“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 colour, 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 mænad 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 for ever.”
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
dramatising; 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 humour 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
actually 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 aweary, aweary, 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 is the speaker in the fragments
of Sappho. But, even if we did know, there still 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;
’Tis 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 vagrom 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 Phaon
and the Leucadian leap, and the calumnies of Athenian worldlings in
the comic theatre; let us reject all that Swinburnian 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 Alcæus that she was the “violet-weaving, pure,
sweetly-smiling Sappho.”
Her life as teacher and æsthetic 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 favourite pupil Atthis. 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 Æolian, looked
with horror on a life without poetry and a death unhonoured by song,
writes--
“When thou art dead, thou shalt lie, with none to remember or mourn,
For ever and aye; for thy head no Pierian roses adorn;
But e’en 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
a number of short fragments. Among them is one in the accepted amœbæan
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?
’Twas too far overhead!”