this ancient city. The architecture is not striking, for, with the exception of the public buildings and a few private dwellings, Damascus is built of mud; and yet it gives to the stranger an impression of imposing grandeur from the magnificence and beauty of its interiors. The houses are built round courts, which are pleasant, shady arcades of overarching boughs and trellised vines; the walls are covered with and water gleams and sparkles all around, gushing from fountains of marble or alabaster. The shady, narrow streets and gay bazaars forcibly recall to the stranger the imagery of the "Arabian Nights." Here, unlike Cairo and Jerusalem, although there is variety enough in the loungers and passers-by, there is no Frank admixture in the crowd, no undignified hurry, no bustling, eager tread imported from the busy West. All is Oriental, from the Moslem lady who shuffles past in yellow slippers, to the shawled Bekouin who eyes with stealthy glance the portly kadi in long striped robe and huge white turban; while the gaunt softa, most fanatical of the followers of the Prophet, scowls upon the unveiled Maronite woman, as she crouches in an angle of the wall to avoid the huge camel, who with his swinging load of firewood sweeps the narrow lane. Bludân was the name of the sanatorium in the hills to which they were bound, a cool, delightful spot, from which they made excursions to Baalbec, a chaos of colossal columns and broken porticoes; and to Hermon, which Lieutenant Conder considers to be the Mount of the Transfiguration. In the end of September they went into camp again at Bethlehem, which is now one of the most flourishing towns in Palestine. It has five thousand inhabitants, who are all Christians, and whose enterprise and energy in trade shew the difference between the religion of hope and progress and the deadening, benumbing influence of the fatalistic Mussulman creed. The olive harvest had begun in the environs of the busy little town, and picturesque groups of gaily-dressed women were hard at work in the olive-orchards, their babies being slung up the while in small hammocks between the trees. In the beginning of November the travellers left Bethlehem, and entered the barren wilderness which stretches away on the west beyond the Dead Sea; their first desert camp being pitched beside the Greek monastery of Mar Saba, a spot dreary and desolate almost beyond the power of language to describe. Its inmates are Greek monks exiled for crimes or heresy, and Lieutenant Conder scarcely knew which had the more hopeless and fossilized appearance, the ghastly desert outside, or these living men within, slowly withering away - a dreary death in life. From this stony wilderness they marched to Jerusalem, the great centre of interest | were covered deep with luxuriant pastur in Palestine; but while admitting its many age, and were bright with patches of bril fascinations from an antiquarian point of liant flowers, over which the lovely little view, our author solemnly avers it to be in sunbirds peculiar to the district hovered his opinion "a very ugly city." On two like living jewels. The weather was still occasions during Easter he was present in occasionally stormy and cold, with bitter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and showers of sleet and hail; and rheumasaw the pretended miracle of the holy tism and hay-fever attacked the muchfire, which the ignorant Syrian and Rus- enduring survey party. Among the many sian peasants believe to descend from Biblical sites which they were able to idenheaven. The church, which is a large tify was Bethabara, the scene of our lord's building, is crowded on these occasions baptism, a place about which there has with pilgrims, and the scene is peculiarly been much dispute. Lieutenant Conder striking from the varied nationality and places it at one of the many fords of the dress of the worshippers, and from the Jordan, just above its junction with the wild and intense emotion which many of Jalûd. During this campaign their comthem exhibit. During his stay in Jerusa-missariat was not so well supplied as usual: lem Lieutenant Conder prepared a map, often after a hard day's work they could shewing as accurately as possible the lie of the natural rock within the city walls (modern Jerusalem being built, as Captain Warren and others have shown, over the accumulated rubbish of the ancient city). By this and by certain other investigations he was able to demonstrate that the conformation of the ground is not radically different now from what it was in ancient times; and he was also led to reject the sites of the Holy Sepulchre and of Calvary as not genuine. In the middle of November they left Jerusalem for Jericho, which is represented by a modern mudbuilt village called Eriha. From this camp they endeavored to fix the site of the wicked cities of the plain, and found a spot still known as Wady Amriyeh, a word radically the same as the Hebrew Gomorrah. They were equally fortunate with Admah and Zeboim, but found no trace of Sodom, which the neighboring Moslems believe to be entombed beneath the sullen waters of the Sea of Lot, which is the term they apply to the Dead Sea. get nothing to eat but eggs and bread; and when meat was procurable, it was too often some patriarchal goat, whose ancient bones were scarcely worth the picking. Insufficient food combined with rheumatism and cough at length reduced the gallant explorer so much that he was obliged to return to England; and during his absence Mr. Drake, his second in command, had another attack of fever, and succumbed to it. In September 1874, Lieutenant Conder returned to Palestine and resumed camplife, the tents of the survey party being pitched near Hebron. Here they examined the cave of Machpelah and the massive wall which surrounds it. Like many Biblical and Christian sites it is a sacred shrine of the Moslems, who guard it most jealously. The oak of Mamre ("oak of rest") is still shewn standing among the vineyards north-west of Hebron; it has branches fifty feet long. A wide district of open wolds and arable land, dry and treeless, but rich in flocks and herds, runs north and west of Hebron, and forms the scene of many of David's wanderings. It was now autumn, and these lands, which are stretches of beautiful pastures in spring, were now a desolate desert. The weather, too, began to get stormy and broken; rheumatism, the bête noire of tent life in a variable climate, attacked even horses, and the party were forced to return to Jerusalem. the The valley of the Jordan, to which they next turned their attention, is one of the most remarkable features of Palestine. Along its whole course it teems with wild life, its furred and feathered denizens finding refuge in the cane and tamarisk brakes, the willow thickets, and the tall papyrus marshes through which the river flows. Various theories have been started to account for the extreme depression of the lower portion of the Jordan valley and of In the beginning of March they moved the Dead Sea. Lieutenant Conder, after to the warm spring of Engedi, the water a careful examination, refers it to volcanic of which is eighty-three degrees Fahr. and earthquake action, but considers that They were here in the vicinity of the Dead the sea has had its present limits from a Sea, on whose desolate shores they someperiod not prior to the creation of man. times found the pickled bodies of fish from It was early spring when they finished the Jordan. From this camp they visited the survey of the Jordan valley, and the the magnificent ruins of the fortress of wide, glaring wastes of white chalk-land | Masada, so graphically described by An interesting chapter treats of the ori gin of the present Syrian peasantry, whom Lieutenant Conder considers to be the From The Saturday Review CRITICS AND AUTHORS. descendants of the ancient Canaanites whom the Israelites were unable to drive THERE is one question between critic out. They are a people who have many and author which is incapable of settlevirtues; they are patient, docile, sober, ment. It is the business and, as it were, quick, intelligent, and brave; but they are the duty of the critic to give counsel ignorant, immoral, and given over to which it is not the business of the author the most shameless untruthfulness. They to attend to. What the critic demands have a proverb, "that a lie is the salt of seems to be reasonable, and, in some ways a man," and yet their moral perceptions of putting it, incontrovertible; but there is are not so blunted but that they can ad- something in the nature of things pointmire honesty and truthfulness in others; blank against it. What can be more reafor to the oaths in use in patriarchal times sonable on the face of things than the they have now added another, and swear critic's remonstrance with the popular when they are striking a bargain, "by the writer who floods the reading world with word of the English." Their houses are works inferior to the earlier efforts of his built of mud or of sun-dried bricks; and a genius, whereby he both injures his own peasant in comfortable circumstances has reputation, and induces people, by the a carpet for the raised platform at one end prestige of a past success, to waste time of his house and warm suitable clothing and money on what is not worth the exfor himself and his household. His food penditure? It is quite true that popular is simple; he never tastes meat except at authors will persist in this line of conduct, a feast, but lives upon unleavened bread and the critic, while they persist, must which he dips in oil, or conserve made of enter his protest. Yet it must sometimes grapes; to this be adds rice, olives, clari-occur to him that, simple as his demand fied butter, eggs, melons, and cucumbers, sounds, in the present state of things it is and in a time of scarcity mallows are eaten a sheer impossibility, as running counter stewed in oil or sour milk. Many dis- to nature; that he is asking what he has eases, such as dysentery, ophthalmia, no right to ask; that, in fact, the interest fever, and liver complaints, affect the peas- of readers and authors is not identical antry. Leprosy, which was common in that is, supposing it to be the interest of Biblical and crusading times, is common readers only to read masterpieces, the still, and is as incurable now as it was cream of each writer's intelligence. It is then. The lepers who cluster about the to be observed that this blamable redunoutskirts of the towns and villages, and dance is a feature of the present century, hoarsely demand charity from the passers- attaching to authorship as a settled credby, present a most ghastly and affecting itable profession. It is because authors spectacle. are a steadier class than their predecessors of a long-past date, not given to excesses, no longer fitful, wild, dissipated, that they are over-prolific. Goldsmith wrote one novel, Fielding four, Smollett four, Sterne two. How many would they have written had they lived in our day and been under the inducements to a steadier life settling into habit, which literature as a recognized profession-subject we may say to the conditions of supply and demand — would offer them? Necessity drove them to the effort of invention, but the difficulties and Barley and wheat are the ordinary spring crops, succeeded by sesame, Indian corn, melons, tobacco, and cotton; in winter, beans, lentils, chick-peas, and other vegetables are grown. Indigo is found wild, and the list of fruits comprises olives, grapes, pomegranates, apricots, walnuts, plums, apples, mulberries, pears, quinces, oranges, lemons, and bananas. Sheep, oxen, goats, horses, and camels are the domestic animals; all except the last being small. humiliations of publishing presented the effort in a painfully depressing light. Habit was either never formed or was sadly submitted to as a bondage and perpetually broken in upon. We are speaking of course of writers of light literature, and especially of novelists. Richardson was in every point the one exception to the general position of the eighteenth-century novelist. He was his own publisher, and the "close application" with which he had always devoted himself to business made the "sedentary habits" of a literary life, when at past fifty he found his true vocation, natural to him. These "sedentary habits" belonged then to the learned, who were slaves to their desk in a sense, in which no one is nowadays; but the imagination was generally treated as untamable, and not reducible to the bondage of regular hours. Who shall say that it is not now drilled to perform a day's work with the same punctuality as any divine, antiquary, or philologist of a past date showed in the execution of his heavier tasks? Habit is now master of the situation; and we need not look far to find the reason why. Success at all times must be a stimulus to further action; but success of praise and credit has nothing like the same control over natural indolence that pecuniary success has, especially when this can be calculated upon with any accuracy. Uncertain gains as a rule, lead to idleness and extravagance; steady gains, affecting the rate of living and raising their owner in the social scale, as naturally lead to industry and the formation of habits necessary to the sustaining and securing of advantages once acquired. Thus impelled, the powers bow themselves to a yoke which otherwise might not be borne; but how soon does the pen become a tyrant over those who have framed their lives to its service! The old novelist wrote by fits and snatches, and thus knew nothing of this bondage, and he and his readers were agreed that the imagination is too volatile an essence for compulsion; but modern experience gives good reason for the suspicion that of all the powers invention, once put into the harness of habit, demands its exercise with most persistence. The work of life is then marked out; it would be as great an effort to leave off as it was to begin. It is impossible, if we speculate on the fecundity of some of our novelists, not to conclude that practice has subdued the brain into absolute subservience to the needs of the hour. The mind forms a knack of devising plots; it sees every thing with this view. The brain is ever at work on scenes, situations, dialogues, and it is a necessity as each day comes round to put them into shape. Of all literary work we may imagine it to be the most exacting, and this though pure invention has far less to do with the business than when novel-writing cost a good deal more trouble, and one story at a time kept fancy on the strain. Now half-a-dozen are apparently in hand at once, coming out piecemeal in as many periodicals. It seems all the same to brain, feeling, hand, which thread is taken up. The work achieved is really surprising considering all things the wear and tear, the brief time for thought, the transition from group to group. Thought and feeling have only, like practised actors, to slip into the costume of the story, and they say, Here we are to do the author's bidding. As an inintellectual feat the thing is wonderful. We say it seriously. The variety of incident and character, the descriptions, the easy possession of the subject, the local coloring, the flowing style, are alike astonishing; the habit of good writing making the reader feel himself in the company of a practised hand, of a real artist. We will not say "under his spell that charm belongs to an earlier date in his career. The fastidious reader, while not unentertained, perceives this difference between the earlier and later periods. Practice makes the experienced novelist bring his horse to the water unresisting, with a plau sible facility that was wanting in the earlier effort; but he cannot make him drink, to the same freshening of the reader's fancy. The true contact of mind with mind is not to be effected by practised ease; it is struck off in the heat of a new and vivid sensation. No trick of art can bring a reader into that intimate communion with the persons performing their parts before him which is the supreme delight of fiction. Who can know all this better than the author? If it comes to comparing sensations, what are the reader's feelings contrasted with the writer's own when he looks back on the glow of his first effort, and sets it by the side of his present business-like methods! As Walter Scott, in an extreme case — yet a case to the point writes touchingly to James Ballantyne, who had been offering unwelcome hints: "I value your criticisms as much as ever, but the worst is my faults are better known to myself than to you. young beauty that she wears an unbecoming dress, or speaks too loud, or any other fault she can correct, and she will do so if Tell a she has sense and a good opinion of your taste. But tell a failing beauty that her hair is getting grey, her wrinkles apparent, her gait heavy, and that she has no business in a ball-room but to be ranged against the wall as an evergreen, and you will afflict the poor old lady without rendering her any service. She knows all that better than you. I am sure the old lady in question takes pains enough with her toilet." Our more voluminous modern novelists who astonish us with their ceaseless stream of fiction would not make such an admission even to themselves; nor is there the same contrast between their earliest and latest works as when Scott's rich vein was exhausted. But reflections similar in nature, though not in degree, must sometimes visit them; they must recognize a difference. And here the question we started with meets us. The critic says, "Rest upon your oars; do not let the past shame the present; you have done good work, retire on the credit of it." Circumstances once made this counsel easy enough to follow, but they are dead against it now. Indus try is one of the duties of our lives. What other industry can the novelist follow? Must he alone sit idle? Now all industry is connected in some way with the idea of getting something by it, earning or saving for oneself or for others. The housewife's sedentary needle, or her busy cares, have all this for their end, how ever little it may come into immediate calculation. Work that is in no way profitable can scarcely be considered a duty. Looking at the question on this side it would seem that the too voluminous writer, so long as he finds a publisher, may appeal to another kind of success besides the literary one as a justification. Though indolence is less injurious to fame than publishing for renumeration work of an inferior quality, there is a sort of virtue in this which the deliberate masterly inactivity misses. This sort of virtue, then, has its place in the world. Society cannot be fed on chefs-d'œuvre. So long as an author does his best with good intentions he is not such a superfluity as he seems, and we must leave the care of his fame in his own keeping. Critics are thus a sort of literary rural deans superintending airy fabrics of name and fame. It is their duty to speak in the cause of the ideal best, but they can enforce nothing; nor would things go any better if they could. The real interest of readers would not gain by fixing an early date of superannuation; because this would discredit the profession as an employment and point to a melancholy old age. What is really im. portant is the moral question. A jaded imagination is tempted to take up subjects and questions which offered no temptation to its early freshness; but recourse to the vulgarly sensational and to still "fouler springs" is to be censured on its own account, and does not enter into the present argument: What we have said belongs rather to the works of prose imagination than poetical. Yet it must be observed that the poets of our day protract the singing period beyond precedent, which seems to dictate a somewhat early retirement upon its laurels. Mr. Browning, indeed, may say that, as he started with a defiance of sing-song melody, he is independent of the period thus defined. But though poetry has commonly an early prime, and there is a charm in young verse which we often miss in the muse's later efforts, still we are disposed to approve of any use of the poet's time rather than spending the leisure of old age in tinkering the effusions of youthful genius; a habit in which Wordsworth indulged to such a degree that in the latest edition of his works we miss many a lovely cadence and memorable line, and find poems moved and shifted about out of their original setting till we don't know where we are. A young poet may prune and qualify, and transpose, because he does it with the same ear and with his original aim fresh in memory; he is still a friendly critic. The old man differs from his youth in the alterations he makes, and has another aim. He views his works as a whole; and bends each part to make it fit to needs undreamt of, whereas the happy numbers first ranged themselves as the ear and fancy bid them. Time will find it more difficult to settle points like this, to replant what has been uprooted, to decide the claims of original and tampered-with, than to ignore altogether the later productions of a genius that has worked out its vein. But it will make easy work of the abundant after-math of the modern novelist; the growth of an indefatigable, intelligent industry, after the first harvest rich with the flowers and fruitful seeds of genius the first gathering from the storehouse of thought and memory-has long been garnered. |