The Sapphic Secret

SOME subjects never wear out, but, like those broadcloth coats so prized by our grandfathers, keep even their shiny surface nap to the very last. If we think out the matter to its bottom, we shall find that these perennial themes have an honest connection with what is elemental in human nature. We are growing prouder every day, as we continue to add web over web to the cocoon of our ensphering artificiality; but yet we remain the same simple species of worm which, in its early nakedness, spun the matchless gossamers of unconditioned art.

Said a maker of maple syrup to me once: “ The first sap drawn from the tree at the earliest moment of the season is always the best. It has a flavor quite indescribable, suggesting a direct connection with the tree’s most precious and most mysterious life.” I do not give his words, but what I took to be his meaning. Going back to his crude speech, it would be something like this: “ The fust runnin’ is the cream o’ the sap ; ye git it right out’n the root, an’ it tastes jes’ like the spring o’ the year b’iled down an’ squeezed through sugartree wood. It’s ondoubtedly the juliciousest tastin’ stuff in the known world.”

When the Muses first tapped the veins of human passion, away back in the springtime of the world, it was a fragrant and racy tipple that they drew forth. It was better to taste it “ than to lick a honeycomb,” — ἤ μέλι λείχειν, as Theocritus makes his herdsman sing; and, pretend to the contrary as we may, the whole world likes it still. That is, the whole world would like it, were the flagons in which it is kept, those supremely delicate yet indestructible receptacles of the Lesbian vintage, unsealed and placed within the common reach.

But who shall strike the wax of mystery from those priceless amphoræ, and give to the unsophisticated nostrils of the average reader the ravishing bouquet of wine pressed in a garden of Mytilene twenty-five centuries ago ? We spring to the task with enthusiasm, and scrape away the ἄλειϕαρ, the pitch seal, and wrench out the stopper; but who shall share with us the first puff of long-imprisoned fragrance ?

When a neighbor is called in, and a draught is offered him, it is ten to one he fails to detect the distinguishing characteristic of it, and turns with pleasure to something like a glass of California claret. The few, the select coterie,— you and I belong to it, — have always appreciated the indefinable, and have met to discuss it, with this Sapphic tipple shimmering like liquid fire upon the board. We would all be translators,— that is, cup-bearers, — were it possible, and carry from lip to lip around the circle of the world this electrifying philter, the secret of the tenth Muse.

It seems to me that no fascination of mere pedantry can account for the influence exerted by the ancient Greek lyrists over the minds of modern poets. The universal desire to translate has behind it a stronger force than could be generated by a dry school-impulse; for it is not always, perhaps not oftenest, the college man who flies headlong into the flame of the lamp of Hellas and is singed to madness thereby. I knew a young rustic of burly frame, whose head was as large as Webster’s, and he chopped wood in winter and ploughed corn in summer for his livelihood ; but he had found time to study Latin, and was half crazy to turn the Eclogues of Virgil into English verse. There is a wide space between such a lettered hind and a poet like André Chénier; still, it is all the more interesting when we bring the extremes together, for then we know that the circle is complete, and that it measures a universal fascination. It is as if all mankind had joined hands to receive the thrilling shock from a primal and inexhaustible battery.

English poetry, from Chaucer down to Tennyson, acknowledges the lyre, the syrinx, and the flute, and is not ashamed of a “smack of Helicon,” as Lowell somewhere phrases it. Indeed, the master singers of our tongue may be most readily tallied by the Greek sign. Not that they all have been Greek scholars: the influence entered them, mayhap, indirectly, as notably in the case of Shakespeare ; they clutched at second hand, if not at first, the fine substance of Arcadian songsimples, each using them in his own way, as a bee uses what it gathers from flowers.

The Elizabethan poets, at their taverns in Bohemian session, kept the tradition, if not the scholarly study, of Greek poetry alive and active, while in France a succession of lyrists dated song back to the rose gardens of Mytilene and the olive slopes of Ætna, the vineyards round about Teos and the tuneful rivers of Boeotia. But in our day the blight of so-called realism has fallen upon expression to such an extent that one voice is but an echo of all the rest, a bird-organ cry of the commonplace and the usual.

Greek realism was the true realism, beside which the mnch-boasted “ faithfulness to life ” of our Whitmans, our Ibsens, and our Tolstóys is a dirty wash of imitation. The civilization of Greece had for foundation what its poets represented it to have, but is American civilization anchored in what Whitman would have us believe ? The good gray poet looked back with but half-enlightened eyes to the freedom and the heathen sincerity of Homer. Consciously, even self-consciously and with long forethought and training, he tried to be an elementary voice of ancient, unhindered man, and, with a prodigious show of contempt for our enlightenment, proclaimed himself, as of old did Simichidas, “ a burning mouth of the Muses.”

And he much wished to go naked and run races with Pan, or loaf and invite his soul after the example of the pseudoAnakreon.

However, it is not every poet who wills it that can be strong enough to connect himself, through perfect understanding, with a dead civilization, and key his songscore in unison with it. The modern realist always fails, as Whitman did, owing to the difference between original, unconscious nakedness and a belated bluster about “ truthfulness to nature.” Poets like Keats and Tennyson, simply asserting their genius, have joined the old chorus, in a way, without spoiling their modern tone and accent, while those of André Chénier’s ilk have groped in vain for the αὐλός and the tibia, the syrinx and the divine shell, not to be satisfied short of possessing at least the very instrument, τοὐς τρητοὺς δόνακας, offered by Daphnis to the goat-footed god, and unwilling to blow a single note left unsounded by the Arcadian pipers. But what has it mattered that every voluntary effort to reproduce the Greek word-music has failed ? The next genius is sure to try it again, and stick fast in the trap set for him by Aœde.

Now, what is the secret of this unavoidable fascination and this inevitable failure ? Swinburne has attempted to explain it in one of his gorgeous essays, with only the success of demonstrating that mere violence of epithet could not serve his turn. Yet one or two of his phrases must be numbered among the happy, ever memorable flashes which now and again leap from the pen-nib of rare genius. Speaking of Sappho, he says, “ Her verses strike and sting the memory,” and they seem akin to fire and air; ” that they are “ the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.”

While it is true that the writers of Greek middle comedy, those ancient American humorists who, like our own present fun-makers, wanted their food to be all salt, did not agree with the enthusiastic champion of English erotic poetry, still, it is the larger fact that Sappho captured and held thrall the Greek imagination. She was mistress of the world to a greater degree than Homer was master of it; she appealed to men with a stronger fascination than any other lyrist could command, and so great was her power over women that she drew them about her in a school the like of which has never been controlled by any other poet.

Restraint appears to have been considered a hardship not bearable by the biographers of Sappho ; the poet’s divine rage has rendered even the wisdom of counsel lurid and perfervid. The quarrel has been fierce over the question of Sappho’s moral character distinguished from her character as a poet, and has been pushed to a profitless extreme. The simple truth is, we know scarcely anything about her life, and the few facts to be accepted as even probably true, bearing upon the subject, are accessible to every reader, and need not be gone over here.

For my part, I always come to the fragments of Sappho’s poetry expecting to find something new in them, — and I invariably do ; but this novelty seems to steal through and from behind the words. Very often I imagine that a glimpse of the woman, superbly beautiful and divinely gifted, comes out of her phrases, a form seen dimly through Coan silk, ὑδατίνα βράκη, like the English poet’s vision appearing

It is a most tantalizing half revelation.

In taking up this old theme once more, then, it is not to enter the dusty arena of grammar or archæology or philology, nor yet to repeat the meagre facts, and the thrifty conjectures dear to this or that one of the many learned biographers. Let us try to find out what Sappho herself has to say ; for it is this, and but this, that should interest us under the conditions of the record.

A true poet is what his poetry is; that is the artistic view. Genius speaks through what it creates, and the golden fragments of Sappho’s verse are the best biography of the world’s greatest lyrist.

Counting verses and mere scraps of verses, all that we have pretty well identified of Sappho’s poetry would make at the best, if combined, a single poem of about two hundred and twenty lines. The odes, and the probably genuine fragments which are long enough to be of importance from a literary point of view, or chance to contain a complete artistic stroke, are, as I select them, thirty-four in number. Other fragments are interesting on a minor account, and may be mentioned incidentally ; but mainly to the two dozen and ten must we look for the key to the Sapphic Secret. Two of these are doubtfully attributed to Sappho, namely, fragments 26 and 120.

The Ode to Aphrodite is the only complete poem of Sappho’s that time has spared to us, — one, but a masterpiece, almost overrich in its ripe and strangely racy maturity and its tropical intensity of conception and expression. It is surpassed, however, I think, by the Ode to Anactoria, the most perfect, even in its fragmentary or truncated state, of all erotic poems. These two pieces, the first made up of twenty-eight lines, the second of seventeen, the last two lines of the second being fragmentary, offer at the outset a study of the poet’s incomparable “ verbal economy,” as Mr. Watts, in his article on Poetry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, has so aptly named it. Here the amazing power of Greek words as words is shown in such a way that phrases, like ripe fruit clusters, seem bursting with a rich juice of passionate meaning. Let us try to examine, and if possible dissect, some of these word wonders, so that what is vaguely known as “ popular intelligence ” may grasp somewhat of their captivating secret.

Alcæus called Sappho a pure violetweaver, ἱόπλοκ᾿ ἄγνα Σάπϕοι; and if he referred to her mastery of color-purity in song, it was a happy comparison. The very first word of the first ode suggests a tapestry of priceless and fadeless dyes, — ποικιλόθρον᾿ ἀθάνατ᾿ Ἀϕρόδιτα. It sets before the Greek mind a throne draped in embroidered cloth, the handiwork of an absolute master, many-colored, the hues divinely approved, and harmoniously blended into some matchless pattern of beauty. Our language has no word with which to translate it, nor yet any rhythmic combination of words that will paraphrase it.

is Sir Edwin Arnold’s attempt to render the whole line ; but “ splendor-throned ” leaves out the woven colors. Colonel Higginson is content with “ beautifulthroned,” and “ star-throned ” satisfied John Addington Symonds. Swinburne, essaying to surprise the poet, and take her secret unawares, tried this splendid paraphrase:—

The reader to whom Greek is a sealed fountain must feel as readily as the profoundest Greek scholar that here is a single word baffling the genius of four men known all over the world as, in differing ways and degrees, masters of expression.

In the second ode, the phrase χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας is translated by John Herman Merivale “ grassy pale.” Symonds tries “ paler than grass in autumn,” and Swinburne “ paler than grass in summer.”

Here again is the despair of the wouldbe translators. The word χλωροτέρα has a compound meaning : it describes a plant’s greenness fading into the pallor of decay, the vernal hue of foliage disappearing and leaving the lush greenery sallow and wan ; and its force of comparison in connection with TTOUX-S, grass, gives it the further meaning “ more grass-fadish than faded grass that is, more like the sallow wanness of faded grass than the color of faded grass itself. But Sappho uses the whole phrase as an adjective descriptive of herself under the blanching and jaundicing strain of an imperious emotion. It tells how the splendor and color, the vigor and abounding life, of a fresh and joyous youth suddenly give way to a living death of jealousy and despair. “All flesh is as grass,” πᾰσα σὰρξ ὡς χόρτος, is the apostle’s expression, where χόρτος stands for fresh-cut grass not yet cured into hay. This phrase is perfectly translatable word for word, while Sappho’s finest meaning eludes every possible stroke of betrayal. I can think of no more striking contrast than is here projected between a realistic and an idealistic mode of expression. “ All flesh is like green hay ; ” that is, it must shortly wither and be consumed. The comparison is a direct physical measurement of one thing by another. But in Sappho’s words lurk a whole swarm of physical, spiritual, and sensuous suggestions, all correlated, and shading off from densest substance into the most tenuous and filmy spiritual allusion. The apostle hits us plump with a bullet of gross truth; the poet thrills us with a strain of haunting music which comes along like a flash of woven splendor-rays.

By her marvelous art in the linking together of words Sappho makes them her own, seems to invent them or give them an omnipotent energy. The incomparable realism of Theocritus when he speaks of the grayish, ash-brown cicadas in the summer trees as αἰθαλίωνες, burnt and smoked to a cinder color by basking in the sun, is but superficial when compared with Sappho’s ἐπιπορϕύρει (fragment 94), by which she describes — “ paints ” is the better word — the darkening change of purple color which takes place in the petals of a hyacinth that has been trampled under the feet of shepherds on a hilltop. Take the petal of a blue violet and crush it between your fingers; you will see the change to opaque purple. But Sappho is not content with mere realism ; she makes the spiritual connection by using the whole phrase adjectively to suggest the change from the flower-flush of happiness to the dusky gloom of sadness after the heart is trampled upon. Theocritus was often enough artlessly true to the very facts of nature, and set them forth with absolutely sincere dramatic directness. Sappho was just as true, just as sincere, just as direct, with the added force of incomparable art, — an art that could flood a phrase, or even a single word, with the concentrated riches and splendors of a whole dramatic situation. She made words reciprocate; forced them to borrow and lend, empty shades of elusive meaning into one another, light up one another’s remote nooks, focus their colors into dazzling iris centres of beauty, passion, and charm.

In fragment 4 this art of verbal squeezing, so that the meaning of one word gushes out into that of another, like musty juice, so to speak, is carried to the furthest, and yet the passage is a piece of simple and apparently artless description : —

I translate this into prose as best I can: “ Coolness steals all around through the apple boughs, and down the shimmering foliage a drowsiness settles gently. The dry grammarian will laugh at my rendering ; but it is literally what Sappho meant. In her words, however, is inclosed the dreamy sense of summer in a breezy, slumbrous apple orchard, like the purple juice in a cluster of ripe grapes. Theocritus describes much the same conditions with his παντ᾿ ὦσδεν θἐρος μάλα πίονος, ὦσδε ὀπὠρας, — “ All breathed the odor of rich, fruity summer time.” But here again Theocritus thrusts forth only the beautiful fact, while Sappho makes her meaning include a spiritual condition, the drowsy dream of the soul, induced by the coolness, the leaf rustle, and the slumber-bearing weather.

Matthew Arnold has denied that the Greek poets have the magic of expression which belongs to Western genius; but it seems to me that just what he called magic is to be found doubly distilled in some of these pathetic “ stray gusts of Sapphic song,” and in a few of the happiest flute-scores of Theocritus and some haunting chord fragments of the true Anakreon. There is not a single line of all that Shakespeare wrote which, if left to stray alone through twenty-five centuries, could give the human soul a finer thrill than fragment 33 :

Indeed I loved thee once, O Atthis, long ago. Our English words do not carry the undertone of that backward cry through the darkness of dead years ; they barely suggest it.

Here is a bundle of the fragments, with what seems to me their meaning in English: —

(Frag. 40.)

Οῖον τὸ γλνκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾿ ῠσδῳ
ἄκρον ἐπ᾿ ἀκροτάτῳ᾿ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾿, ἀλλ᾿ οὐκ εδύναντ᾿ ἐπίκεσθαι.

(Frag. 93.)

As the sweet apple, red a-blush on the top spray of the tree,
The tipmost top, that the gatherers failed to see;
Nay, saw, but could not touch, and so let he.

(Frag. 94.)

(Frag. 103.)

(Frag. 52.)

(Frag, 95.)

O Evening, thou dost bring, what bright morn sent wandering,
The errant goat, the straying sheep, the child in mother’s breast to sleep.

But the English phrasing is pale, sapless, and unsuggestive of that element in the Sapphic equation which in almost every word of the original is subtly personal and magically appealing.

Fragment 109 has a haunting plangency of movement, and a pathos that returns again and again, like a mournful echo : —

So fragment 39 carries a note almost beyond the reach of suggestion in English :

The tender, love - burdened and joysweetened cry of the song-bird in spring is expressed in absolute terms by the compound word ἰμερόϕωνος; it is the voice of elemental, unsophisticated desire. I never read that line without thinking of the mocking-birds in May among the blooming haw boskets and wild plum thickets of Georgia.

Sappho had the true song-bird’s voice, — the seeking, calling voice of absolute, initial longing, the cry of pristine passion. “ Desire,” connected with love in its purest and highest human sense, was the key-word of her song. We need not pause to inquire whether, living in an age of hideous moral laxity, she was a bad or a good woman. Her song is not evil in its substance nor vicious in its essence. Her love-desire was that of a burning, music-charmed genius, full of health and vigor, wandering in the springtime groves of song. I have found it interesting to group together her phrases containing this key-word “ desire : ” — γελαίσας ἰμερόεν.

Here we have the laughter of desire ; the desiring heart; good-desiring, — that is, a pure love-impulse ; a desireful face, in connection with beauty; and the desire-burdened voice of a bird in spring. This note of longing is not a coarse cry of lust, as the fleshly school of critics and poets would have us believe, but a fine human utterance in behalf of the noblest natural, elemental impulse. Sappho, whatever may have been her attitude as a Lesbian woman living some six hundred years before Christ, was, in her poetry, so far as what we have of it goes, a true woman, singing freely the deepest and sweetest as well as the strongest and most burning secrets of woman’s heart. She sings the mother and the child, the groom and the bride, the bird in the grove, the maiden’s tender dream of love beside her loom, a child girl golden-fair, the love of delicacy, flowers, beautiful colors, the rustic girl and her clever artfulness, a sweetvoiced maiden, her girl friends, as well as the pain and stress and overmastering clutch of love and jealousy and longing and despair. But her key-word is one that belongs exclusively to women, — a word meaning more than our word “longing,” and bearing a more spiritual allusion to love than our word “ desire.” She was not sentimental, but she was a gorgeous fountain of sentiment; beyond this, her music and her colors and her masterly command of sympathy make her verse strangely captivating.

A poet once said to me that Sappho’s poetry always seemed to startle immemorial echoes in his mind, and held him breathlessly expectant of some miraculous revelation. It looks to one who reads as if all the poets had felt this curious effect of the fragments, which so often just reach the line of cleavage between tantalizing suggestion and the full explosion of discovery. What it is that one expects and seems just on the point of realizing is not what is so persistently iterated and reiterated in the Anakreontics, not what the shallower harp sounds monotonously as its only phrase, — ἔρωτα μοῦνον ἠχεῖ, — but some immanent, soulpervading, and final expression of human love loosed within by a supreme voice, the far overpassed imerophone, thrilling the ancient sphere with unimaginable melody.

Each master poet has this precious secret of a haunting reserve, this remote, alluring suggestiveness beyond all words ; but none like Sappho. Each true genius swings a colored lantern with magic effect across our track, and its light is always characteristic and individual, with a signal flash exclusively its own. Sappho’s light is that of absolute, universal womanhood. She knew herself, her sex, and her power ; and it is this womanly knowledge, informed with a genius never yet surpassed, that brims her words with imperishable fascination.

Ἀστέρων παντων ὁ κάλιστος.

Maurice Thompson.