No More Learning

Every one who reads acknowledges her fame, concedes her supremacy; but to
all except poets and Hellenists her name is a vague and uncomprehended
splendour, rising secure above a persistent mist of misconception. In spite
of all that is in these days being written about Sappho, it is perhaps not
out of place now to inquire, in a few words, into the substance of this
supremacy which towers so unassailably secure from what appear to be such
shadowy foundations.

First, we have the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height
of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric
poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life.
Among the _Molic_ peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried
to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of
assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate,
minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity,
imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the
fixed forms and restricted measures. The very metropolis of this lyric
realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples,
the sunlit silver of the fountains, the hyacinth gardens by a soft blue
sea, Beauty and Love in their young warmth could fuse the most rigid forms
to fluency. Here Sappho was the acknowledged queen of song--revered,
studied, imitated, served, adored by a little court of attendants and
disciples, loved and hymned by Alcaeus, and acclaimed by her fellow
craftsmen throughout Greece as the wonder of her age. That all the tributes
of her contemporaries show reverence not less for her personality than for
her genius is sufficient answer to the calumnies with which the ribald
jesters of that later period, the corrupt and shameless writers of Athenian
comedy, strove to defile her fame. It is sufficient, also, to warrant our
regarding the picturesque but scarcely dignified story of her vain pursuit
of Phaon and her frenzied leap from the Cliff of Leucas as nothing more
than a poetic myth, reminiscent, perhaps, of the myth of Aphrodite and
Adonis--who is, indeed, called Phaon in some versions. The story is further
discredited by the fact that we find no mention of it in Greek literature--
even among those Attic comedians who would have clutched at it so eagerly
and given it so gross a turn--till a date more than two hundred years after
Sappho's death. It is a myth which has begotten some exquisite literature,
both in prose and verse, from Ovid's famous epistle to Addison's gracious
fantasy and some impassioned and imperishable dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne;
but one need not accept the story as a fact in order to appreciate the
beauties which flowered out from its coloured unreality.

The applause of contemporaries, however, is not always justified by the
verdict of after-times, and does not always secure an immortality of
renown. The fame of Sappho has a more stable basis.
Her work was in the
world's possession for not far short of a thousand years--a thousand years
of changing tastes, searching criticism, and familiar use. It had to endure
the wear and tear of quotation, the commonizing touch of the school and the
market-place. And under this test its glory grew ever more and more
conspicuous. Through those thousand years poets and critics vied with one
another in proclaiming her verse the one unmatched exemplar of lyric art.
Such testimony, even though not a single fragment remained to us from which
to judge her poetry for ourselves, might well convince us that the
supremacy acknowledged by those who knew all the triumphs of the genius of
old Greece was beyond the assault of any modern rival. We might safely
accept the sustained judgment of a thousand years of Greece.

Fortunately for us, however, two small but incomparable odes and a few
scintillating fragments have survived, quoted and handed down in the
eulogies of critics and expositors. In these the wisest minds, the greatest
poets, and the most inspired teachers of modern days have found
justification for the unanimous verdict of antiquity. The tributes of
Addison, Tennyson, and others, the throbbing paraphrases and ecstatic
interpretations of Swinburne, are too well known to call for special
comment in this brief note; but the concise summing up of her genius by Mr.
Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so convincing and
illuminating that it seems to demand quotation here: "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. "

The poems of Sappho so mysteriously lost to us seem to have consisted of at
least nine books of odes, together with _epithalamia_, epigrams,
elegies, and monodies. Of the several theories which have been advanced to
account for their disappearance, the most plausible seems to be that which
represents them as having been burned at Byzantium in the year 380 Anno
Domini, by command of Gregory Nazianzen, in order that his own poems might
be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved. Of
the efficacy of this act no means of judging has come down to us.

In recent years there has arisen a great body of literature upon the
subject of Sappho, most of it the abstruse work of scholars writing for
scholars. But the gist of it all, together with the minutest surviving
fragment of her verse, has been made available to the general reader in
English by Mr. Henry T.