Part 3

“High and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted.”

In the case of songs whose theme is what Sappho calls the “bitter sweet” of love, their proper style has been determined by the gathering consensus of humanity, and it is a style simple but powerful, with a magic recurring in cadences easy to grasp and too affecting to forget. It is the style of “Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,” not of the Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day. Sappho’s songs fulfil all the conditions, and even of her fragments that is true which her imitator Horace said of her completer poems, as he more happily possessed them--

“Still breathes the love, still lives the fire Imparted to the Lesbian’s lyre.”

The virtue of Sappho is supreme art without artificiality, utter truth to natural feeling wedded to words of utter truth. Let Pausanias, that ancient Baedeker, declare that “concerning love Sappho sang many things which are inconsistent with one another.” She is only the more truthful therefor. No human heart, frankly enjoying or suffering the “bitter-sweet” moods and experiences of love, ever was consistent. Consistency belongs only to the cool and calculating brain. If love is cool and calculating, it is not love.

How much Sappho may have written on other subjects than this, the most engrossing of all, we shall perhaps never know. But we may be sure that one of the most priceless poetical treasures lost to the world has been those other verses which, to quote Shelley on Keats, told of--

“All she had loved, and moulded into thought From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound.”

There is, we may add, one quality besides beauty in verse which can never be analysed. It is charm. Sappho is pervaded with charm. And this suggests that we may conclude by quoting the judgment of Matthew Arnold upon one defect at least which must make Heine rank always lower than Sappho:--

“Charm is the glory which makes Song of the poet divine; Love is the fountain of charm. How without charm wilt thou draw, Poet! the world to thy way? Not by thy lightnings of wit-- Not by thy thunder of scorn! These to the world, too, are given; Wit it possesses and scorn-- Charm is the poet’s alone.”

THE ST. ABBS PRESS, LONDON

Transcriber’s Note

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.