Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300]
but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of
the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate
the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate
erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that
the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or
_vice versa_, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. They
look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which
does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious
and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls
who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play
soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls.
When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to
masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's
love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in
dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to
kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such
marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of
different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by
violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few
prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing
disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several
eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman
shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are
that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite
possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental
masculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune,
not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and
take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal
impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the
Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not
overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased
brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of
erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as
the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species,
and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic
passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it
cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]