Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of
conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now
subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.
Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possibly
deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient
writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one
hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--the
following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and
in much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with the
distinctness of a painting:
"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough, which the gatherers
overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not
reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or
rather fragments of such, comprising the following:
"Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal
creature, bitter-sweet."
"Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain
falling on the oaks."
"Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend."
"Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will."
"For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like
her."
"Bitter-sweet," "giver of pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some
expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the
rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night
might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems,
and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the
following fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaíka Eromenaen] ("to a
beloved woman"):
"That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy
presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and
lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in
my bosom. For when I see thee but a little I have no
utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and
straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with
my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat bathes me,
and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than
grass, and seem in my madness little better than one
dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..."
The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was "not one
passion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfect
expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greek
physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as a
compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F.B. Jevons, in
his history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the "marvellous
fidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long before
him Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "felt
the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms."
Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never
since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry
like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne,
speaks of the
"dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate
and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with
such grandeur as would seem impossible to such
passion."
And J.A. Symonds assures us that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some
Persian or Provençal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions
of overmastering passion."
I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin version
of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The more
I read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more I
marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and
opinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to the
psychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a long
and minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; I
have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a
lover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his
bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved;
but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind,
deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead,
she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.
An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem.
Suppose you say to a friend:
"A woman was walking in the woods when she saw
something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart
fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a
cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and
looked as if she would faint and die: what did she
see?"
The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!" In
truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like the
symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin,
Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becoming
husky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizziness
which will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "a
fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these
symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may
cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular,
but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am glad
that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of
diagnoses is not my family doctor.
Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of the
imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic,
affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give
us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sappho
the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration,
yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood
than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron
deceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian
Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):
"To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after
the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem
too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love
was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual
manner than we demand that it should be."
That is it precisely. These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic
love but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's
absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal
sensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic;
but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic implies
something healthy and normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy and
normal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been written
by a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and her
famous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred to in
her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton:
"What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who
wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies, she shall
soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give,
and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth."
In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which
refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the
moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen.
She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and
it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and
Constantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray,
"too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer,
Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that
"it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her
verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a
woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure
woman that her modern apologists would have her."
The following lament alone would prove this:
[Greek:
Deduke men a Selana
kai Plaeiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d' erxet ora
ego de mona katheudo.]