Arthur stringer, novelist and lyric poet, showed versatility and considerable power in imaginative construction when, in 1903, he published a volume of two dramatic poems or soliloquies and one poetic drama, all on classical themes in blank verse; namely, Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia. In these works, however, Stringer was indulging an ‘avocation;’ for his genius is at its best in lyrical verse and prose fiction. Hephaestus and Persephone, even though they are written in blank verse, have all the color, music, and emotion which we associate with lyrical poetry. Sappho in Leucadia, though dramatic in form, is undramatic in movement, and is lyrical in spirit. For at the beginning Sappho, the ‘bird-throated child of Lesbos,’ has resolved to destroy herself by leaping into the sea, and Phaon’s only role is the attempt of a lover to dissuade her, but to no avail. The so-called ‘drama’ is but a series of colloquies between Sappho and Phaon. The only ‘movement’ is a psychological development in three stages—first, the original intention on Sappho’s part to destroy herself; then the arrested intention; and, finally, the intention fulfilled, in spite of Phaon’s pleading, by Sappho leaping to her death.
What Stringer has really done in Sappho in Leucadia is to take a Greek legend and to tell the simple episode of Sappho’s death, in colorful, musical, and artistic blank verse. There is no emotional poignancy in it; nothing for the heart and the moral imagination. It is all for the aesthetic sensibility, for the lover of sensuous imagery and melody. Oddly its single lyrical interlude or ‘song’ is not in ‘Sapphics,’ but is an octave in trimeters. The sensuous beauty of color and music in this quasi-poetic drama is exemplified in the following speech by Sappho:—
For like a god you seemed in those glad days
Of droning wings and languorous afternoons,
When close beside the murmuring sea we walked.
Then did the odorous summer ocean seem
A meadow green where foam one moment flowered
And then was gone, and ever came again,
A thousand bloom-burdened Springs in one!
—How like a god you seemed to me; and I