Luckily, or unluckily, as one may choose to view it, the spirit of the nineteenth century is a ghost very difficult to be laid. A steady course of narcotics may lull it to rest for a time; but the spirit is but stupefied, not dead; its vitality is great, and it will start up again to life at the first trumpet-blast which reaches from without, eager to exchange a peaceful dream for the movement of the arena and the renewed clank of arms.
Some such feelings were mine as I beheld the signal waving from the ship which was to carry me back to a world I had almost forgotten; and though I heaved a sigh of regret, and possibly may have dropped a tear or two in secret for the peaceful and familiar scenes I was leaving, yet I would not have steered round the vessel to return to my island.
Not the mere distance which separates Transylvania from Western Europe gives to it this feeling of strange isolation. Other countries as far or farther off are infinitely more familiar even to those who have never visited them. We know all about Turkey, and Greece is no more strange to us than Italy or Switzerland. But no one ever comes to Transylvania in cold blood, unless it be some very rabid sportsman eager for the embrace of a shaggy bear; and as for those rushing travellers, bound for the Black Sea, who sometimes traverse the country in hot-headed haste, they mostly resemble the superficial swallow which skims the surface of a placid lake, without guessing the secrets of the blue depths below.
Situated by nature within a formidable rampart of snow-tipped mountains, and shielded by heavy curtains of shrouding forests against the noise and turmoil of the outer world, the very name of Transylvania tells us that it was formerly regarded as something apart, something out of reach, whose existence even for a time was enveloped in mystery. In olden times these gloomy forest gorges were tenanted only by the solitary bear or packs of famished wolves, while the mistrustful lynx looked down from the giddy heights, and the chamois leaped unchecked from rock to rock. The people who lived westward of this mountain rampart, knowing but little or nothing of the country on the other side, designated it as Transylvania, or the land beyond the forest, just as we sometimes talk of the “land beyond the clouds.”
Nothing, however, can remain undiscovered on the face of our globe. That enterprising creature man, who is even now attempting, with some show of success, to probe the country beyond the clouds, has likewise discovered the way to this secluded nook. The dense forests, once forming such impenetrable barriers against the outer world, have in great part disappeared; another voice is heard besides that of the wild beasts of the wood; another breath comes mingled along with the mountain vapors—it is the breath of that nineteenth-century monster, the steam-engine.
This benefactor of the age, this harbinger of civilization, which is as truly the destroyer of romance, and poetry’s deadly foe, will undoubtedly succeed in robbing this country of the old-world charm which yet lingers about it. Transylvania will in time become as civilized and cultivated, and likewise as stereotyped and conventional, as the best known parts of our first European States—it will even one day cease to be an island; but as yet the advent of the nineteenth-century monster is of too recent a date to have tainted the atmosphere by its breath, and the old-world charm still lingers around and about many things. It is floating everywhere and anywhere—in the forests and on the mountains, in mediæval churches and ruined watch-towers, in mysterious caverns and in ancient gold-mines, in the songs of the people and the legends they tell. Like a subtle perfume evaporating under the rays of a burning sun, it is growing daily fainter and fainter, and all lovers of the past should hasten to collect this fleeting fragrance ere it be gone forever. This is what I have endeavored to do, to some small extent, since fate for a time cast my lines in those parts.
And first and foremost let me here explain that my intentions in compiling this work are nowise of an ambitious or lofty nature. I desire to instruct no one, to influence no one, to enlist no one’s sympathies in favor of any particular social question or political doctrine. Even had such been my intention, I have been therein amply forestalled by others; nor do I delude myself into the belief that it is my proud vocation to correct the errors of all former writers by giving to the world the only correct and trustworthy description of Transylvania which has yet appeared. I have not lived long enough in the country to feel myself justified in taking up the gauntlet against the assertions of older inhabitants of the soil, but have lived there too long to rival that admirable self-possession which induces the average tourist to classify, condemn, ticket, and tie up every fact which comes within his notice, never demeaning himself to grovel or analyze, nor being disturbed by any doubts of the reliability of his own unerring judgment.
Whoever wishes to study the history of Transylvania in its past, present, and future aspects, who wants to understand its geological formation or system of agriculture, who would thoroughly penetrate into the inextricable net-work of conflicting political interests which divide its interior, must seek his information elsewhere.
Do you wish, for instance, to see Transylvania as it was some forty years ago? If so, I can confidently advise you to read the valuable work of Mr. Paget and the spirited descriptions of Monsieur de Gérando.
Do you want to gain insight into the geological resources of the country, or the farming system of the Saxon peasant? Then take up Charles Boner’s comprehensive work on Transylvania. And would you see these Saxons as they love to behold themselves, then turn to Dr. Teutsch’s learned work on “Die Siebenbürger Sachsen;” while if politics be your special hobby, you cannot better indulge it than by selecting Mr. Patterson’s most interesting work on Hungary and Transylvania.