From the time of the Schemata Musica printed in Volger’s edition of 1810, down to the music published by G. Cipollini in 1890 in his brother’s Saffo, many have put Sappho’s songs to music. Even in the last few years many have tried their hand at the task. Perhaps the most successful music, with a real touch of the old Greek flavor, is that which was composed by Professor Stanley for several of Sappho’s fragments in connection with Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske’s stage presentation of Percy Mackaye’s Sappho and Phaon. This has been reprinted this year in a general treatment of Greek music by Professor Stanley of the University of Michigan. The selections published include “Builders, Build the Roof-Beam High, Hymenaeon”; “Gath’rers, What Have We Forgot, Hymenaeon!”; “What shall we do, Cytherea?”; “Hollow Shell, Horny Shell”; “Akoue, Poseidon”; “Hesper, Eleleu”, etc. Miss Pearl C. Wilson, of Miss Chandor’s School in New York, a former student of Professor Perry of Columbia University, without making any pretense of reproducing the ancient music has composed musical accompaniments for several of the odes and also of the new fragments, which have been sung with much success. She tried to illustrate the metre of each fragment, but found it more satisfactory to write the music without the modern division into bars and rests, simply indicating the long and short syllables by notes of different values. This makes possible a lyric delivery of the poems, each line determined solely by the words and their meaning. In that way the simple melodies as expressions of the thought gain a great deal when sung. I can testify from my own public experiments in readings from Sappho that her fragments can be much better recited or chanted when accompanied by music, as I am convinced they were originally.
XIII. EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION
I venture to hope that out of all I have written in the preceding pages some fairly clear idea of Sappho may have emerged. Yet the discussion has had to wander widely through literature which has, indeed, been influenced strongly by her name but journeys far from the Lesbian lyrist herself. In closing this study it may be well, therefore, to return to the woman and the poet and add some final words.
The fragments of many other ancient poets have been collected for merely scholastic reasons, but Sappho’s literary remains are more than antique specimens. They constitute a great and noble literature and some of the latest found are among the best. They often rank as highly as the completed poems of other writers—surely an unparalleled phenomenon. In them we recognize the creator’s genius as clearly as in a fragmentary torso of Phidias we see the sculptor’s art in every chiselled line. While we miss the fullness of her life, we can restore her figure because the fragments are “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.” Nearly every line of them has been imitated, dilated or diluted, and, disgraceful to say, many who have drunk of her living water have poisoned it into stagnant and salacious slime. There is nothing like this in the history of literature. Higginson in 1871 summarized the case:
“What other woman played such a part in moulding the great literature that has moulded the world? Colonel Mure thinks that a hundred such women might have demoralized all Greece. But it grew demoralized at any rate; and even the island where Sappho taught took its share in the degradation. If, on the other hand, the view taken of her by more careful criticism be correct, a hundred such women might have done much to save it. Modern nations must again take up the problem where Athens failed and Lesbos only pointed the way to the solution,—to create a civilization where the highest culture shall be extended to woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern life culminate, like the greatest of modern poems, in the elevation of womanhood. ‘Die ewige Weibliche zieht uns hinan.’”
Sappho, then, was a pure and good woman, busily and successfully engaged in the work of her chosen profession. She was a teacher of singing and dancing and the technique of poetry, and to give her pupils the finest models she applied herself so seriously to the lyric art that she reached a perfection in it to which no other classic poet attained. If she ever collected her verse it was only to promote the idealization of marriage pageants, and not with the purpose of publishing a full edition of her songs. It would not be safe to deny that there was a practically useful collection of Sappho’s songs in the archives of her school or guild or in the Temple of Aphrodite, but no copies were sold at the book-stalls in her own day as certainly was later the case in fifth century Athens.
Sappho, in fact, must be listed with two other names which, taken together, form a unique and astonishing group, a group whose peculiar and distinguishing feature is that their enduring thoughts and imperishable words were indispensable necessities in their life-work rather than productions as literature for the sake of literature. It is not because of the accidental alliteration that we rank Sappho with Socrates and Shakespeare. These great exemplars of song, ethics, and drama, respectively, were alike in that it was not by their intention that their works became literature. Shakespeare as a theatrical manager was obliged by his position to write plays that would attract audiences. He was compelled by his genius to make those dramas imperishable. But if he had had his way none of them would ever have been printed. Our gratitude must be given to prompters’ copies and to literary thieves. Socrates was a teacher whose purely oral lessons his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, committed to writing that the master’s inspiring thoughts might not die.
Socrates’ love for his young disciples was a love passing the love of women. The myriad-minded man of Stratford,—“Gentle Will,” as his comrades called him,—had an affectionate sympathy with all sorts and conditions of his fellow-men. Sappho’s love for her girl friends was so intense that there are those who, not knowing how passionate the love of woman can be for woman, still fail, despite the evidence, to recognize a love more sublime even than that for man.