Volume 7 — Glimpses Of Tuscany.

II. The Boboli Gardens.

The high wall of our raised garden binds on the southern entrance to the Boboli: our white spirae droops down into it like a willow, so large and in such perfect bloom that strangers stop to sketch it as they pass. The good grand duke has gone since I last was here; the Sardinian bayonet is gleaming exactly where the Austrian sentinel stood. The Boboli has changed masters—not for the first time—and accepts the situation with the serenity of a veteran.

It is a bright Sunday morning. There is still time for a walk there before the Military Mass at Santo Spirito. Twelve years have not disturbed the placid sameness of this creature of the hill-side: the laurels are clipped just as evenly, the old busts and statues look at you, or at each other, just as archly or just as stolidly. It is all thoroughly man-made—intensely artificial. Every impulse of nature has been stifled in tree and shrub, until they no more dare to lean out of line than soldiers on parade. The very crocuses steal timidly through the grass, as if they were afraid of doing wrong.

"Grove nods to grove, each alley has its brother; One half the garden represents the other."

It looks human, every inch; the Lord is completely banished; his Spirit could not possibly walk in such a garden. And yet this creature of man seems clothed with imperishable bloom: this death of all nature seems able to outlive all other life. You cannot despise it, for it possesses the semblance of indestructibility— unchangefulness in the midst of change. In the forests, dissolution and reproduction are palpably waging their unending warfare; even on the eternal Apennines, the snow comes and goes, the lights and shadows of the clouds are endlessly shifting. But in this miniature world monotony counterfeits the terrible fixity and relentlessness of fate. Nature is deprived of all free-will, and moves obedient to a fixed design.

It is difficult to say how far civilization, apart from religion, may go with advantage in remodelling the natural man. It is equally difficult to say how far art may safely encroach upon nature in reconstructing a landscape. Some of the grand elemental presentations disdain our interference. We have no control over the clouds, or the curves of the ocean, or the nocturnal radiance of the skies. But the surface of the earth is an unfinished sketch, which the Creator has left us to humanize, in some small degree, after our fancy. We do not make even the smallest impression upon its planetary aspect; but, after centuries of toil, we succeed in partially changing its more immediate expression. We take the groundwork ready made, accept the laws as we find them, and then, inspired by the supreme longing after unrevealed beauty, which, in some shape or other, haunts every human soul, proceed to establish a little paradise of our own.

But above and beyond that last temporal Eden, there is still another—the one beyond the grave. I, who am an immortal spirit capable of sharing the celestial joy of angels, predestined for the beatific vision; I, whose hereafter should be passed amid perpetual light, and peace, and beauty; may I not have imaginings of better forms, of sweeter faces, of fairer prospects, of deeper skies, and even of diviner stars than those revealed to the senses? Did Raphael ever see a face that equalled hers of the San Sisto? Was there ever in the flesh a form to rival the Apollo of the Vatican? Is there any pattern in nature for Giotto's Campanile? Is there any voice in the woods or seas to suggest the melodies of Kreutzer or the harmonies of Beethoven? And may we not, then, poetize our landscapes too, and throw into the face of nature the expression of a human soul? But here is precisely the difficulty: the landscape has a soul of its own, which must not be murdered, even to make way for ours. The Grand Master has been at work before us; his works have wandered, of their own sweet will, into shapes and combinations that exhibit the grace beyond the reach of art. The mountains, the streams. the valleys, are full of these sweet surprises. The true artist can do little more than reproduce them, squared and framed, for parlor contemplation: the true gardener can do little more than display them to the best advantage.

It is more than likely, though, that, when the Boboli Gardens were laid out by the Medici, the artists employed had only to deal with unornamented slopes of olive orchards and arable land. The landscape was less to be remodelled than created. The surface under treatment was artistically as blank as uncolored canvas— as meaningless as quarried marble. With this difference, however: that while the groundwork of the painter fades and wrinkles, while marble stains and shatters, while even the sculptured arches of great cathedrals crumble into dust, the living canvas on which the landscape gardener works is not only imperishable, but so charged with vitality that it gains instead of losing by duration; or, should a touch of decay at last appear, it is but in transition to new phases of beauty. One would think that, where human fancy is free to conceive a garden of delight, and human means sufficient to ransack the ages and spoil the climes for its embellishment, the result could not escape being a public and paramount attraction. I take this Boboli Garden as a sample of most public gardens or parks. Are they popularly, or even selectly, attractive? Are they ever thronged, except at stated hours, when people chiefly congregate to exhibit themselves and criticise each other? Was an artist, by any miracle, ever caught there more than once, save in the capacity of casual saunterer? Are they not startlingly unfrequented, in spite of their superb richness and beauty? However conducive these civic Edens to municipal health, have not the park police an almost exclusive monopoly of the fresh air and gravel? Do these magnets draw by dint of their intrinsic beauty? It may safely be questioned. And may not this failure be attributed to our vague, unpronounced repugnance to having nature out of harmony with itself and ourselves? Notwithstanding all the gilt and carmine of the new emblazonry, we keep asking the gay palimpsest to restore the lost features of our first friend.

The curse that fell on Adam also visited the earth from which he was taken. The heart of fallen man is full of yearning; the face of nature is full of sympathetic sadness; her voice is nearer a sigh than a song. More than half the year is clouded, more than half the hours belong to night, and over more than half the world goes the wail of the unresting seas. The vast distances are everywhere softened or shaded into pensiveness; the very sunshine turns to blue and purple on the hills; it is only the small near which presumes to be glad with the flash of a rivulet, the song of birds, or the glance of flowers. And, in these minor poems too, there is apt to lurk some sly suggestion of the unattained. Even where the universe is transfigured by the coming morn, and the world thrills with the joyous cry of reawakened life, the momentary exultation, the piercing delight of existence, are soon sobered by toil, or care, or thought; and, bright as the coming day may prove, the impression left on human hearts is that of promise unfulfilled. The poorest part of sunrise is the sun itself; the horns on the Rigi are silent as soon as the orb is fairly up.

It may not be overbold to affirm that some of these grander parks, such as the Bois de Boulogne, bear no mean resemblance to the first paradise itself. But our lot is changed since then; the primitive tradition of Deity incarnate has been fulfilled. Eden could no longer content us; we would not care to pass those Cherubim with the flaming sword, even if we dared. Between us and any possible paradise lies the grave. It is worse than mockery to expect the sorely laden Christian heart to find more than casual enjoyment in arbitrary walks, and endless beds of roses, and artificial fountains, and manufactured grottoes. Sorrow, passion, death, were encountered by God in descending to man; sorrow, passion, death, must be encountered by man in ascending to God. Spiritual felicity is less to be extracted from violets and roses than from sackcloth and ashes. Temporal happiness is not to be compassed by meandering through shaded avenues and even lawns, but by the sweat of the brow and the work of the hands; and in our respites from toil we like the wild, suggestive irregularities of nature better than a too glaring array of brightnesses with which we are seldom in complete accord. The post-Adamic garden needs depth and gloom and mystery as well as sunshine and flowers.

I do not mean to say that the Boboli is wholly glad; much of it is sad or saddening enough. That long, grim avenue of cypress would suit the valley of the shadow of death. Arnolfo's dark, mighty wall goes striding down the hill-side like a phantom. The Boboli was only meant to be wholly glad. Though probably not designed by a Greek, it is nevertheless Grecian, or rather Athenian; for, in art, Athens is Greece. By an exceptional felicity and refinement of mental, moral, and physical organization, the Athenian realized in himself the most perfect development of natural civilization. The dark, religious mysteries which tinge and sadden Hindu, Egyptian, and most Gentile life had little hold upon the Greek. Athens, in her prime, succeeded in escaping the pressure and responsibility of the hereafter. She aimed at making time a success independent of eternity. The real heaven of the Athenian and his disciples, in both classic peninsulas, was this world, not the next. Eternity was but the ghost of time, a vague prolongation of the present for better or worse in Elysium or Hades, the shadow projected by a vast material world as it moved through endless space. The poets of Greece dictated her popular theology; her sculptors carried beauty to the very borders of the beatitude, giving such glory to form that the inspired likeness is mistaken for the divine original. It is impossible to tell where the hero ends and the god begins. We have the deification of man in marble or fable, instead of the humanization of God in the flesh; or, in other words, the identity of religion and art. This pleasant way of being one with God, this graceful fulfilment of destiny, imparted a complacency to Athenian life which we cannot imitate.

"In every dark and awful place, Rude hill and haunted wood. This beautiful, bright people left A name of omen good. "Unlike the children of romance, From out whose spirit deep The touch of gloom hath passed on glen. And mountain, lake, and steep; On Devil's Bridge and Raven's Tower, And love-lorn Maiden's Leap."

Grecian life, in its highest aspect, was an attempt to reproduce the perfections of a lost Eden; Christian life, in its highest aspect, is purification, self-denial, self-immolation, for a paradise which can never be reached in this world, and only in the next after life-long fear and trembling. And although we strive more or less successfully to substitute the joys of the spirit for those of the flesh, yet "Even we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body." (St. Paul. [Footnote 208]) After the knowledge of good and evil, our paradise must have no walls. The broad expanse of which each one of us may chance to be the centre, bounded by the horizon and vaulted by the sky—the whole visible landscape, with its fitful light and shade, its changing blight and bloom, its alternating sigh and song, whether subdued into use or wild as on the morning of the first Sabbath—this whole visible universe is the only garden in harmony with the vast aspiration, the ceaseless yearning of Christian life. Our opened eyes would weary of the walled Eden, as Rasselas wearied of the Happy Valley.

It is a pure and paramount joy to grapple with the rugged earth and bend it to your will; a joy to pierce the forest to your liking and smooth a bare expanse into velvet lawn: of mortal joys perhaps the purest and most enduring. But when all is done?—

Take your stand behind the Pitti Palace almost anywhere high up the hill, on the observatory itself, if you choose. All the wide valley of the Arno, with its circumference of cultured hills and woodless mountains, is before you. For thousands of years industrious generations have been at work on that fair panorama. Yellow villas are dotting all the heights; olive-trees are wrapping all the slopes in pale monotony; the vines are trailing everywhere in endless procession over mutilated mulberries; the long gray walls are solemnly parcelling out the small Tuscan farms. All Florence is beneath you, with its domes and towers and spires, its streets and bridges, its memories and suggestions. The atmosphere is so transparent, the cultivation so perfect, that the area described by half the radius of vision seems to enclose only a vast kitchen-garden. But further on, the mist and haze are settling; the enchantment of distance is falling; Vallambrosa, gleaming on its mountain's breast, turns into some mysterious opal; the records traced by man through all those centuries are gradually erased by the quiet alchemy of nature, and the same eternal story reappears as vividly as if the superscription were but the shadow of a dream.

Turn to the Boboli at your feet. Do you wonder it is a failure—that Florence never goes there? They love their own little gardens dearly and the flowers in their windows; for these are but sweet thefts from nature to embellish home. But for these attempts to compress universal beauty into a given space, for this overprizing, overadorning of the near, only to be lost, or merged, or overlooked in the glory of the far, the Christian heart can have but little relish.

The bells of Santo Spirito are ringing; and I wonder, on my way there, if that cold white hand of Athens will ever quite relax its hold on Christian life.