I shall never forget the shock to my feelings when, shortly after leaving Transylvania, I went to spend the summer months in the much-famed Wienerwald near Vienna. In former years I had often visited this neighborhood, and had even retained of it very pleasant recollections; but now, fresh from the wild charm of undefiled and undesecrated nature, the Wienerwald and everything about it appeared in the light of a pitiable farce. In fact, I do not think I had ever rightly appreciated the Transylvanian mountain scenery till forced to compare it with another landscape.
The country about Vienna—of which its natives are so proud—is beautiful, it is true, or rather it has been beautiful once; but, alas! how much of its charm has been destroyed by that terrible Versch?nerungs Verein (Beautifying Association), as those noisome institutions are called, loathsome abortions of a diseased German brain, which{378} have the object of teaching unfortunate mankind to appreciate the beauties of nature in the only correct fashion authorized by science.
Viewed in the abstract, an ignorant stranger unacquainted with the habits of the country might be prone to imagine taking a walk up any of those beautiful wooded hills to be a comparatively simple matter, provided his lungs and his chaussure be in adequate walking trim. Ridiculous error! to be speedily rectified by painful experience before you have spent many days in the neighborhood of the Austrian capital. It is here not a question of boots, but of books; of science, not of soles; your lungs are useless unless your mind be rightly adjusted; and the latest edition of Meyer’s “Conversations Lexicon” will be far more necessary to fit you for a walk in the Wienerwald than a pair of Euknemida walking-shoes.
To go into a civilized Austrian forest requires at least as much preparation as to enter a fashionable ball-room; and unless you have been thoroughly grounded in contemporary literature, general history, and the biographies of celebrated men, you had far better stay at home.
There you are not left to yourself to make acquaintance with trees and flowers, as your ignorant rustic fashion has hitherto been; but your exact relations to the botanical world around you are precisely defined from the very outset. At every step you make you are overwhelmed with alternate doses of advice, admonition, entreaty, or threat; but never, never by any chance are you left to your own devices! You cannot feel as if you were alone even in the most hidden depths of the forest, for the tormenting spirit of the Versch?nerungs Verein will insist on following you about step by step, its jarring voice ever breaking in on your most secret reveries. It warns you not to tread on the grass; it entreats you to spare the pine-cones; it instructs you to avoid meddling with the toadstools; it recommends the flowers to your protection; it advises you to be careful with your cigar-ashes; it commands you to muzzle your unhappy terrier; it weighs you down with a crushing sense of your own unworthiness by appealing to your sense of honor, of probity, of refinement, of patriotism, and to a hundred other noble qualities you are acutely conscious of not possessing; then passing from fawning flattery to brutal menace, it growls dark threats against your liberty or your purse, should you have remained deaf to its hateful voice, and presume to have overstepped the limits of familiarity prescribed towards an oak-tree or a bush of wild-rose.
If, chafing in spirit at these reiterated pinpricks, you would take some rest by sitting down on one of the numerous benches placed there for the accommodation of exhausted but perfectly educated individuals, you are abruptly called upon to choose between Goethe and Schiller, Kant or Hegel, Lessing or Wieland, to the immortal memory of each of which celebrities the proud monument of six feet of white-painted board has been dedicated.
A harmless enough looking little bridge is designated as Custozza bridge, and a delicious opening in the forest redolent of wild cyclamen desecrated by the base appellation of Philosophen Wiese (Philosopher’s meadow). Even the source where you pause to slake your thirst has been christened by some such preposterous title as the fountain of friendship or the spring of gratitude. You cannot, in fact, move a hundred yards in any given direction without having the names of celebrated men, cardinal virtues, or national victories forced down your throat ad nauseam, and—what to my thinking is the cruelest grievance of all—you are there debarred the simple satisfaction of losing your way in a natural unsophisticated manner, every second tree having been converted into a sign-post, which persists in giving information you would much rather be without.
Latitude and longitude are dinned into your ears with merciless precision; staring patches of scarlet, blue, and yellow paint, arranged to express a whole series of cabalistic signs, disfigure the ruddy bronze of noble pine-stems; gaunt pointing fingers, multiplied as in a delirious nightmare, meet you at every turn, informing you of your exact bearings with regard to every given point of the landscape within a radius of ten miles. “Two hours from Bürgersruhe,” they tell you; “Five hours from Wienerlust;” “An hour and a half from Philister Berg”—and oh, how many weary miles away from anything resembling nature and freedom, eagles and poetry!
You long to be gone from the mournful spectacle of nature profaned and debased; your independent spirit chafes and frets under the oppressive tyranny of a vulgar despot, who, not content with directing your movements and restricting your actions, would further extend his detested interference to the inmost regions of your thoughts and feelings. Why should I be confronted with Hegel, when I wish to cultivate the far more congenial society of an interesting stag-beetle? Wherefore disturb the luxurious feeling of gloomy revenge my soul is brooding by the suggestion of any sentiment as sickly and{380} as utterly fabulous as friendship or gratitude? Why dishonor the fragrance of pale cyclamen by a bookworm odor of mustiness and mildew? Why, O cruel Versch?nerungs Verein, skilful annihilator of all that is beautiful and sublime, have you left no margin for poetry or imagination, romance or accident, conjecture or hope, in visiting these regions? “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’ entrate” it is indeed the case here to say; or rather, if you be wise, do not enter these hopeless regions at all, but turning your back on all such, go straight through to Transylvania, where you will find in profusion all those charms of which the Wienerwald has been so cruelly robbed!