Sappho and the Vigil of Venus/Introduction
INTRODUCTION.
The fame of Sappho, as the greatest poetess of all time, rests mainly on tradition, which for us moderns is confirmed by one complete poem, two incomplete ones, and over 170 fragments, one consisting of six lines, ten of four, seven of three, twenty-seven of two, and the rest of not more than one line, sometimes of only one word. No other poet inherits such great fame on so slight a foundation. Yet none is, by universal consent, more incontestably pre-eminent in his sphere.
It is remarkable that, were it not for quotations by writers on style, grammarians and lexicographers, not a line of hers would have survived to our times. Yet her poems were still extant till well on in the Christian Era. They seem, from accounts which have come down to us, to have been systematically hunted out and destroyed in an outburst of fanatical religious zeal kindled by medieval ecclesiastics. Scaliger even places their destruction as late as 1073 A.D., when bonfires were made at Rome and Constantinople of the poems of Sappho and other "heathen singers," under Pope Gregory VII. Hence the men of old who were so unanimous in praise of her were writing for readers who could perfectly estimate the value of their opinion; and we find no evidence that it was ever challenged. As Homer was called par excellence "the Poet," so Sappho was styled "the Poetess." Plato gives her a place among the intellectual giants whom he names "the Wise." Plutarch says the recital of her poems cast a spell of enchantment over an audience, and adds that while he read them, to touch the wine-cup seemed a profanation. Writers in the Greek Anthology acclaim her as The Tenth Muse, Daughter of Eros and Aphrodite, the Pride of Hellas, the Companion of Apollo, the Flower of the Graces. Aristotle says that the Lesbians so gloried in her, that "woman as she was," they stamped her image on their coins, just as other peoples set the heads of gods and goddesses on theirs. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the famous writer on literary style, quotes a poem of hers (the "Hymn to Aphrodite") as an example of absolute perfection in technique, in mastery of the music of verse: "the language," he says, "ripples softly and smoothly along, the words seem to nestle together, to be interwoven by natural affinities."
Longinus, in his "Treatise on the Sublime," quotes the Second Ode in this collection as an amazing revelation of the interaction of the soul and the mortal frame under love's overwhelming passion. Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus and Tiberius, in his Geography, says of the island of Lesbos "Here flourished Sappho, who was something wonderful; never within the memory of man has any woman been known who could in the least degree be compared to her for poetic genius."
It seems almost superfluous to quote the opinions of modern poets and critics, who possess but a few gems out of a vast treasure-hoard. How great it was we may infer from the record that nine books of her lyric odes were known to the ancients, that she was the chief acknowledged writer of Epithalamia, or Marriage Songs, that her Hymns of Invocation to various deities are mentioned with special praise, and that she wrote many epigrams and elegies.
The manuscript in which the recently discovered ode "To Anactoria" (the last in this collection) was found bears the tantalizing title "The First Book of the Lyrics of Sappho, 1,332 lines"—of which but fragments remain! Yet from the long roll of great names we will venture to quote three of our writers who have testified to her glory. Addison wrote: "Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry . . . her works are filled with bewitching tenderness and rapture." J. Addington Symonds says: "The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been. Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literature, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and illimitable grace." Swinburne confessed that he despaired of adequately translating her. Of his attempt at an expanded paraphrase (in "Anactoria") of some fragments of her poems, he exclaimed "No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work. It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her . . . her verses seem akin to fire and air, being themselves 'air and fire'; other element there is none in them."
Sappho was a native of the island of Lesbos: she lived towards the close of the seventh and early part of the sixth centuries B.C. She was contemporaneous with, in Hebrew history, the days just preceding the Babylonian Captivity; in Greek history, the time of Solon; in Roman history, the first of the Tarquins. Her father died when she was a child; her mother, whose name was Kleïs, may have survived to the days of her fame. She had two brothers, of whom Larichus was public cupbearer of the city of Mitylene, and, as this office could only be held by high-born youths, it follows that Sappho's family belonged to the aristocracy. Her second brother, Charaxus, has a romantic history. He sailed to Egypt, his merchandise being the celebrated Lesbian wine, and there saw a girl of surpassing loveliness, who, having been probably kidnapped by pirates, had been sold into slavery. He ransomed her at a heavy price, and made her, the world-famed Rhodopis (or Doriche, as Sappho names her in a poem), his wife, though afterwards it was said that she made merchandise of her beauty, and became very wealthy. Some Greek writers asserted that it was she who built one of the pyramids, herein confusing her with another Rhodopis, a name given to the Egyptian queen Nitocris, of whom the "golden slipper" story was told, which has survived in our nursery-legend of Cinderella. Unhappily, the poetess excited her brother's resentment by her objection to his connection with this frail beauty, and found it no easy task to appease him.[1]
If we are to conclude that all her poems in which she speaks in the first person express her own personal experience—a theory which would land us in some queer conclusions if we applied it, say, to Burns—not only was Sappho's mother living in the days of her fame, but she had a daughter named after her mother, Kleïs, a very fair, sweet and dear maiden.
The beauty of the women of Lesbos was early sung by Homer, and Sappho was dowered with no small share of it. A poet in the Greek Anthology sings how her starry eyes reflected her genius, and compares the beauty of her face to that of Aphrodite.
As to Alcaeus the poet's love for her, and her love for Phaon, and her despairing leap from the Leucadian Rock to a death in the sea, because that love was unrequited—these stories are rejected by the learned as the inventions of later romancers.
The Aeolian ladies of Lesbos were like those of the court of our Queen Elizabeth, intellectual and cultured. They formed clubs among themselves for the cultivation of poetry and music; and the most famous of these aesthetic coteries gathered round Sappho.
Readers who know something of the passionate attachments between girls at school and college, of their adoration for each other and their teachers, will not think it strange that we find evidence in these poems of similar links of love between Sappho and some of her girl-students, that we find records of rapturous happiness, of adoring worship, of burning reproaches, passioning and thrilling through these immortal lines. Human nature has not changed in five-and-twenty centuries. Disraeli, in Coningsby, wrote: "At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after life can never bring its rapture or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase—a school-friendship!" Those words might have been penned by one who had been listening to the echoes that have pealed down the corridors of time from those halls where gathered the girl-friends of Sappho.
But in after-ages, when nameless vices became rife in Greece, and when the days of intellectual queens at Lesbos were no more, and the degraded daughters of that island had won an evil pre-eminence of wantonness; then coarse-minded comic writers, for whom pure love between persons of the same sex—as of David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Tennyson and Arthur Hallam—was inconceivable, attributed their own foul imaginings to those fair and sweet women of a golden age. They cast the filth gendered in their own souls upon the robes of Sappho—these wallowers in foulness who thought that they could defile the stars with bespatterings from their sties!
- ↑ Among recent discoveries in Egypt is a fragment containing one of her attempts at reconciliation.