Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

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.

II

But it is not alone as a singer that Sappho has come down to us. She was the leader of an intellectual movement among women that was without a parallel in classic times. We may greet her as not only the first of woman poets, but as the founder of the first “woman’s club” known to us. It is not certain that it had either a constitution or by-laws, and it discussed poetry and esthetics instead of science and social economics. But the measure of the intellect is not so much what we discuss as the quality of thought we bring into the discussion. It is easy enough to talk platitudes about literature or philosophy, and not so easy as one might imagine to talk wisely and well about poetry, or manners, or the art of living; and it is easier to do any of these things than it is to write what is worth talking about. The women who came to Sappho from the isles of the Ægean and the far hills of Greece seem to have been more intent upon writing poems than talking about them. There is no trace of brilliant conversation, or critical papers, or gathered sheaves of the knowledge that comes so freely under our own hand. Unfortunately, there was no secretary in this primitive club to take notes for posterity, or, if there was, the records have been lost. We know little of its sayings, though there are scattered traces of its doings. A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,—a verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,—and that is all. Even these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual side. Of the quality of its work we cannot judge, as there is little of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners. When they married, she wrote their bridal odes. These she sang with the lyre, and one of her minor claims to fame was her invention of the plectrum, which brought out the full resources of this instrument. For Timas, who died unmarried, she wrote a touching elegy, which was sung at her tomb by the maidens, who cut off their curls as a token of sorrow.

The most gifted of Sappho’s friends was Erinna, who died at nineteen, leaving among other things a poem of three hundred verses, which was said to deserve a place beside the epics of Homer. She sang of the sorrows of a maiden whose mother compelled her to spin when she wished to serve the Muses. There is also a tradition that she wrote an epitaph for a companion of “birth and lineage high,” who died on her wedding day, and “changed bridal songs to sound of sob and tear.” She was thought to surpass her teacher in hexameters. Sappho reproved her for being so scornful, and this is all the trait we have of this precocious child of genius, who preferred poetry to spinning. Her own epitaph speaks for itself:

These are Erinna’s songs; how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years.
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equaled hers?

The only thing about Andromeda of which we are sure is that she dressed badly. “What woman ever charmed thy mind who wore a graceless dress, or did not know how to draw her garments about her ankles?” says Sappho to this formidable rival who stole away from her the fickle heart of Atthis. Of the brilliant Gorgo she grew tired. It is supposed that these two were at the head of other clubs or schools. Damophyla wrote a hymn to Artemis, the patron goddess of pure-souled maidens, which was modeled after Sappho and had great praise in its day, but no fragment of it is left.