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 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 Verschönerungs 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!
[CHAPTER LIII.]
A WEEK IN THE PINE REGION.
Our quarters at the shelter-hut in the pine valley were so satisfactory, and its situation so delightful, that instead of remaining only two nights, as had been originally intended, we stayed there a whole week, exploring the valley in all directions, making sketches of the principal points, and collecting supplies of the rare ferns and mosses with which the neighborhood abounded, along with the alpen-rose, which we often discovered still flowering at sheltered places.
A thorough dose of nature enjoyed in this way acts like a regenerating medicine on a mind and body wearied and weakened by a long strain of conventionalities. It is refreshing merely to look round on a beautiful scene as yet untainted by the so-called civilizing breath of man, who, too often attempting to paint the lily, invariably vulgarizes when he seeks to improve the work of the Creator. What unmixed delight to see here everything unspoiled and unadulterated, each tree and flower living out its natural life, or falling into beautiful decay, without having been turned aside from its original vocation, or distorted to an unnatural use to minister to some imaginary want of sensual, cruel, greedy, rapacious man; to find one little spot where nature yet reigns supreme; to be able to gaze around and say that those splendid fir-stems will not be cut up in a noisy saw-mill, nor yet defiled by vulgar paint; those late scarlet strawberries hanging in coral fringes from pearl-gray rocks will not be sold at so much a pint and cooked into sickly jams; those prickly fir-cones will not be abstracted from their rightful owners, the red-coated squirrels, to adorn the tasteless veranda of some popular beer-house; the swelling outlines of those glorious blue gentians will be flattened in no improved herbarium, nor those gorgeous butterflies invited to lay down their young lives to further the interests of science; those brown leaping trout will, thank Heaven, never, never figure on an illuminated menu card as truites à la Chambord, to flatter the palate of some dissipated sybarite! The pure light of the north star alone will point out my direction, and neither Kant nor Hegel will rise from his grave to torment me here.
THE PINE VALLEY.[82]