How jealous she could be of her family’s good name! More than once she prays that no dishonor may come to her house. How jealous also of those who sought to win away the love of her girls and of the girls themselves when any of them seemed to have forgotten her! How intensely, too, she could hate, the outbursting passion against the “she-dog” at the close of fragment E 36, which we have translated on [page 20], may serve to suggest. The fierceness of her satire is also incidentally shown in this as well as in other fragments. (See E 35, 37, 71, et al.)
Like Socrates and Shakespeare Sappho had a planetary mind swinging in its orbit with ease through all realms, whether of nature, or human nature, or the divine nature of the unseen world. This need not be elaborated here, save in Sappho’s case. But it may be worth while to repeat some of the evidence as to Sappho’s wide range of thought as it is seen in a few typical instances. She loved the roses, the clover, and the anthrysc. She loved the doves and the nightingales, and knew their colorings and discerned their ways. But the unplucked apple on the top of the topmost bough, the myriad ears of the listening night that hears what the girl across the sea says and relays it right over the waves, the rosy-fingered moon well above the horizon and launching light across the rolling sea and over the fields of flowers, reveal even in the fragments which are “small but roses” how surpassing were her instincts for nature’s loftier meanings as well as its minute details and how exquisite were her comparisons. As for the phases of love—they were her daily business,—and each new couple whose wedding festivities she arranged in song gave her new material. Where in all literature is there a finer example of the union of human love along with insight into the soul of nature than in the ode, To Absent Anactoria? ([See p. 72]).
As we have said, she knew the heart of the Greek bride and her dread at the loss of her free virginity. Mother love, too, was never more exquisitely portrayed than in the song we have quoted on [pp. 27-28]. But the subject of woman’s love for woman is peculiarly her own. The finest lines in all Sappho’s poetry are those descriptive of Anactoria in a poem which we might call Old Love is Best (E. 38, [pp. 82-83 above]).
Finished style, the γλαφυρὸς χαρακτήρ, as the Greek critics called it, simple purity but effective luminosity and exquisite rarity of expression, faultless constraint, fine taste in choosing appropriate subjects, marvellous verbal economy, comprehensive power in single words, fiery passion as well as austerity, richness and beauty, good arrangement of words, assonance, alliteration, consonantal harmonies, lingering vowel music and melody, produced often by the repetition of long vowels, the soft Aeolic quality of the Greek sounds, swift changes of nature and enchanting images, varied metres, but above all else, charm, that greatest characteristic of Sappho so emphasized by the ancients and moderns,—all these qualities she used that her songs and hymns might be perfect. It is this simple natural perfection of her art, like the “nothing too much” of the Parthenon frieze, that makes her untranslatable, even though it is precisely the quality which modern literature lacks but needs. Her nature was so great and her genius so marvellous and her purposes so inexorable that, in attending with her whole soul to her business as the poetic and musical caterer for successive weddings upon an ancient and interesting island, she incidentally made word-music and created thought-images which sounded the depths and scaled the heights of human passion and which winged their way to distant shores. The strains of her songs are beginning to be heard everywhere and are ever growing clearer and sweeter in this present timely century, the century of woman’s exaltation and glorification. Her genius is concisely summed up by Watts-Dunton in his Essay on Poetry, as follows: “Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second.”
In the Lesbus and the Asia Minor of Sappho’s day as in those of Homer, women were at their zenith and were allowed greater freedom in life and speech than in later Athens where woman’s position had reached its nadir, even though literature and art had attained their highest bloom. In Athens women were cabin’d, cribb’d, confined. The more ancient Greeks in general, however, even if their law made the wife the property of her lord and master, appreciated their women and considered them close to the divine, else they would not have appointed them to important priesthoods and other offices and to be interpreters of the desires of the gods and counsellors of their own political troubles. Sappho was a twentieth century woman living in sixth century Lesbus, who could go about town without a chaperon and take part in the most intellectual and religious meetings. Of course she was “ni une sainte ni surtout une prude,” as Reinach says. Rarely is a woman who is interesting a “saint.” Reinach compares her also to Madame de Sévigné, who wrote to her daughter “paroles de feu et de fièvre ... tout pareils à ceux de l’amour.” What with her teaching, with her own writings, and with the executive work of the hetairiai, those ancient Y. W. C. A.’s for the cultivation of poetry and music, which Mackail has so aptly compared with the Courts of Love which existed in Languedoc from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, she was too noble and too busy to be devoted to ignobler ways, falsely ascribed to her. But her love was deeper than that of the schoolgirl in convent, conservatory of music, or literary club. She was no Ruskin-like school-mistress presiding over a group of virtuous but bold young women. She was respectable and respected. There was in her sacred guild under the patronage of Aphrodite “l’étroite et tendre intimité de jeunes filles de bonne naissance entre elles et avec leurs dirigeantes” (Reinach). But we utterly reject to-day the Athenian vaudeville idea of Sappho, who never should have been branded a courtesan.
How the fine radiance Sappho shed on woman’s love for woman and on her love of love and on the glory of pure and honorable marriage shines at last across these twenty-five hundred years! Her figure stands there on her isle. In itself it is white marble veined with gold. Much mud from many lands has been flung against it. For centuries, almost for millenniums, it has been soiled and stained. Even good men have come to think of the stains as integral parts of the statue, and of the gold as base metal. But the winds and rains of time have tired out the soilers and washed the figure white and clean of all Attic and all later defilings. It is all pure marble now, veined with warm gold. Something that suggests the Pygmalion miracle is happening to it. The statue is alive and luminous with its own beauty, grace, and power. Sappho’s poetry deals with the eternal experiences of the human heart and carries with it those touches which make the whole world kin. As T. G. Tucker says: “Love and Sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilisation make little difference.”
And not unhallowed was the page
By wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage
The pangs of vain pursuit;