Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 49 to 54, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
Rome took about six months to disappoint Christina. There was no help for it. In future every place and every person was destined to disappoint her. It was not that she had changed her nature to any especial captiousness or misanthropy; she had simply set herself an impossible programme. At the age of twenty-eight, in the superabundant fulness of her powers, she had retired, and proposed henceforward to take pleasure for her employment. The plan, unsound for almost any temperament, was ludicrous for Christina. Her energy could never be consumed by entertainments. Her brain was fertile and keen, and she was of a passionately participating nature. Work was her first necessity. It could not be long before, feeling herself baulked and unproductive, she must begin to quarrel with her surroundings.
None of this, naturally, emerged during the year at Brussels. At Brussels she was trying her wings; she was merely pausing and was on holiday. But at Rome she was stopping, and the holiday had become routine. Discontent and disillusion were inevitable.
But though like everything else in her life Rome was bound to fail her, it was with this difference; it did not allow itself to be cast off. Christina was not proof against the Eternal City. Inveighing against its inhabitants, quarrelling with its Popes, embroiling herself hotly and needlessly in its affairs, she yet remained captive. No sooner had she left it than she looked towards it longingly. Time after time she returned eagerly to the trials it had in store for her. She was in love with the notion of spending the end of her life among her own kin, but she died in Rome, after having left it only for short intervals during thirty years.
Christina's discontent with Rome was reciprocal. If, taking a long look forward, we seek to describe her during her residence there, an inevitable word suggests itself. She was a nuisance. She was a brilliant nuisance, a nuisance to be reckoned with, but still a nuisance.
'Pellegrino real, con sciolta chioma,
Venne a empir di se stessa Italia e Roma'
ran one of the complimentary verses on her arrival. Christina did, in fact, with a fearful zest, set about filling Italy and Rome with herself. Her career, that of the regular expatriated resident at the capital, was one of forced activities. Having no affairs of her own, she had either to invent them or adopt other people's. The invented schemes were invariably crack-brained, and the adopted ones capable of promoting much bad feeling. And both varieties were planned on her own extensive royal scale and driven to their limits by her exceptionally powerful personality. During her residence at Rome she not only aimed at two kingdoms for herself, but also attempted to create two Popes and arrange another Pope's quarrels. Heavenly guidance was thought to have led her to the Eternal City, but her condition undoubtedly gave Satan a chance to employ her there.
Christina came almost immediately into conflict with Rome in the person of Alexander VII. The church had opened its arms to her, but Christina, having enjoyed the first sumptuous embrace, showed herself indifferent to further graces. Alexander, meanwhile, had a fixed idea of the behaviour suitable to a converted queen. It was not a rigid schedule, but it included some prayers, a little penance, a modest bearing, and above all, obedience to the power to which she had professed herself so delighted to submit.
Christina's idea was different. She had adopted Roman Catholicism. That was enough. She had not the least intention of keeping up an attitude about it. She would practise her religion as seemed good to her. Alexander's tactful efforts to make a pious exhibit of her met with complete failure. He was forced at last into the curious position of urging on her that one public prayer was worth a dozen private devotions, which naturally provoked from Christina an outburst of honest northern scorn. The fact is that Christina was, in the true sense of the word, absolutely unreligious at heart. She chose religion, but she had not a grain of mysticism in her composition with which to pursue it. She was fundamentally rational. She wished to be a free-thinking Roman Catholic. She proposed to accept the dogma of the church and meanwhile to do as she pleased. She appreciated the church's ends, but could not tolerate its means. Christina could see nothing honest in Alexander's censure of the privacy of her devotions, of her lack of modesty, of her free attitude towards men. She scorned public protestations, tore the breeches off the Michelangelos, laughed the idea of chaperones to scorn. Her conflict with Alexander was a typical instance of the natural conflict between north and south.
Meanwhile she freely demonstrated her own attitude: that is to say, she flung herself into the pleasures Rome could give. She was magnificently entertained by the Pamphilj and the Barberini and the other great houses, and as was usual on her public appearances, inspired admiration and gave offence. Her mania for the arts and sciences was impressive, but while the Italians admired it, they stuck to the commonsense view that to renounce a throne for it was imbecility. 'This is purchasing at an extravagant price indeed', wrote a Roman observer, 'the frivolous pleasures of beholding the ruins of ancient Rome and the mutilated remains of Greek and Roman industry.' Although her taste, according to modern notions, was not frivolous, but altogether laudable, she managed to gratify it in a way that seemed to the lay mind eccentric and to the clerical something worse. She had no ear for sermons, but she went to the University and listened with interest to doctors debating in Arabic and Chaldæan about the Koran. She visited the Castle of St Angelo like any other tourist, but must needs insist on being allowed to fire off the great cannon with her own hand. Its reverberations were naturally heard throughout the city. She patronised the theatre to excess. Yet while she was willing to stoop to a commoner's frivolity in the gratification of her own pleasures, she attempted to extract the last dregs of obeisance as her royal right. The spirit that had ruined her meeting with Condé began to infect her general behaviour. She could not meet this or that royal personage without first discussing how their respective chairs were to be placed, what they were to be covered in, and exactly how much she could expect of her rights. She, with her true passion for classical Rome, was prevented from visiting the Capitol by the refusal of the Senators to receive her bare-headed. We can detect an ulterior note in her disappointment with the Italians. 'Do not think this is the country of heroes or wise men', she wrote, 'or the home of glories and virtues. O Caesar! O Cato! O Cicero! ... There are here only statues, obelisks and sumptuous palaces, not men!'
Disappointed of the Catos and Ciceros, Christina began to cast about for the Horaces and the Plinies. Her passion for literature was a part of her nature that was pure gold. It was honest and sturdy. She had nothing about her of the diletantism that infects the arts it pretends to patronise. She read Plato and Tacitus because she liked them, and she collected literary and learned men round her in the hope of finding something worthy and interesting in their work. At Rome her dear project of a salon had a chance to be realised. Men of talent were not likely to be lacking when a patron offered. The salon[,] however[,] was not formed on ordinary lines. The men of talent had no complement in women of charm. Christina reigned alone.
In a short time the queen had gathered enough genius round her in the Farnese Palace to embark upon something more ambitious and formal. The salon became a learned club. It became in fact an Academy, as these gatherings were beginning to be called, and took the name of Pia Accademia Reale. The constitution, drawn up under the queen's auspices, was full of admirable intentions. The first clause stated that the object of the academy was to discountenance pedantry, and the second that no person was to be excluded who possessed the necessary virtue and learning. The constitution further laid it down that the queen was to bear all expenses and expressly excluded panegyrics of herself. This little personal academy of Christina was one of the starting-points of the whole academy movement, and was itself the germ of the famous Arcadia.
Italian literature was at this moment beginning to set towards a simplicity revival. Seicentismo, the fashion of the seventeenth century, with its artificialities and ludicrous conceits, had passed its high-water mark, and was felt to have been unproductive. The periodical cry of back-to-nature began to be heard. All over Italy societies with fantastic names and ingenious devices began to be formed for the purpose of freeing literature from chains. The pedants were everywhere banded together to vow death to pedantry.
Of all the societies the Arcadia turned out to be the largest, the longest-lived and the most picturesque. Pursuing the back-to-nature intention, it constructed itself on pastoral lines. Its meetings were held whenever possible in the open air, its members assumed the names of shepherds and shepherdesses of Greece. Taking place at the end of the seventeenth century, a period when natural beauty existed for the polite Romans exclusively in poetic Arcadia, the revival was inevitably the most artificial return to nature in the history of literature. The reaction, popular as it was, in the end gave little more to art than seicentismo itself. But the movement typified in the Arcadia was furiously fashionable. Scarcely an enlightened Roman or an aspiring tourist but wished to be a member. In the end a theatre was built in which the periwigged shepherds might exchange their verses of gallantry, the laws of the constitution were cut in marble, and when a schism invaded the ranks of the society[,] it shook the elegant world. It was to this sumptuous and ineffectual growth that Christina's first meetings in the Palazzo Farnese gave impetus.
Above: Kristina.
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