Part 2

“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 Erinna and Atthis and Anactoria resembled those of Socrates with the young men Alcibiades and Charmides and Phædrus. But it has apparently not been also pointed out as a parallel that, three centuries later, there similarly gathered about the _maître_ Philêtas, 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 humours 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 on 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 Æolian 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 _Ecclesiazusæ_, or “_Women in Parliament_,” to find scandalous comedy in the _Précieuses_ 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 unco’ guid 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 unco’ guid, have carried on the wrong in a different way, and, for example, the title _Sapho_ of Daudet’s sketch of _mœurs 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 æsthetic 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 Alcæus, 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 perplex’d 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 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!”

Reply the men--

“The hyacinth so sweet On the hills where the herdsmen go Is trampled ’neath 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 odours and sweet sounds--pervades all that is left of her. The Queen of Love sits on a richly-coloured 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 _trouvères_, or of Chaucer, for the daisy, and of the balladist for the season when the “shaws 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 a number of scraps and lines. So far as we possess even these we have to thank ancient critics, such as Aristotle, Dionysius, and Longinus, writers of miscellanies, such as Plutarch and Athenæus, or grammarians like Hephæstion. We have also to thank those modern scholars, and particular Bergk, 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 recognisable 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 splendour 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 marvellous 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 Mitylene 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 skilful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did more than imitate; they plagiarised, 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 sitteth 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 breaks; all o’er I tremble, pale as death; nay more, I seem almost to die.”

When after this we read in the _Phèdre_ 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 recognise their source. We recognise, also, if it were not already confessed, the source of this of Tennyson in his _Fatima_:

“Last night, when some one 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 colour 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 fairly 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 sae kindly, Had we never loved sae 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 bist wie eine Blume So hold und schön und rein: Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.”

Near as English is to German, incomparably more easy 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 _Kubla Khan_, or like Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee”? The case is exactly the same when we turn to a Greek lyric. Alcæus 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 have to be hunted for. The Greek lyric spirit would therefore have loved the best of Burns and would have recognised 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-throned 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, throned 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, throned 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 mid air 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 ail’d me, what might mean That call of mine. ‘What would’st thou have, with heart on fire, Sappho?’ thou saidst. ‘Whom pray’st thou me To win for thee to fond desire? Who wrongeth 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 in regard to 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 civilisation make little difference. But those touches are only weakened by far-sought words and elaborate metres, 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--