DOI article:
Garnett, Richard: Alexander the ratcatcher
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.25498#0239
By Richard Garnett 235
predecessors’ inability to comply with your Holiness’s request
must have cost them many inward tears, not the less genuine
because entirely invisible and completely inaudible. A wise Pope
will, before all things, consider the spirit of his age. The force
of public opinion, which your Holiness lately appeared to disparage,
was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any of your suc-
cessors. If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was
because the world was with you. Did you pursue the same
methods now, you would soon discover that you had become an
offensive anachronism. It will not have escaped your Holiness’s
penetration, that what moralists will persist in terming the eleva-
tion of the standard of the Church, is the result of the so-called
improvement of the world.”
“There is a measure of truth in this,” admitted Alexander the
Sixth, “ and the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was
my felicity to be a Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation !
when men’s view of life was large and liberal ; when the fair
humanities flourished ; when the earth yielded up her hoards of
chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and new-found agate urns
as fresh as day ; when painters and sculptors vied with antiquity,
and poets and historians followed in their path ; when every be-
nign deity was worshipped save Diana and Vesta ; when the arts
of courtship and cosmetics were expounded by archbishops; when
the beauteous Imperia was of more account than the eleven thou-
sand virgins; when obnoxious persons glided imperceptibly from
the world ; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm
with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present
sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and
its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impo-
tence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art ! Pope
Alexander ! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and
I swear
predecessors’ inability to comply with your Holiness’s request
must have cost them many inward tears, not the less genuine
because entirely invisible and completely inaudible. A wise Pope
will, before all things, consider the spirit of his age. The force
of public opinion, which your Holiness lately appeared to disparage,
was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any of your suc-
cessors. If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was
because the world was with you. Did you pursue the same
methods now, you would soon discover that you had become an
offensive anachronism. It will not have escaped your Holiness’s
penetration, that what moralists will persist in terming the eleva-
tion of the standard of the Church, is the result of the so-called
improvement of the world.”
“There is a measure of truth in this,” admitted Alexander the
Sixth, “ and the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was
my felicity to be a Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation !
when men’s view of life was large and liberal ; when the fair
humanities flourished ; when the earth yielded up her hoards of
chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and new-found agate urns
as fresh as day ; when painters and sculptors vied with antiquity,
and poets and historians followed in their path ; when every be-
nign deity was worshipped save Diana and Vesta ; when the arts
of courtship and cosmetics were expounded by archbishops; when
the beauteous Imperia was of more account than the eleven thou-
sand virgins; when obnoxious persons glided imperceptibly from
the world ; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm
with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present
sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and
its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impo-
tence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art ! Pope
Alexander ! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and
I swear