The few fragments of Sappho which have been preserved are not those which have been spared by the saints or which have been culled for special innocence. They simply happen to be quoted here and there by ancient critics, grammarians, and even lexicographers, to illustrate some æsthetic doctrine, the use of some word, or even some peculiarity of grammar. And no understanding man or woman can read them without feeling that what we find is sheer poetry, sound and true, free from dross in either form or thought. Says Sappho herself, “I love daintiness, and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty of the sun.” To Alcæus, her fellow-countryman and acquaintance, she was the “violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.” To Plato, who judged even art by ethical standards, she is “beautiful and wise.” Her reply to her fellow-poet, when he was too bashful to say something which was in his mind, was this—
“Had your desire been right and good,
Your tongue perplex’d with no bad thought,
With frank eye unabashed you would
Have spoken of the thing you ought.”
To some lover she says—if she is speaking in her own person—
“As friends we’ll part:
Win thee a younger bride;
Too old, I lack the heart
To keep thee at my side.”
Nay, we may go further and say that, after reading and re-reading and translating and commenting on her poems, so far as we possess them, we find her verse full indeed of warmth and colour, full of poignant feeling, but never riotous, always sane, always controlled by the truest sense of art. Obedience to the central Greek motto μηδὲν ἄγαν—“nothing too much”—was never better exemplified. The Greeks would never have set her on such a pedestal if she had been the poetical mænad who seems to exist in the mind of Swinburne, when he writes of her, in that vicious exaggeration of phrase which he too often affects, as—
“Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.”
No writer so lacking in sophrosyne could assert, as Swinburne elsewhere in his finer and truer style makes her assert—
“I Sappho shall be one ...
... with all high things for ever.”
There is not a line of Sappho of which you do not feel that, glow as it may with feeling, it is constructed with such art as—unconscious though it may possibly be—can only be sustained in a mind of perfect sanity.
There is something else which is too often strangely overlooked in judging a poet from his writings alone. It is particularly liable to be forgotten when the writings which have been preserved are but fragments severed from their context. The poet is not always writing in his own person; he is not always revealing his own feelings. He is often dramatising; and his verses then utter the sentiments and passions suited to the character concerned. No one will accept a passage culled from Shakespeare as proof of the ethical views of Shakespeare himself. It may express only the whim of Falstaff, or the snarl of Shylock, or the banter of Benedick, or the melancholy humour of Hamlet. Allowing for all the difference between lyric poetry and dramatic, the lyrist also has his passages in which he is speaking for another. He may be actually writing for another. In Memoriam doubtless represents the heart of Tennyson himself. But suppose posterity to retain but a few fragments of his other works. What shall we say of those who might take the isolated words “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead” as a proof of the settled pessimism of our poet? We know that the speaker was Mariana. We do not always know who is the speaker in the fragments of Sappho. But, even if we did know, there still remains not a verse which betrays the too much, or which passes beyond the pathetic into the reckless, the hysterical, still less the dissolute.