I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to “haunt”
them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it
took another _corso_ of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause me
yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of the
Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so that
I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose with
their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and our
background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. These
pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent charm
of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead with
a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, planted,
cultivated private preserve--preserve of tranquillity and beauty and
immunity--in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for that matter,
easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, quiet,
distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging boundaries
all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of course the
most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to which, when
the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably
omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that
are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too
closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its
shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a
dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring
at you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a
grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping
downward in mossy marble steps--when, I say, the place possesses these
attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier
spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left
you to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder
where, left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art,
nothing too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine
_tertium quid_: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the
revelation invoked descends upon you.
The Boboli Gardens are not large--you wonder how compact little Florence
finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to their
extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group
of steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a
still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground
much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of
their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even,
if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if
they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its
ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention,
but it isn’t enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you
at all if it isn’t your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your
impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I
must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It
remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness--or
at least thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional
_taste_ of Florence--no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor
pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre
already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly
aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind,
in which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to
association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as
much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another
for (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in
this charmed and forsaken circle--done or meant to be done; what was it,
dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the
huge flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and
looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced
rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide
court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain
that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of
abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy--glancing at
them in a certain light and a certain mood--I get (perhaps on too easy
terms, you may think) a sense of _history_ that takes away my breath.
Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, embroidered
and brocaded according to their period, and held _fetes champetres_ and
floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering hemicycle. And
the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all now is a mere
tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in
things, a passive--or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly,
pathetically responsive--accessibility to the yearning guess. Call
it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep stain
of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the
brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but
there still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can “layout”
parks on virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive
importations, but we unfortunately can’t scatter abroad again this seed
of the eventual human soul of a place--that comes but in its time and
takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it _has_ come.