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· Golden Age of Lyric Poetry ·
· The Mythical and the Real Sappho ·
· Her Poems ·
· Contrast with Hebrew Singers ·
· Poet of Nature and Passion ·
· The First Woman’s Club ·
· Æolian and Doric Poetesses ·
· Honors to the Genius of Hellenic Women ·
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I
A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist,
singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal--all this was the
Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang
the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the
brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its
finest representative. Before her no woman had appeared in a distinctly
literary rôle, so far as we know. To-day she still stands supreme in
her own field.
This “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho,” who sang so
divinely, and vanished so theatrically from Leucadia’s “rock of woe,”
was long veiled in the mists of romance. The tragical muse pictured in
flowing draperies, with a crown of laurel on her head and a lyre in her
hand, chanting her swan-song before cooling her heart of flame in the
blue sea at her feet, was as intangible to us as one of Fra Angelico’s
angels. She looked out of a land of mystery and shadows, with nothing
human about her save that she loved, and suffered, and died. “Do thou,
gentle Love, place wings beneath me as I fall, that I may not be the
reproach of the Leucadian waves,” is her pathetic prayer, and here she
fades from our sight.
But it has been fairly settled that this romantic story was a dream;
that Phaon was only a mythical Adonis; that Sappho did not follow him
across the sea, did not die of love, and never took the fatal leap at
all. The sentimental tourist who sighs over her melancholy fate to-day,
as he passes the bare white cliffs of Santa Maura, so long consecrated
to tragedies of love and sorrow, pays his sympathetic tribute to a
phantom. She went to Sicily, it seems, but not for love. It is supposed
that she was exiled. There were political conspiracies for which men
were banished, and she may have written revolutionary songs. Possibly
she held too radical opinions on the privileges of her sex. But all
this is the purest surmise. In any case, her offense could not have
been a grave one, as she returned in a few years to Mytilene, where she
was adored by a fickle public as the glory of her native city, and
honored with altars and temples after her death. Her face was stamped
upon coins--“though she was a woman,” said Aristotle. The outlines are
clear and strong, with the virile quality so marked in most statues of
Greek women. She was also represented, with Alcæus, on a vase of the
next century, as not only beautiful, but tall and stately.
A thousand years afterward a statue of her is said to have been one
of the ornaments of the gymnasium at Byzantium. But coin and bust and
statue give us many faces. Which was the real one? We are more familiar
with the ideal Sappho in the modern portrait in which Alma-Tadema has
so subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect,
her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her eloquent eyes.
But recent critics tell us that even her beauty was a fiction of the
imagination. Does she not say of herself, in the burning lines of
Ovid, that she was brown and of low stature, though her name filled
all lands? Or was it the sweet humility of love that made her own
attractions seem to her slender and insufficient? She had been dead six
hundred years or so when Ovid wrote, and his knowledge could not have
been infallible.
Men of her own time called her the “beautiful Sappho,” the “flower
of the graces,” and Greek standards of beauty included height and
stateliness. Perhaps they were under the magic spell of her genius, and
indulged in glowing figures of speech. At all events, modern scholars
are more literal, and they have mostly decided that she was a small,
dark woman, of noble birth, who was early left a widow with one fair
daughter, “Cleïs, the beloved, with a form like a golden flower.” This
was also the name of her own mother. One of her brothers held the
honorable office of cup-bearer; the other went to Egypt, and, much to
the displeasure of his gifted sister, married a woman of more charms
than discretion, for whom he had paid a large ransom. This famous
beauty of Naucratis became very rich, and, possibly by way of atonement
for her sins, made a generous offering at the temple of Delphi. It
was even said that she immortalized herself by building the third
pyramid; but these tales, whether true or not, have been relegated to
the region of myths. We learn from Sappho herself that she quarreled
with her brother on account of this _mésalliance_. These are scant
materials on which to base a life, but they include about all the facts
we have of
That mighty songstress, whose unrivaled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers.
We do not even know when or where or how she died, though epitaphs in
the strain of these flattering and prosaic lines are numerous.
If her personality is veiled to us, still less do we know what manner
of woman she was. The Attic comedians said unpleasant things about
her a century after she died, and no one lived who could dispute
them. Unfortunately, no infallible certificate of character can be
found to protect a name that has been only a historic memory two or
three thousand years. It is certain, however, that Æolian women had
an honored place in society and literature. They formed a center of
intellectual light in which the brilliant Sappho reigned supreme, and
it was no unusual thing to see them at banquets and festivals with
men. A well-born Athenian woman would have lost the rather illusory
privileges of her position by such freedom. She was decorously ignorant
and stayed at home. It was a foregone conclusion in Athens that a woman
who was educated and a poet could not be respectable, and if the facts
were against this conclusion, so much the worse for the facts.
Hence it was quite natural that Sappho, who did not go into seclusion
or hide her light, should be decried by the satirists who had never
seen her. A hundred years had sufficed to dim the incidents of her
life, and left them free to invent any romance they chose. Her supposed
love-affairs were a fruitful theme. That men died before she was born,
or were born after she died, were impertinent details which were not
held to interfere in the least with their tender relations toward her.
It is true that she wrote with a pen dipped in fire, but poems and
tales of passion are not held even to-day as evidence against the fair
fame of the author, whatever might be thought of her good taste. The
Greek standards of morality were, at best, far from ours, and the frank
naturalism of that age would be likely to shock our sense of decorum.
But there is no indication that Sappho fell below these standards, and
there is much to show that she rose above them. “I love delicacy,” she
writes, “and for me love has the sun’s splendor and beauty.” Alcæus,
her fellow-poet and rival, addresses her as “pure, sweetly smiling
Sappho.” When he grows too ardent in his love, she rebukes him with
gentle dignity: “Hadst thou felt desire for things good or noble, and
had not thy tongue framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine
eyes, but thou hadst spoken honestly about it.” And why did she feel
her brother’s disgrace so keenly if her own life was open to reproach?
We gather from herself that she was simple, amiable, and sunny,
with a Greek love of life and all that pertains to it. “I am not of
revengeful temper,” she says, “but have a childlike mind.” To this
naïve confession she adds a choice bit of wisdom: “When anger spreads
through the breast, guard thy tongue from barking idly.” She tells her
daughter not to mourn for her, as “a poet’s home is not a fit place
for lamentation.” In the spirit of her age and race, she insists that
“death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they
would die.”
Whatever her character and personal history may have been, we know that
she wrote perfect lyrics with the spark of immortality in them, and
gathered about her in the sunny island of Lesbos a circle of educated
women who devoted themselves to the study of music, poetry, and the
arts of refined living. Her genius has been recognized by poets,
philosophers, and critics, as well as by simpler people who felt in her
verse the “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” She was
the “divine Muse” of Plato, and shared the lyric throne with Pindar.
Aristotle quoted her, and the austere Solon was so charmed with one
of her odes that he said he could not die until he had learned it.
Strabo writes that “at no period on record has any woman been known who
compared with her in the least degree as a poet.” Horace and Catullus
imitated her, Ovid paraphrased her, but no one has caught the essence
of her fiery spirit. Plutarch likens her to the “heart of a volcano.”
Longinus called her celebrated ode, “not a passion, but a congress of
passions.” Modern men have tried to put her golden-winged, fire-tipped
words into another tongue, and turned with despair from the task. It is
like trying to seize the light that blazes in the heart of the diamond,
or the fiery tints that hide in the opal. Perhaps Swinburne has best
caught the spirit and the music of
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity.
But even this exquisite artist in words says: “Where Catullus failed I
could not hope to succeed.”
There were nine volumes of her works in the days of Horace. To-day
scarcely more than two hundred lines survive. Besides the two immortal
odes, we have only fragments, gems scattered here and there through the
writers of antiquity. To the everlasting discredit of an ignorant and
fanatical age, the fathers denounced her, and the Byzantine emperors
or the ascetic monks of a later time burned these so-called relics of
paganism, to supply their place with books of devotion and lives of the
saints. When the Hellenic spirit woke again, after a sleep of more than
a thousand years, it was too late. These poems had perished with many
monumental works of the intellect, and scholars thought their lives
well spent if they found a line or two from the lost treasures.
But what was the life from which Sappho sprang, that she could reach
the topmost bough of fame at a single flight? The lucid note, the
tropical passion, the musical flow--these nature might give; but where
did she learn the fine sense of proportion, the perfection of metrical
form, the mastery of the secrets of language, which placed her at the
head of the lyric poets of Greece? The voices which might have told us
are silent. Sparta was making heroic men and women, not literature.
Athens was struggling through her stormy youth, and pluming her wings
for the highest flight of all. The great Hebrew poetry was contemporary
with Sappho, but she shows no trace of its influence. If she ever saw
or heard it, her spirit was utterly alien to it. Still less had she
in common with the inspired woman who led the armies of Israel to
victory, six or seven centuries before, and chanted in stately measure
the immortal song of their triumphs. It may be noted here that it
was a woman who fired the hearts of these wandering people to brave
deeds, when men drew back, timid and disheartened; it was a woman who
went before them into battle; and it was a woman who broke into that
impassioned poem which has come down to us across the ages as one of
the great martial hymns of the world. But Deborah, the soldier, poet,
prophetess, judge, and minstrel, never walked in the flowery paths of
beauty and love. Her virile soul rose on the wings of a sublime faith,
far above the things of sense. Behind that chorus of joy and exultation
lay the long-baffled hopes, aspirations, and energies of an oppressed
people, but it celebrated the apotheosis of force. It was a barbaric
song, wild and revengeful even in its splendid imagery and patriotic
fervor. Miriam took her timbrel, and sang in the same strain of power
and majesty, inspired by the same soaring imagination. But we find
no touch of a woman’s pity or tenderness in these pæans of victory.
Their note is strong and exultant, alive with the lofty enthusiasm of
a religious race in which the passion for art and beauty was not yet
born. Sappho had caught nothing from these singers of an earlier time.
She does not live in the bracing air of great ideals, nor does she
dwell upon any vexed moral problems, after the manner of later poets.
She is simply human, and strikes a personal note, the charm of which is
unfailing, and will be fresh as long as flowers bloom, or men and women
live and love.
This sweet-voiced singer seems to have risen full-fledged with the
dawn, and her notes were liquid and clear as the song of the lark that
soars out of the morning mists, and makes the sky vocal with melody.
The freshness of the woods and the wild freedom of the air are in
them. She loves the flowers, the running streams, the silver moon,
the “golden-sandaled dawn,” the “dear, glad angel of the spring, the
nightingale.” Hesperus, fairest of stars, “brings all that bright
morning scattered,” and smiles on “dark-eyed sleep, child of night.”
Again she says, “The stars about the fair moon hide their bright faces
when she lights up all the earth with silver.” Was it the music of
her voice that the doves heard “when their hearts turned cold and they
dropped their wings”? She sings the praise of the purple hyacinth, the
blushing apple-blossom, and the pale Lesbian rose, which she loves
best of all. Dica is bidden to twine wreaths, “for even the blessed
Graces look kindlier on a flowery sacrifice, and turn their faces
from those who lack garlands.” In the garden of the nymphs, “the cool
water gurgles through apple-boughs, and slumber streams from quivering
leaves.” To this passionate love of nature, so vividly told in rare and
exquisite figures and in phrases “shot with a thousand hues,” she adds
a sensibility that responds to every breath that passes. “I flutter
like a child after her mother,” is her cry. She likens a bird to a
flower that grows in a garden and has nothing to fear from the storms.
A woman alone is like a wild flower which no one takes care of. She
touches every phase of love from the divine tenderness of girlhood to
the wild passion that shakes the soul, “a wind on the mountains falling
on oaks.” Her words flash and burn with the heart-consuming fire of
her race. The lines in which she entreats the “star-throned Aphrodite”
to have pity on her anguish, glow with a white heat. The swift-winged
doves had brought the fickle goddess once before to soothe her pain
with sweet promises and an immortal smile. Will she not come again and
lift the ache from her tortured soul, and give her what she asks?
The intensity of passion reaches its climax in the ode to Anactoria.
Simple as it is, the vocabulary of “bitter-sweet” emotion is exhausted.
In her most impassioned verses, our own Mrs. Browning does not quite
forget to reflect about her love. She sets it forth in subtly woven
thoughts, and lets it filter through her mind until it takes the
color of it. Sappho sings of passion pure and artless. She does not
think about it, she does not analyze it. It possesses her heart
and imagination, and she tells it so simply, so sincerely, and so
truly, that the familiar story never loses its charm. She sang in the
childhood of the world, when people felt more than they thought, when
love was a sensation, a joy, a passion, a pain, not a sentiment. If she
did not spiritualize her theme, she purified it of the coarseness which
made the love-songs of men, before and afterward, unfit for a delicate
ear. This first touch of a woman in literature was to refine it, though
it was many centuries before she had the power to lead men to take love
from the exclusive domain of the senses and give it a soul.