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.
[Footnote 208: For the suggestion of this text of St. Paul the writer is indebted to a notice in the Freeman's Journal of Father Ryan's beautiful lines, "Why does your poetry sound like a sigh.">[
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.