Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 85 to 88, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
Like most people whose interest in writing is keen enough, Christina occasionally attempted it herself. She wrote, according to her time, her Maxims or Thoughts, a type of demi-literature not particularly attractive in itself, but preferable to its only alternative, occasional verse. Christina was no artist, but she was a sound wielder of the pen, and her Pensées have a certain fine flavour of strength and scorn. They are much concerned with princes, and vengeance, and loving and punishing. Christina's heroes of antiquity are introduced, and women and marriage occur naturally at a disadvantage. The moral thoughts are somewhat stereotyped, but every now and then she strikes off her own personal anvil a bright spark. Such a one is: 'There is no greater folly than to take too much care of health. It should be enjoyed and put to every test.' She made, too, a respectable comment upon Cicero: 'Cicero was the only coward in history capable of great things.'
But Christina's letters far excel in interest her studied writings. Her style is excellently clear and simple; her feelings were invariably so keen that they carried her along in vigorous flow. She was so little a respecter of persons that her invective is a constant source of liveliness. One could have as soon wrung a letter of pure compliment out of Christina as a gushingly feminine speech; and in letter-writing, as elsewhere, sincerity is sterling.
In the act of writing Christina preserved her customary atmosphere of rabid activity. She herself was indefatigable, and required that her secretaries should be the same. She made them copy and recopy for the slightest fault, and when some alteration of hers passed unnoticed, the manuscript would be returned once again with an admonishment in the margin: 'Ouvrez les yeux!' In literary matters, however, she did not insist on being invariably right. 'C'est moi qui suis une bête', she once apologised handsomely in the margin, 'pardonnez moi!' She wrote in French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish and Latin. Her linguistic standard must have been high, for she always protested that she was not proficient to write in Italian, although she lived in Rome for thirty years and doubtless spoke the language freely. She wrote French most easily, as was natural to the age, but, in her private correspondence, not very correctly. Her caligraphy has the omissions and inexactitudes of a writer whose mind is too impetuous to be followed closely by the hand.
Christina read as zealously as she wrote. Those tall orders she issued to 'send me everything worth reading' were quite sincere. None of the books remained with uncut pages. She took this pleasure seriously and annotated profusely as she went. It is pathetic to think of the poor quality of much of her pabulum, and of the time she wasted upon the output of the Arcadians. A sumptuous and foolish little volume dedicated to Christina — 'How much more the beauty of the soul attracts than that of the body' — bears annotations in her swift, somewhat illegible hand, three to a page, amounting sometimes to almost as much matter as the text itself. 'Good! Very good! True! Well said! Not true! I don't believe it!' she painstakingly exclaims beside every sentiment; and once, when she is compared with Alexander to his detriment, 'It is not true, and I won't have it!' Though she could appreciate Plato and Pascal[,] she seemed unaware of the stupidity of this kind of literature. Perhaps the fact that she sponsored these talents did not admit of her finding fault with them.
Christina's interest in works of art, though keen, was rather less intelligent than her interest in books. She was here more of the collector than the lover, and she is said by her detractors to have allowed valuable pictures to be cut up to decorate her ceilings. She carried her enthusiasm for Italy and her distaste for Germany even into the world of art. 'I have an infinite number of pictures', she wrote before her abdication, 'but I set little store by any except the thirty or forty Italian masters. There are some by Albert Dürer and by other German masters whose names I don't know. Everyone but me thinks very highly of them, but I swear I would give them all for a couple of Raphaels, and still think I had done them an honour.' She did in the end succeed in acquiring two Raphaels and several Correggios. It was Sweden's good fortune that Christina did not care for the Germans, for in that gigantic flitting of hers in 1654, when she tried to transport all her valuables to Rome and had numbers of them stolen on the way, she left the Dutch and German masters at home to enrich the Swedish galleries.
Above: Kristina.
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