SAPPHO
A Lecture delivered before
the Classical Association
of Victoria, 1913.
SAPPHO
T. G. TUCKER,
LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of
Melbourne
MELBOURNE
THOMAS C. LOTHIAN
1914
PRINTED IN ENGLAND
Copyright.
First Edition, May 1914.
SAPPHO
IT is hardly possible to realize and judge of Sappho without
realizing her environment. The picture must have its background, and the
background is Lesbos about the year 600 B.C. One may well regret never to have
seen the island now called Mytilene but known in ancient times as Lesbos. There
are, however, descriptions not a few, and with these we must perforce be
satisfied. On the map it lies there in the Aegean Sea, a sort of triangle with
rounded edges, pierced deeply on the south by two deep lochs or fiords, while
toward each of its three angles it rises into mountains of from two to three
thousand feet in height. One way it stretches some thirty-five miles, the other
some twenty-five.
It is twenty-five centuries ago since this island was the
home of Sappho, of Actus, and of a whole school of the most finished lyric
poetry and music ever heard in Greece. From its northern shore, across only
seven miles of laughing sea, the poetess might every day look upon the Road,
the land of Homeric legend; and in the North-East distance, over the broadening
strait, rose the storied crest of “many-fountained Ida.” The air
was clear with that translucency of which Athens also boasted, and in which the
Athenian poet rightly or wrongly found one cause of the Athenian intellectual
brilliancy. The climate was, and still is, famous for its mildness and celebrity.
The Lesbian soil was, and still is, rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and
olives, in building-wood and tinted marble. It was eminently a land of flowers
and aromatic plants, of the rose and the iris, the myrtle and the violet, and
the Lesbians would seem to have loved and cultivated flowers much as they are
loved and cultivated in Japan.
Such was the land. The Greeks who inhabited it belonged
apparently to that Achkan Olean branch which was the first to cross from Europe
to the north-west Gyan and to oust, or plant colonies among, the older
nameless—perhaps “Pelasgian”—occupants. This is not the
place to discuss the tribal or even racial differences which once existed
between Olean, Ionian, and Dorian Greeks. Their divergence of character was
great; it was of the first significance as exhibited in war, in social life, in
art. The fact that each division spoke the Greek tongue, though with various
accents and idioms, is no longer held as proof that their racial origin and
capacity were the same. Between the Greek of Lesbos and the Greek of Sparta
there were differences in temper, in adaptability, and in taste, as great as
those between the English-speaking Irishman, with his nimble sympathies and his
ready eloquence and wit, and the slower if surer Saxon of Mid-Lothian. If we
touch upon this question here, it is merely because it casts some measure of
light upon those social and literary characteristics of the Lesbians in which
Sappho fortunately shared. Almost beyond a doubt the Olean Greeks who first
made Lesbos their home was the nearest of kin to those fair-haired Achkans who,
in the Iliad, followed their feudal lords to the siege of Troy. Socially a
distinguishing mark of these people was the liberty and high position enjoyed
by the women in the household, by the Penelope's as well as by the Helens. This
fact has hardly been sufficiently considered in dealing with that peculiar
position of Sappho and her coterie, concerning which something will be said later.
Artistically their distinguishing mark, as represented first in Homer, was
their clear, open-eyed, original observation of essentials, their veracity of
description, their dislike of the indefinite and the mystic. This too is
clearly reflected in the work of Sappho and her compatriots.
We must not, it is true, make too much of this racial
derivation and its consequences. The population of Lesbos doubtless became
mixed; the lapse of centuries, the passing away of the feudal relation,
increasing ease and wealth in a softening climate, long intercourse with the
trade and culture of the neighboring Asiatic coast—all these had their
inevitable effects. Nevertheless, among it all, the frank genius of earliest
Greece is still discernible in the classic poetry of Lesbos.
The island naturally possessed its characteristic speech.
The dialect of Lesbos was strongly marked. It is altogether unsafe to specify
at this distance of time the particular qualities of softness or sonority which
belonged to Greek dialects; but, if one may venture where doubt must always be
so great, it would not be unreasonable to speak of Lesbian Greek as perhaps the
most “swingable” of them all. In several ways it is peculiarly
like Italian. The aspirate is gone, the double consonants are brought out with
an Italian clarity unique in Greece, the vowels are firm and musical. And here
we must remember that a local Greek dialect must never be looked upon as a
provincial patois simply because it is not Attic. Neither Attic nor any other
one speech possessed a pre-eminence in Greece in the year 600 B.C. The poet of
every little independent Grecian state was free to compose in his own idiom,
with no more hesitation or self-consciousness than would have occurred to a
Provençal troubadour, an early trover of Normandy, or a Sicilian poet before
the age of Dante. The half-doubts of Burns when writing his native Scots would
find no sympathy in Sappho or Actus. No poetry that profoundly stirs the heart
was ever written with effort in an alien speech. Burns perhaps had some reason
to be tempted to write in English. The Lesbian singers had no temptation to
write in anything but Lesbian. Sappho may indeed be called the Burns of Greece,
but if her dialect, like his, was local, it was at the same time the genuine
and recognized language of the most cultured men and women of her people.
Having thus spoken of Lesbos, its people, and its language,
we may proceed to the social and ethical surroundings into which Sappho was
born. The island contained, after the usual Greek fashion, perhaps half-a-dozen
little communities independent of each other. All these had their “little
summer wars” and their little revolutions; but it is with Mytilene,
the chief and largest town, that the life of Sappho is identified. The history
of such a town at this period may be compared to that of an Italian city in the
later thirteenth century. It was the history of a struggle between a despotism,
or an oligarchy of aristocrats, and the rights of the citizens. The grand and popular
of Florence in the time of Dante find their analogues in the conflicts of
nobles like Actus and his brother Antimonides against the champions of the
common folk of Mytilene. There were also feuds less immediately explainable,
just as there were feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, of Blacks and Whites. We
need not inquire into the usurpations of Elenchus and Missiles or the
dictatorship of Pittacus. Men carried to power by favor of one party might
drive their opponents into banishment, just as Dante was exiled to Verona and
Ravenna. Among those who thus left their country for a space were the poet Actus
and his greater contemporary Sappho. Particularly haughty and turbulent were
the nobly born, and these often elected to roam abroad and serve as condottieri
in foreign armies rather than condescend to obey the rule of the commons at
home. It may be mentioned in passing that the brother of the poet Actus took
service under King Nebuchadnezzar, and in his wars killed a Goliath, who “lacked
but a hand’s-breath of five cubits.”
Yet these are after all but surface incidents, of which
history often makes too much. As in modern times, the little wars and little
revolutions caused but an inconsiderable suspension of social and industrial
life. Commerce and art went on very much as before. The vines of Lesbos were
pruned, the ships of Lesbos went trading down the coast, the poets and
musicians of Lesbos played and sang. We know that while Guelfs were quarrelling
with Ghibellines and Florentines were fighting with Pisans or Genoese, the
festive processions went with song across the Arno, Giotto’s tower rose from
the ground, Guido Cavalcanti composed his sonnets, and Dante, for all that he
must fight in the front ranks at Capaldi, found time and hearers for his Donne chi’
averted intellect s'more. So, it was at Mytilene. We need not therefore picture
Sappho and her society of maidens as living perpetually among war’s alarms or
fluttering in daily expectation of battle, murder, and sudden death. Life in
Lesbos must have been passing cheerful, as life goes.
When we proceed next to speak of the lively enthusiasm of
this Lesbian folk for beauty in all its forms, and in especial for the beauty
of music and poetry, we must guard against a misconception. Under all the love
of art which ruled in Lesbos, amid all its eager cultivation of the Muses and
the Graces, this isle of Greece “where burning Sappho loved and sung”
carried on its daily work as strenuously as any Greeks were wont. Its farmers
and fishermen, its quarriers and vinedressers, labored like others in sun or
cold. There was no doubt plenty of envy, hatred, and malice, and no little that
was coarse and gross. Nevertheless, the love of art and beauty and the
spontaneous appreciation of them penetrated far deeper into a Greek people than
it does with us. It was not an artificial outgrowth, a dainty efflorescence of
leisure and luxury. It was no private possession of the virtuoso, or
sequestered playground of the amateur. Even now the popular songs of the
village Greeks are in literary grace and thought of a higher quality than many
songs familiar to our drawing-rooms. Life without song and dance upon the sward
was unimaginable in old Hellas.
The special pride of Lesbos was in its music and poetry. In
the language of the legend, when that magic singer Orpheus had been torn to
pieces in Thrace, his head—with, as some say, his lyre—was carried “down
the swift Hubris to the Lesbian shore.” On the coins of Mytilene,
as on the flag of Ireland, may be seen a harp. The first great name in the
musical history of Greece is that of the Lesbian Trepanier. It is not indeed a
probable story that he was the first to increase the strings of the lyre from
four to seven, but it is practically certain that he both improved that
instrument and invented new forms of composition to embody a lyrical idea.
Another world-known poet and musician who shed glory on Lesbos was Arion. Of
him in later days the story grew that, when he was thrown overboard by pirates,
a dolphin, which had been charmed by his melodies, bore him upon its back safe
to the Tarentine shore.
In Lesbos, as in every part of Greece, there were abundant
demands upon musician and poet. Every occasion of worship, festivity, and grief
required its song. The gods were hymned by groups at their altars and by
white-robed maidens in processions; at weddings the hymeneal chorus was chanted
along the street, and the epithalamion before the doors of the bridal home; at
every banquet were sung lively catches and jocund songs of Bacchus; every
season—spring, summer, harvest—had its popular ditty, exultant or pathetic;
almost every occupation, of herdsman, boatman, gardener, was beguiled with
melody; at the coming of the first swallow, as on the old English Mayday, the
children sang the “swallow-song” from house to house.
And let it be remembered that the Greeks had none of our modern tolerance for a
song of which the words were naught and the tune everything. To them the
thought, the sentiment, was first; the melody was simply its proper vehicle.
Italian opera, when not a word is intelligible, would have seemed to them a
strange anomaly. To them music was the “art of the Muses,”
and this meant literature no less than minstrelsy. The poet, unless, like
Burns, he wrote his verses to existing tunes, was his own composer. In either
case he was poet first and foremost.
Now for generations the songs for special purposes had been
shaping themselves on special lines. To use a phrase of Aristotle, experience
had found out the right species to fit the case. There were sundry recognized
stanzas and meters for a processional, a hymeneal, or a dirge. In most cases,
therefore, the task of a new poet was to write new words; the melody would, as
in the case of Burns, almost find itself. Nevertheless, the complete poet could
not dispense with an elaborate training in music. To invent beautiful
variations of existing tunes was part of his glory; he must at least write
words which should sing themselves to the melody he selected. “Melodies”
is the word, for the Greeks knew practically nothing of harmonies. Their songs
were sung in unison, or simply with an octave interval when men sang with women
or with boys. The accompanying instrument was generally the lyre, or one of
many stringed instruments akin thereto; sometimes it was the so-called flute,
which was in truth a clarinet. Whatever their musical deficiencies, it has been
maintained by competent authorities that in nicety of ear for pitch and time
the training of the Greeks incomparably surpassed the modern. Be that as it
may, it must never be left out of sight that, when a Lesbian wrote a song, it
was in the first place as perfect a poem as he could create, and in the second
it was meant to be sung, not merely to be read. Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark is
consummate literature. Yet we may doubt if it could ever be sung, and assuredly
it was not written to that end. On the other hand, the songs of Moore are often
but sickly stuff to read, but they lend themselves perfectly to those touching
Irish airs, to which, by the way, the Lesbians seem to have been akin in a
peculiar tone of plaintiveness. A Greek lyric aimed at combining the literary music
of Shelley’s Ode with the songful music of Moore. It is in the perfection of
this combination that Sappho excels all women who have ever written verse.
Where song was for generations so abundant, it follows that
there was floating about among the people many an old ballad or favorite ditty
whose author had been long forgotten. Numbers of these Volkslieder, or snatches
of them, lay, sometimes with consciousness and sometimes unrealized, in the
memory of every child of Lesbos. The artistic poet did not scorn them; he
feared no charge of plagiarism if he adopted and adapted them; he often acted
as Burns acted with the ballads of Scotland; he took them, gave them that marvelous
and inexplicable touch of finality which only genius can impart, and so made
them his forever. This also did Sappho do, and her verses, when she deals with
well-worn themes, are beyond question often fed with the hints of older
nameless songsters.
There is one department of lyric verse in which Lesbos stood
supreme, and Sappho supreme in Lesbos. It is the poetry, not of religion or
marriage, of the banquet or the seasons, but of personal emotion; the verse of
the “lyric cry,” which tells of the writer’s own passion, its
waves of joy and sorrow, love and hate. It is the monody, the verse sung, not
by a gathered company, but from the one overflowing heart, the song best
represented at Rome by Catullus, and in modern times by Burns or Heine. For
most of her poems in this kind there is no reason to suppose that Sappho relied
upon any promptings but those of her own soul. She took the floating rhythms of
the ballads, modified them, and into their mold she poured verse which, as
George Sand said of her own writings, came from “the real blood of her heart
and the real flame of her thought.”
And here at length we come to the poetess herself. Into this
land, devoted to poetry, to music, to flowers, and so regardful of loveliness
that a public “prize of beauty” was annually competed for in the temple
of Hera, was Sappho—or Sappho, as she apparently called herself—born in the
latter part of the seventh century before Christ. Our ancient authorities are
sufficiently in agreement as to her date, and we may lay it down that she was
in her prime about the year 600 B.C., or nearly a hundred and fifty years
before that great period of Athenian literary culture which is represented by Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides. The ascertainable facts of her career are miserably
few, and concerning those matters which are in debate as to her life and
character the present exponent must be permitted to express simply his own
views, premising that they have been formed with all due and deliberate care.
Whether the names of her parents were or were not
Scamandronymus and Class is an unimportant question. We may simply remark that
both those names are of aristocratic color, and both are authenticated. Whether
again she was born at Mytilene itself, or at the smaller town of Eres's, is of
little moment, since we know that at any rate Mytilene was the scene of her
life’s work. That she belonged to the ranks of the well-born, and that good
looks were in the family, is proved by the choice of her brother Larches as cupbearer
of Mytilene, an office which was bestowed only on handsome and noble youth.
That at least one member of the family possessed considerable means is known
from the rather romantic history of a second brother, Choragus. This young man
sailed away in his ship, laden with the famous Lesbian wine—the innocents popular
Lesbian of Horace—as far as Egypt. There he traded in that merchandise at the
Pan-Grecian free-town of Naucratis, which had been established in the Delta
under a permission somewhat like that by which settlement was first allowed in
the treaty-ports of China. Here, however, he fell in love with the world-famed
demi-mondaine whose name, Dobrich, is less familiar than her sobriquet Rhodopids— “complexion
of a rose”—and his gains were spent in chivalrously ransoming
that lady from a degrading slavery. It is of interest to know, though the
verses are not preserved to us, that his poetess sister reproved him sharply
for this conduct. Her “love of love” did not blind her to
the claims of family honor and dignity. It is gratifying to learn that at a
later time she expresses her reconciliation to her brother in a poem which,
like those of Herenda's and Bicchulites, has but recently been disgorged,
though in a sadly mutilated state, by the omnivorous sands of Egypt. Sappho
herself is said to have married a wealthy islander of Andros, and to have had
at least one daughter, whose name, according to Greek custom, was the name of
the grandmother, Class. It is apparently this Class whom she is addressing in a
fragment which we may venture to translate thus——
“I have
a maid, a bonny maid,
As
dainty as the golden flowers,
My
darling Class. Where I paid
All
Lydia, and the lovely bowers
Of
Cyprus, ’would not buy my maid.”
An inscription on the Parian marbles informs us that, at
some uncertain date, Sappho fled, or was driven, into banishment to Sicily.
There is nothing unlikely in the circumstance, and it is worth noting that more
than 500 years later, in the days of Cicero, Verres, the governor of that
island, appropriated a bronze statue of Sappho, wrought by a Grecian master and
greatly prized at Syracuse.
As Aberg Aube which has gathered about Sappho’s history,
there are two strange legends, or rather there is one strange legend in two
parts, which must here be told briefly.
The story goes that once upon a time Aphrodite, goddess of
love, disguised as an aged woman, was gallantly ferried across to Lesbos by a
young waterman of the name of Pheon. In reward she bestowed upon him marvelous
beauty and irresistible charm. Of him, the fable tells, Sappho became enamored
to the point of frenzy, and, unable to win his heart, she resolved to attempt
the last and most desperate cure known for her disease. Away in the Ionian Sea
was the jutting rock of Leucas, and it was believed that those who cast
themselves down from that cliff into the sea either ended their miseries in
death or rose from the waters cured of their malady. What became of Sappho when
she took that “lover’s leap” may be found narrated by Hephaestion. It
is given in Addison’s 233rd Spectator. “Many who were present
related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again;
there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap,
but that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her
hovering in the air under that shape. But whether the whiteness and fluttering
of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she
might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is
still a doubt among the Lesbians.” Well, let us share the Lesbian
doubt, and a little more. Suffice it to say that, though this story, which has
been elaborated by the fancy of Ovid, appears to have been known in some shape
to Menander and other comic poets of Athens, there is absolutely no trace of
the name of Pheon or of anything connected with him in any fragment of Sappho.
Nor was there likely to be, seeing that he is in all probability but another
avatar of the mythical youth Adonis. More interesting is it to observe that the
rock of desperation is called “Sappho’s Leap” unto this day. Unfortunately,
we do not know when or by whom it was so baptized.
Of Sappho’s personal appearance we have no certain
knowledge. More than four centuries later a philosopher named Maximus Tyrus
says that she was considered beautiful, “though” short
and dark, and hence is prompted Swinburne’s assumption—
“The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.”
If this be true, she was sufficiently unlike the
conventional ideal of Lesbian beauty. Her contemporary Actus speaks of her “sweet
smile,” and Anacreon, in the next generation, of her “sweet
voice.” Later writers of epigrams, who can hardly have known much
about the matter, call her “bright-eyed,” or “the
pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians,” but those are as likely as
not mere descriptive guesses of the kind in which poetical fancy may pardonably
indulge. If we meet with the untranslatable adjective kale applied to her by
Plato, we must remember that it is a stock epithet of admiration for a writer
of charm and genius, and in such cases contains no reference whatever to beauty
of person.
What we really know best of Sappho’s life is that she was
acknowledged the choicest spirit of her time in music and poetry, and that,
whether as friendly guide or professional teacher or something of both, she
gathered about her what may be variously called a coterie, academy,
conservatorium, or club, of young women, not only from Lesbos itself but from
other islands, and even from Miletus and the distant Pamphylia. Sometimes they had
called her “companions,” sometimes her “disciples.”
One of them, Edina of Telos, herself became famous, but unhappily survives for
us as a lyrist only in an inconsiderable line or two.
Sappho appears to have taught these damsels music and the
art of poetry, so far as that art is teachable. She appears, moreover, to have
taught them whatever charms and graces of bearing and behavior were most
desired by women, whether in their social life or in their frequent appearances
in religious or secular processions and ceremonies. There exists a short
fragment in which she derides the rusticity of the woman who has no idea how to
hold up her train about her ankles. In another place she bids one of her
maidens—
“Take sprigs of anise fair
With soft hands twined,
And round thy bonny hair
A chaplet bind;
The Muse with smiles will bless
Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.”
It has often been observed that the relations of Sappho with
the young women Edina and at this and Anatolia resembled those of Socrates with
the young men Alcibiades and Charmides and Hydrus. But it has apparently not
been also pointed out as a parallel that, three centuries later, there
similarly gathered about the maître Philotas, in the isle of Cos, a school of
young poets, among whom were no less persons than Theocritus, Asclepiades and
Aratus.
The peculiarity of Sappho’s coterie lay to the general mind
in the fact that it was a club of women. And here we must handle with brief and
gentle touch, but with no false reserve, a topic which no discourse on Sappho
can shrink from facing. The reputation of Sappho and her comrades has long been
made to suffer from what is probably, and almost certainly, a cruel injustice.
Partly through the social depravity of the later Greek and Roman, partly
through taking too seriously the scurrilous humors of the comic dramatists of
Athens, many ancients and most moderns have formed concerning that Lesbian
school a notion which in all likelihood does bitter wrong to Sappho, wrong to
art, and wrong to human nature. At Athens, as among all the Ionian Greeks, and later
among Greeks almost everywhere, a woman of character was kept in a seclusion
suggestive of the oriental. The woman most to be praised, Pericles declared,
was “she of whom least is said among men whether for good or evil.”
This, as we have seen, was not the way of the older Olean Lesbos, where woman
still enjoyed much of the Homeric freedom and independence to go and come and
live her life. What more natural than for Athenians to imagine that the famous
coterie of Sappho consisted of women of the same class as the brilliant
Aspasia? Their very talent was proof enough, for the Athenian housekeeper who
passed for wife made no pretensions to literature and art. What more natural
also than for an Athenian playwright, like him of the Ecclesiasts, or “Women
in Parliament,” to find scandalous comedy in the Preciouses of
Lesbos? Again, the poems of Sappho are nearly all poems of love, and to the
ordinary Greek, especially of a later date, it was unseemly for modest women to
acknowledge so positive a passion. An Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have
received no countenance from the Athenian Mrs. Grundy. The truth seems to be
that Lesbos in the year 600 B.C. was in this respect socially and ethically
almost as different from the Athens of two hundred years later as the
emancipated young woman of America is different from the dragon-guarded Spanish
maiden of Madrid.
We may pass by other considerations which might be urged,
but it is no surprise that the false notion of Sappho, constructed by decadent
Greeks and refined upon by the vice of the Romans, should do her special harm
in the days when paganism gave way to Christianity. Among the many works
destroyed by the undo’ guide in the early Byzantine days were the poems of
Sappho—destroyed the more savagely because that particular pagan, who so
passionately invoked the Queen of love, was a woman, and woman’s ideal place
was then the cloister. Unhappily certain moderns, who are anything but undo’ guide,
have carried on the wrong in a different way, and, for example, the title Sapho
of Daudet’s sketch of mars Parisiennes is a choice which may pardonably stir
the ire of any Hellenist.
The few fragments of Sappho which have been preserved are
not those which have been spared by the saints or which have been culled for
special innocence. They simply happen to be quoted here and there by ancient
critics, grammarians, and even lexicographers, to illustrate some esthetic
doctrine, the use of some word, or even some peculiarity of grammar. And no
understanding man or woman can read them without feeling that what we find is
sheer poetry, sound and true, free from dross in either form or thought. Says
Sappho herself, “I love daintiness, and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty
of the sun.” To Actus, her fellow-countryman and acquaintance,
she was the “violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.” To Plato,
who judged even art by ethical standards, she is “beautiful and wise.”
Her reply to her fellow-poet, when he was too bashful to say something which
was in his mind, was this—
“Had your desire been right and good,
Your tongue perplexed with no bad thought,
With frank eye unabashed you would
Have spoken of the thing you ought.”
To some lover she says—if she is speaking in her own person—
“As friends we’ll part:
Win thee a younger bride;
Too old, I lack the heart
To keep thee at my side.”
Nay, we may go further and say that, after reading and
re-reading and translating and commenting on her poems, so far as we possess
them, we find her verse full indeed of warmth and color, full of poignant
feeling, but never riotous, always sane, always controlled by the truest sense
of art. Obedience to the central Greek motto μηδὲν ἄγαν—“nothing too much”—was
never better exemplified. The Greeks would never have set her on such a
pedestal if she had been the poetical monad who seems to exist in the mind of
Swinburne, when he writes of her, in that vicious exaggeration of phrase which
he too often affects, as—
“Love’s priestess, mad with
pain and joy of song,
Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.”
No writer so lacking in sophrosyne could assert, as
Swinburne elsewhere in his finer and truer style makes her assert—
“I Sappho shall be one ...
... with all high things forever.”
There is not a line of Sappho of which you do not feel that,
glow as it may with feeling, it is constructed with such art as—unconscious
though it may possibly be—can only be sustained in a mind of perfect sanity.
There is something else which is too often strangely
overlooked in judging a poet from his writings alone. It is particularly liable
to be forgotten when the writings which have been preserved are, but fragments
severed from their context. The poet is not always writing in his own person;
he is not always revealing his own feelings. He is often dramatizing; and his
verses then utter the sentiments and passions suited to the character
concerned. No one will accept a passage culled from Shakespeare as proof of the
ethical views of Shakespeare himself. It may express only the whim of Falstaff,
or the snarl of Shylock, or the banter of Benedick, or the melancholy humor of
Hamlet. Allowing for all the difference between lyric poetry and dramatic, the
lyrist also has his passages in which he is speaking for another. He may be writing
for another. In Memoriam doubtless represents the heart of Tennyson himself.
But suppose posterity to retain but a few fragments of his other works. What
shall we say of those who might take the isolated words “I am a weary, a weary, I
would that I were dead” as a proof of the settled pessimism of
our poet? We know that the speaker was Mariana. We do not always know who the
speaker in the fragments of Sappho is. But, even if we did know, there remains
not a verse which betrays the too much, or which passes beyond the pathetic
into the reckless, the hysterical, still less the dissolute.
Behind Sappho, as behind Burns before he wrote “Green
grow the rushes O” or “Auld Lang Syne,”
lay a mass of popular ballads and a wealth of lyrical ideas to be seized upon
and shaped when the perfect mood arrived. When she sings—
“Sunk is the moon;
The Pleiades are set;
Tic midnight; soon
The hour is past; and yet
I lie alone”—
it is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric
lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such varoom ditty. It is practically
certain that she is doing so in that quatrain which begins “Sweet
mother mine, I cannot ply my loom.” That thought is embodied in
English folksong also— “O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin
to-night”—as well as in German and other tongues.
Let us then sweep aside from the memory of Sappho the myths
of Pheon and the Leucadian leap, and the calumnies of Athenian worldlangs in
the comic theatre; let us reject all that Swinburn Ian hyperbole which makes
her “mad” in any sense whatever; and let us simply take her
upon the strength of the “few passages, but roses” which are
left to us, and upon the word of Actus that she was the “violet-weaving, pure,
sweetly-smiling Sappho.”
Her life as teacher and esthetic guide in Lesbos evidently
did not pass without a cloud. Her talent, like talent everywhere, found jealous
rivals and detractors. A certain Andromeda seems to have caused her special
vexation by luring away her favorite pupil at this. There were also, then as
now, rich but uncultured women who had little love for art and its votaries,
particularly if these latter were all too charming. To one such woman Sappho,
who, like a true Olean, looked with horror on a life without poetry and a death
unconjured by song, writes—
“When thou art dead, thou
shalt lie, with none to remember or mourn,
Forever and aye; for thy head no Pieria roses adorn;
But even in the nether abodes thou shalt herd thee,
unnoted, forlorn,
With the dead whom the great dead scorn.”
Her work as poetess, though of everlasting value for what it
touches in universal humanity, naturally bears many marks of her country and
her time. Besides her songs of personal emotion, she wrote in several of the
various forms of occasional verse which we found reason to mention as existing
in Lesbos. Of her wedding songs and epithalamia, we possess several short
fragments. Among them is one in the accepted amban or antiphonic style, in
which a band of girls mock the men with failure to win some dainty maiden, and
the men reply with a taunt at the neglected bloom of the unprofitable virgin.
Say the maids—
“On the top of the topmost
spray
The pippin blushes red,
Forgot by the gatherers—nay!
Was it “forgot” we said?
Taws too far overhead!”
Reply the men—
“The hyacinth so sweet
On the hills where the herdsmen go
Is trampled ’beneath their feet,
And its purple bloom laid low—”
and there unhappily the record deserts us.
The writing of Sappho was thus in no way dissociated from
the surrounding life of Lesbos. Similarly, the Lesbian love of bright and
beautiful things—of gold, of roses, of sweet odors and sweet sounds—pervades
all that is left of her. The Queen of Love sits on a richly-colored throne; she
dispenses the “nectar” of love in “beakers of gold”;
she wears a “golden coronal”; the Graces have “rosy arms”;
verses are the “rose-wreath of the Muses”; the blessed goddesses shower
grace upon those who approach them with garlands on their heads. If maidens
dance around the altar, they may dance most pleasantly on the tender grass
flecked with flowers. It is sweet to lie in the garden of the Nymphs, where—
“Through apple-boughs, with
purling sound,
Cool waters creep;
From quivering leaves descends around
The dew of sleep.”
Sweet among sounds is that of the “harbinger of spring, the
nightingale, whose voice is all desire.” Sappho does in very
truth, as she declares, love daintiness. Above all, she loves love. Love is the
“nectar”
in the lines—
“Come, Cyprian Queen, and,
debonair,
In golden cups the nectar bear,
Wherein all festal joy must share
Or be no joy.”
But there is nothing morbid, nothing of the hot house, about
all this. It is simply the frank, naïve, half-physical, half-mental, enjoyment
of the youth of the world, as fresh and healthy as the love of the trousers, or
of Chaucer, for the daisy, and of the balladist for the season when the “shows
be sheen and leaves be large and long.”
Unhappily of the nine books of Sappho there have survived
only one complete poem, one or two considerable fragments, and several scraps
and lines. So far as we possess even these, we must thank ancient critics, such
as Aristotle, Dionysius, and Longinus, writers of miscellanies, such as
Plutarch and Athens, or grammarians like Hephaestion. We have also to thank
those modern scholars, and Bergh, who have acutely and patiently gleaned the
scattered remnants from the pages of these ancient authorities. Scanty as they
are, we can gather from them as profound a conviction of their creator’s genius
as we gather from some fragmentary torso of an ancient masterpiece of
sculpture. We may grieve that a torso of Praxiteles is so mutilated; nevertheless,
the art of the master speaks in every recognizable line of it. According to the
old proverbs, “Hercules may be known from his foot” and “a
lion from his toe-nail.” What remains of Sappho is enough to make
us fully comprehend the splendor of her poetic reputation in ancient times.
That reputation was unique. To the Greeks “the poet”
meant Homer; “the poetess” meant Sappho. The story goes that Solon,
the Athenian sage and legislator who was her contemporary, hearing his nephew
sing one of Sappho’s odes, demanded to be taught it, “So that I may not die
without learning it.” Plato consents to praise her, and that,
when Plato speaks of a poet, is praise from Sir Hubert. To Aristotle she ranks
with Homer and Archilochus. Strabo, the geographer, calls her “a marvelous
being,” whom “no woman could pretend to rival in the very least
in the matter of poetry.” Plutarch avers that “her
utterances are veritably mingled with fire,” and that “the
warmth of her heart comes forth from her in her songs.” He
confesses also that their dainty charm shamed him to put by the wine-cup. To
one writer of epigrams, said to be Plato himself, she is the “Tenth
Muse”; to others she is the “pride of Greece”
or the “flower of the Graces.” It is recorded that Mytilene
stamped her effigy upon its coins. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, she
was flattered abundantly. The most genuine lyric poet of Rome, Catullus, and
its most skillful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did
more than imitate; they plagiarized, they translated, sometimes almost word for
word. There is scarcely an intelligible fragment left of Sappho which has not
been borrowed or adapted by some modern poet, in English, French, or German.
There is one mutilated ode of hers which no one can
translate. It is quoted by Longinus as showing with what vivid terseness she
can portray the tumultuous and conflicting sensations of a lover in that bright
fierce south. Ambrose Philips makes it wordy; Boileau makes it formal. It
displays all the grand Greek directness, but a directness clothed in the grand
Greek charm of perfect rhythmical expression. We can preserve, if we will, the
directness, but the charm of its medium will inevitably vanish.
In effect, lamentably stripped of its native verbal charm,
it may be rendered—
“Blest as the gods, methinks,
is he
Who sixtieth face to face with thee?
And hears thy sweet voice nigh,
Thy winsome laugh, whereat my heart
Doth in my bosom throb and start;
One glimpse of thee, and I
Am speechless, tongue-tied; subtle flame
Steals in a moment through my frame;
My ears ring; to mine eye
All’s dark; a cold sweat break; all o’er
I tremble, pale as death; anymore,
I seem almost to die.”
When after this we read in the Phaedra of Racine these four
lines—
Je le vis, je
rougis, je palis à sa vue,
Un trouble
s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue ;
Mes yeux ne
voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler,
Je sentais tout
mon cœur et transir et brûler :
we recognize their source. We recognize, also, if it were
not already confessed, the source of this of Tennyson in his Fatima:
“Last night, when someone
spoke his name,
From my swift blood, that went and came,
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame.”
If this physical perturbation seems strange to the more
reticent man of northern blood, it was in no way strange to Theocritus, to
Catullus, or to Lucretius. Once more, according to the German proverb, “he
who would comprehend the poet must travel in the poet’s land.”
And here we are confronted with a supreme difficulty. While
mere fact is readily translatable, and thought is approximately translatable,
the literary quality, which is warm with the pressure and pulsation of a
writer’s mood and rhythmic with his emotional state, is hopelessly
untranslatable. It can be suggested, but it cannot be reproduced. The
translation is too often like the bare, cold photograph of a scene of which the
emotional effect is largely due to color and atmosphere. The simpler and more
direct the words of the original, the more impossible is translation. In the
original the words, though simple and direct, are poetical, beautiful in
quality and association. They contain in their own nature hints of pathos,
sparks of fire, which any so-called synonym would lack. They are musical in
themselves and musical in their combinations. They flow easily, sweetly,
touchingly through the ear into the heart. The translator may seek high and low
in his own language for words and combinations of the same timbre, the same
ethical or emotional influence, the same gracious and touching music. He will
generally seek in vain. In his own language there may exist words approximately
answering in meaning, but, even if they are simple and direct, they are often
commonplace, sullied with “ignoble use,” harsh in sound, without
distinction or charm. He may require a whole phrase to convey the same tone and
effect; he becomes diffuse, where terseness is a special virtue of his
original. Let a foreigner study to render this—
“Had we never loved sea
kindly,
Had we never loved sea blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”
Or this——
“Take, O take those lips
away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn!
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love but sealed in vain.”
Is it to be imagined that he could create precisely the
effect of either of these stanzas in French or Italian? Is not much of that
effect inseparable from the words?
Take a perfectly simple stanza of Heine—
“Du bit Wei peine Blum
So, hold und Schön und rein:
Ich schav’ dich an, und Weymouth
Schlaich Mir ins Hers herein.”
Near as English is to German, incomparably easier as it is
to render German into English than Greek into English, it may be declared that
no English rendering of this verse conveys, or ever will convey, exactly the
impression of the German original.
In respect of mere musical sound, what other words could run
precisely like those of Coleridge at the opening of Kublai Khan, or like
Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee”? The case is the same when
we turn to a Greek lyric. Actus writes four words which mean simply “I
felt the coming of the flowery spring”; but no juxtaposition of
English words yet attempted to that effect can recall to the student of Greek
the impression of
ἦρος ἀνθεμόεντος ἐπάϊον ἐρχομένοιο.
It is necessarily so with Sappho. She is an embodiment of
the typical Greek genius, which demanded the terse and clear, yet fine and
noble, expression of a natural thought, free, as Addison well says, from “those
little conceits and turns of wit with which many of our modern lyrics are so
miserably infected.” True Greek art detests pointless
elaboration, strained effects, or effects which must be hunted for. The Greek
lyric spirit would therefore have loved the best of Burns and would have recognized
him for its own. But you cannot translate Burns. Neither can you translate
Sappho. Nevertheless, one attempt may be nearer, less inadequate, than another.
Let us take the hymn to Aphrodite. It is quoted by the critic Dionysius for its
“happy
language and its easy grace of composition.”
The first stanza contains in the Greek sixteen words, big
and little. In woeful prose these may be literally rendered “Radiant-thronged
immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, guile-weaver, I beseech thee, Queen, crush
not my heart with griefs or cares.”
In turning Greek poetry into English, and so inserting all
those little pronouns and articles and prepositions with which a synthetic
language can dispense, it may be estimated that the number of words will be
greater by about one half,—the little words making the odd half. But Ambrose
Philips makes thirty-four words out of those sixteen—
“O Venus, beauty of the
skies,
To whom a thousand temples rise,
Gaily false in gentle smiles,
Full of love-perplexing wiles;
O Goddess, from my heart remove
The wasting cares and pains of love.”
The italics should suffice for criticism upon the fidelity
of this “translation.” Mr. J. H. Merivale, though more faithful
to the material contents, finds forty-three words necessary—
“Immortal Venus, thronged
above
In radiant beauty, child of Jove,
O skilled in every art of love
And artful snare;
Dread power, to whom I bend the knee,
Release my soul and set it free
From bonds of piercing agony
And gloomy care.”
We may perhaps without presumption ask whether the sense is
not given more faithfully, in a more natural English form and rhythm, and in a
shape sufficiently reminiscent of the original stanza, in the twenty-three
words which follow—
“Guile-weaving child of Zeus,
who art
Immortal, thronged in radiance, spare,
O Queen of Love, to break my heart
With grief and care.”
Keeping to the same principles of strict compression and
strict simplicity we may thus continue with the remainder of the poem—
“But hither come, as thou of
old,
When my voice reached thine ear afar,
Didst leave thy father’s hall of gold,
And yoke thy car,
And through midair their whirring wing
Thy bonny doves did swiftly ply
O’er the dark earth, and thee did bring
Down from the sky.
Right soon they came, and thou, blest Queen,
A smile upon thy face divine,
Didst ask what ails me, what might mean
That call of mine.
‘What wouldn't thou have,
with heart on fire,
Sappho?’ thou sadist. ‘Whom prey's thou me
To win for thee to fond desire.
Who wronged thee?
Soon shall he seek, who now doth shun;
Who scorns thy gifts, shall gifts bestow;
Who loves thee not, shall love anon,
Wilt thou or no.’
So, come thou now, and set me free
From carking cares; bring to full end
My heart’s desire; thyself O be
My stay and friend!”
The perfection of the Greek style is fine simplicity. We
must not say that this characteristic perfection is more absolutely displayed
in Sappho than in Homer or Sophocles. It is, however, illustrated by Sappho in
that region of verse which pre-eminently demands it, the lyric of personal
emotion. There may be, with different persons and at different dates, wide
differences of interest regarding the themes and structures of the epic, the
drama, or the triumphal ode. Most forms of poetry must some time cease to find
full appreciation, because of the peculiar ideas and conventions of their time
and place. But the poetry of the primal and eternal passions of the human
heart, of its experiences and its emotions, carries with it those touches which
make the whole world kin. Love and sorrow are re-born with every human being.
Time and civilization make little difference. But those touches are only
weakened by far-sought words and elaborate meters, by recondite conceits and
ambitious psychology.
Perhaps the woman who seeks to come nearest to Sappho in
poetry is Mrs. Browning, but she falls far short of her predecessor, not only
through inferior mastery of form, but also through an excessive “bookishness”
of thought. The poet moves by—
“High and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.”
In the case of songs whose theme is what Sappho calls the “bitter
sweet” of love, their proper style has been determined by the
gathering consensus of humanity, and it is a style simple but powerful, with a
magic recurring in cadences easy to grasp and too affecting to forget. It is
the style of “Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Don,” not of the Ode on St.
Cecilia’s Day. Sappho’s songs fulfil all the conditions, and even of her
fragments that is true which her imitator Horace said of her completer poems,
as he more happily possessed them—
“Still breathes the love,
still lives the fire
Imparted to the Lesbian’s lyre.”
The virtue of Sappho is supreme art without artificiality,
utter truth to natural feeling wedded to words of utter truth. Let Pausanias,
that ancient Baedeker, declare that “concerning love Sappho sang
many things which are inconsistent with one another.”
She is only the more truthful therefor. No human heart, frankly, enjoying or
suffering the “bitter-sweet” moods and experiences of love, ever was
consistent. Consistency belongs only to the cool and calculating brain. If love
is cool and calculating, it is not love.
How much Sappho may have written on other subjects than
this, the most engrossing of all, we shall perhaps never know. But we may be
sure that one of the most priceless poetical treasures lost to the world has
been those other verses which, to quote Shelley on Keats, told of—
“All she had loved, and molded
into thought
From shape and hue and odor and sweet sound.”
There is, we may add, one quality besides beauty in verse
which can never be analyzed. It is charm. Sappho is pervaded with charm. And
this suggests that we may conclude by quoting the judgment of Matthew Arnold
upon one defect at least which must make Heine rank always lower than Sappho: —
“Charm is the glory which
makes
Song of the poet divine;
Love is the fountain of charm.
How without charm wilt thou draw?
Poet! the world to thy way?
Not by thy lightnings of wit—
Not by thy thunder of scorn!
These to the world, too, are given;
Wit it possesses and scorn—
Charm is the poet’s alone.”
The St. Abs Press, London
SAPPHO T. G. TUCKER,
Reviewed by bsm
on
May 01, 2014
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