SAPPHO AND THE FIRST WOMAN’S CLUB
· Golden Age of Lyric Poetry ·
· The Mythical and the Real Sappho ·
· Her Poems ·
· Contrast with Hebrew Singers ·
· Poet of Nature and Passion ·
· The First Woman’s Club ·
· Æolian and Doric Poetesses ·
· Honors to the Genius of Hellenic Women ·
A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist, singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal—all this was the Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its finest representative. Before her no woman had appeared in a distinctly literary rôle, so far as we know. To-day she still stands supreme in her own field.
This “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho,” who sang so divinely, and vanished so theatrically from Leucadia’s “rock of woe,” was long veiled in the mists of romance. The tragical muse pictured in flowing draperies, with a crown of laurel on her head and a lyre in her hand, chanting her swan-song before cooling her heart of flame in the blue sea at her feet, was as intangible to us as one of Fra Angelico’s angels. She looked out of a land of mystery and shadows, with nothing human about her save that she loved, and suffered, and died. “Do thou, gentle Love, place wings beneath me as I fall, that I may not be the reproach of the Leucadian waves,” is her pathetic prayer, and here she fades from our sight.
But it has been fairly settled that this romantic story was a dream; that Phaon was only a mythical Adonis; that Sappho did not follow him across the sea, did not die of love, and never took the fatal leap at all. The sentimental tourist who sighs over her melancholy fate to-day, as he passes the bare white cliffs of Santa Maura, so long consecrated to tragedies of love and sorrow, pays his sympathetic tribute to a phantom. She went to Sicily, it seems, but not for love. It is supposed that she was exiled. There were political conspiracies for which men were banished, and she may have written revolutionary songs. Possibly she held too radical opinions on the privileges of her sex. But all this is the purest surmise. In any case, her offense could not have been a grave one, as she returned in a few years to Mytilene, where she was adored by a fickle public as the glory of her native city, and honored with altars and temples after her death. Her face was stamped upon coins—“though she was a woman,” said Aristotle. The outlines are clear and strong, with the virile quality so marked in most statues of Greek women. She was also represented, with Alcæus, on a vase of the next century, as not only beautiful, but tall and stately.
A thousand years afterward a statue of her is said to have been one of the ornaments of the gymnasium at Byzantium. But coin and bust and statue give us many faces. Which was the real one? We are more familiar with the ideal Sappho in the modern portrait in which Alma-Tadema has so subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her eloquent eyes.
But recent critics tell us that even her beauty was a fiction of the imagination. Does she not say of herself, in the burning lines of Ovid, that she was brown and of low stature, though her name filled all lands? Or was it the sweet humility of love that made her own attractions seem to her slender and insufficient? She had been dead six hundred years or so when Ovid wrote, and his knowledge could not have been infallible.
Men of her own time called her the “beautiful Sappho,” the “flower of the graces,” and Greek standards of beauty included height and stateliness. Perhaps they were under the magic spell of her genius, and indulged in glowing figures of speech. At all events, modern scholars are more literal, and they have mostly decided that she was a small, dark woman, of noble birth, who was early left a widow with one fair daughter, “Cleïs, the beloved, with a form like a golden flower.” This was also the name of her own mother. One of her brothers held the honorable office of cup-bearer; the other went to Egypt, and, much to the displeasure of his gifted sister, married a woman of more charms than discretion, for whom he had paid a large ransom. This famous beauty of Naucratis became very rich, and, possibly by way of atonement for her sins, made a generous offering at the temple of Delphi. It was even said that she immortalized herself by building the third pyramid; but these tales, whether true or not, have been relegated to the region of myths. We learn from Sappho herself that she quarreled with her brother on account of this mésalliance. These are scant materials on which to base a life, but they include about all the facts we have of
That mighty songstress, whose unrivaled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers.
We do not even know when or where or how she died, though epitaphs in the strain of these flattering and prosaic lines are numerous.
If her personality is veiled to us, still less do we know what manner of woman she was. The Attic comedians said unpleasant things about her a century after she died, and no one lived who could dispute them. Unfortunately, no infallible certificate of character can be found to protect a name that has been only a historic memory two or three thousand years. It is certain, however, that Æolian women had an honored place in society and literature. They formed a center of intellectual light in which the brilliant Sappho reigned supreme, and it was no unusual thing to see them at banquets and festivals with men. A well-born Athenian woman would have lost the rather illusory privileges of her position by such freedom. She was decorously ignorant and stayed at home. It was a foregone conclusion in Athens that a woman who was educated and a poet could not be respectable, and if the facts were against this conclusion, so much the worse for the facts.
Hence it was quite natural that Sappho, who did not go into seclusion or hide her light, should be decried by the satirists who had never seen her. A hundred years had sufficed to dim the incidents of her life, and left them free to invent any romance they chose. Her supposed love-affairs were a fruitful theme. That men died before she was born, or were born after she died, were impertinent details which were not held to interfere in the least with their tender relations toward her. It is true that she wrote with a pen dipped in fire, but poems and tales of passion are not held even to-day as evidence against the fair fame of the author, whatever might be thought of her good taste. The Greek standards of morality were, at best, far from ours, and the frank naturalism of that age would be likely to shock our sense of decorum. But there is no indication that Sappho fell below these standards, and there is much to show that she rose above them. “I love delicacy,” she writes, “and for me love has the sun’s splendor and beauty.” Alcæus, her fellow-poet and rival, addresses her as “pure, sweetly smiling Sappho.” When he grows too ardent in his love, she rebukes him with gentle dignity: “Hadst thou felt desire for things good or noble, and had not thy tongue framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine eyes, but thou hadst spoken honestly about it.” And why did she feel her brother’s disgrace so keenly if her own life was open to reproach?
We gather from herself that she was simple, amiable, and sunny, with a Greek love of life and all that pertains to it. “I am not of revengeful temper,” she says, “but have a childlike mind.” To this naïve confession she adds a choice bit of wisdom: “When anger spreads through the breast, guard thy tongue from barking idly.” She tells her daughter not to mourn for her, as “a poet’s home is not a fit place for lamentation.” In the spirit of her age and race, she insists that “death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die.”
Whatever her character and personal history may have been, we know that she wrote perfect lyrics with the spark of immortality in them, and gathered about her in the sunny island of Lesbos a circle of educated women who devoted themselves to the study of music, poetry, and the arts of refined living. Her genius has been recognized by poets, philosophers, and critics, as well as by simpler people who felt in her verse the “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” She was the “divine Muse” of Plato, and shared the lyric throne with Pindar. Aristotle quoted her, and the austere Solon was so charmed with one of her odes that he said he could not die until he had learned it. Strabo writes that “at no period on record has any woman been known who compared with her in the least degree as a poet.” Horace and Catullus imitated her, Ovid paraphrased her, but no one has caught the essence of her fiery spirit. Plutarch likens her to the “heart of a volcano.” Longinus called her celebrated ode, “not a passion, but a congress of passions.” Modern men have tried to put her golden-winged, fire-tipped words into another tongue, and turned with despair from the task. It is like trying to seize the light that blazes in the heart of the diamond, or the fiery tints that hide in the opal. Perhaps Swinburne has best caught the spirit and the music of
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity.
But even this exquisite artist in words says: “Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed.”
There were nine volumes of her works in the days of Horace. To-day scarcely more than two hundred lines survive. Besides the two immortal odes, we have only fragments, gems scattered here and there through the writers of antiquity. To the everlasting discredit of an ignorant and fanatical age, the fathers denounced her, and the Byzantine emperors or the ascetic monks of a later time burned these so-called relics of paganism, to supply their place with books of devotion and lives of the saints. When the Hellenic spirit woke again, after a sleep of more than a thousand years, it was too late. These poems had perished with many monumental works of the intellect, and scholars thought their lives well spent if they found a line or two from the lost treasures.
But what was the life from which Sappho sprang, that she could reach the topmost bough of fame at a single flight? The lucid note, the tropical passion, the musical flow—these nature might give; but where did she learn the fine sense of proportion, the perfection of metrical form, the mastery of the secrets of language, which placed her at the head of the lyric poets of Greece? The voices which might have told us are silent. Sparta was making heroic men and women, not literature. Athens was struggling through her stormy youth, and pluming her wings for the highest flight of all. The great Hebrew poetry was contemporary with Sappho, but she shows no trace of its influence. If she ever saw or heard it, her spirit was utterly alien to it. Still less had she in common with the inspired woman who led the armies of Israel to victory, six or seven centuries before, and chanted in stately measure the immortal song of their triumphs. It may be noted here that it was a woman who fired the hearts of these wandering people to brave deeds, when men drew back, timid and disheartened; it was a woman who went before them into battle; and it was a woman who broke into that impassioned poem which has come down to us across the ages as one of the great martial hymns of the world. But Deborah, the soldier, poet, prophetess, judge, and minstrel, never walked in the flowery paths of beauty and love. Her virile soul rose on the wings of a sublime faith, far above the things of sense. Behind that chorus of joy and exultation lay the long-baffled hopes, aspirations, and energies of an oppressed people, but it celebrated the apotheosis of force. It was a barbaric song, wild and revengeful even in its splendid imagery and patriotic fervor. Miriam took her timbrel, and sang in the same strain of power and majesty, inspired by the same soaring imagination. But we find no touch of a woman’s pity or tenderness in these pæans of victory. Their note is strong and exultant, alive with the lofty enthusiasm of a religious race in which the passion for art and beauty was not yet born. Sappho had caught nothing from these singers of an earlier time. She does not live in the bracing air of great ideals, nor does she dwell upon any vexed moral problems, after the manner of later poets. She is simply human, and strikes a personal note, the charm of which is unfailing, and will be fresh as long as flowers bloom, or men and women live and love.
This sweet-voiced singer seems to have risen full-fledged with the dawn, and her notes were liquid and clear as the song of the lark that soars out of the morning mists, and makes the sky vocal with melody. The freshness of the woods and the wild freedom of the air are in them. She loves the flowers, the running streams, the silver moon, the “golden-sandaled dawn,” the “dear, glad angel of the spring, the nightingale.” Hesperus, fairest of stars, “brings all that bright morning scattered,” and smiles on “dark-eyed sleep, child of night.” Again she says, “The stars about the fair moon hide their bright faces when she lights up all the earth with silver.” Was it the music of her voice that the doves heard “when their hearts turned cold and they dropped their wings”? She sings the praise of the purple hyacinth, the blushing apple-blossom, and the pale Lesbian rose, which she loves best of all. Dica is bidden to twine wreaths, “for even the blessed Graces look kindlier on a flowery sacrifice, and turn their faces from those who lack garlands.” In the garden of the nymphs, “the cool water gurgles through apple-boughs, and slumber streams from quivering leaves.” To this passionate love of nature, so vividly told in rare and exquisite figures and in phrases “shot with a thousand hues,” she adds a sensibility that responds to every breath that passes. “I flutter like a child after her mother,” is her cry. She likens a bird to a flower that grows in a garden and has nothing to fear from the storms. A woman alone is like a wild flower which no one takes care of. She touches every phase of love from the divine tenderness of girlhood to the wild passion that shakes the soul, “a wind on the mountains falling on oaks.” Her words flash and burn with the heart-consuming fire of her race. The lines in which she entreats the “star-throned Aphrodite” to have pity on her anguish, glow with a white heat. The swift-winged doves had brought the fickle goddess once before to soothe her pain with sweet promises and an immortal smile. Will she not come again and lift the ache from her tortured soul, and give her what she asks?
The intensity of passion reaches its climax in the ode to Anactoria. Simple as it is, the vocabulary of “bitter-sweet” emotion is exhausted. In her most impassioned verses, our own Mrs. Browning does not quite forget to reflect about her love. She sets it forth in subtly woven thoughts, and lets it filter through her mind until it takes the color of it. Sappho sings of passion pure and artless. She does not think about it, she does not analyze it. It possesses her heart and imagination, and she tells it so simply, so sincerely, and so truly, that the familiar story never loses its charm. She sang in the childhood of the world, when people felt more than they thought, when love was a sensation, a joy, a passion, a pain, not a sentiment. If she did not spiritualize her theme, she purified it of the coarseness which made the love-songs of men, before and afterward, unfit for a delicate ear. This first touch of a woman in literature was to refine it, though it was many centuries before she had the power to lead men to take love from the exclusive domain of the senses and give it a soul.
But it is not alone as a singer that Sappho has come down to us. She was the leader of an intellectual movement among women that was without a parallel in classic times. We may greet her as not only the first of woman poets, but as the founder of the first “woman’s club” known to us. It is not certain that it had either a constitution or by-laws, and it discussed poetry and esthetics instead of science and social economics. But the measure of the intellect is not so much what we discuss as the quality of thought we bring into the discussion. It is easy enough to talk platitudes about literature or philosophy, and not so easy as one might imagine to talk wisely and well about poetry, or manners, or the art of living; and it is easier to do any of these things than it is to write what is worth talking about. The women who came to Sappho from the isles of the Ægean and the far hills of Greece seem to have been more intent upon writing poems than talking about them. There is no trace of brilliant conversation, or critical papers, or gathered sheaves of the knowledge that comes so freely under our own hand. Unfortunately, there was no secretary in this primitive club to take notes for posterity, or, if there was, the records have been lost. We know little of its sayings, though there are scattered traces of its doings. A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,—a verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,—and that is all. Even these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual side. Of the quality of its work we cannot judge, as there is little of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners. When they married, she wrote their bridal odes. These she sang with the lyre, and one of her minor claims to fame was her invention of the plectrum, which brought out the full resources of this instrument. For Timas, who died unmarried, she wrote a touching elegy, which was sung at her tomb by the maidens, who cut off their curls as a token of sorrow.
The most gifted of Sappho’s friends was Erinna, who died at nineteen, leaving among other things a poem of three hundred verses, which was said to deserve a place beside the epics of Homer. She sang of the sorrows of a maiden whose mother compelled her to spin when she wished to serve the Muses. There is also a tradition that she wrote an epitaph for a companion of “birth and lineage high,” who died on her wedding day, and “changed bridal songs to sound of sob and tear.” She was thought to surpass her teacher in hexameters. Sappho reproved her for being so scornful, and this is all the trait we have of this precocious child of genius, who preferred poetry to spinning. Her own epitaph speaks for itself:
These are Erinna’s songs; how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years.
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equaled hers?
The only thing about Andromeda of which we are sure is that she dressed badly. “What woman ever charmed thy mind who wore a graceless dress, or did not know how to draw her garments about her ankles?” says Sappho to this formidable rival who stole away from her the fickle heart of Atthis. Of the brilliant Gorgo she grew tired. It is supposed that these two were at the head of other clubs or schools. Damophyla wrote a hymn to Artemis, the patron goddess of pure-souled maidens, which was modeled after Sappho and had great praise in its day, but no fragment of it is left.
“The fair-haired Lesbian,” so famed as the poet of nature and passion, was not without a wise philosophy of life, and she assumes the rôle of mentor with pitiless candor. “He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good will soon be fair,” is her motto; but she tells Mnasidica that her “gloomy temper spoils her, though she has a more beautiful form than the tender Gyrinna.” Her house is devoted to the service of the Muses and must be cheerful, but she shuts out of an honorable immortality those who prefer worldly fortune to the pleasures of the intellect. To a rich woman without education she says: “Where thou diest there wilt thou lie, and no one will remember thy name in times to come, because thou hast no share in the roses of Pieria. Inglorious wilt thou wander about in Hades and flit among its dark shades.” She does not forget the finer graces of character, and evidently realizes the insidious fascination of material things. A moralist of to-day might be expected to tell us that “wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest,” but we are not apt to credit the gifted singers of the ancient world with so much ethical insight, least of all the women of a sensuous and passionate race, which loved before all things beauty and the pleasures of life.
These few touches of wisdom, satire, and criticism, relieved by the love of Sappho for the friends and pupils to whom she is a model, an adviser, and an inspiration, throw a passing side-light on a group of clever women who flit like phantoms across the pages of history, most of them names and nothing more. They are of interest in showing us that the women of ages ago had the same aspirations that we have to-day, together with the same faults, the same virtues, and the same griefs, though they had not learned to moralize their sensations or intellectualize their passions. They show us, too, another phase of the elusive being who dazzled the world in its youth, leaving a few records traced in flame, and charged with an ever-baffling secret for all coming generations.
“Men, I think, will remember us hereafter,” she says with subtle foresight, a line that Swinburne has so gracefully expanded in words taken in part from her own lips:
I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
With all high things forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
With gladness and much sadness and long love.
The little coterie that wrote and talked and worked in the direction of finer ideals of life and manners, under the influence of the first woman poet of the world, has made the island of Lesbos, with its varying charm of sea and sky, and beautiful gardens, and singing birds, and sparkling fountains, and white cliffs outlined like sculpture in the crystalline air, luminous for all time. Of its four more or less famous poets, three were women, but Sappho has overshadowed all the rest. The very atmosphere woke the imagination, and made their hearts sing aloud with love and joy, varied by an occasional note of sorrow and pain. They came from all lands, these gifted maidens, to sit at the feet of Sappho, and to carry back to their distant homes the spirit of poesy and song which inspired so many Hellenic women to brave deeds as well as to tender and heroic words. But the passion of southern seas became a religious enthusiasm in the sheltered and somber plains of Bœotia, where the lives of women had been so bare and hard, and Hesiod with his fellow-poets had given them such cold consolation. The songs of love were turned to processional hymns chanted by white-robed virgins as they brought offerings to the shrines of their gods.
It may have been the fame of Sappho that fired the genius of Myrtis and Corinna. Possibly some dark-eyed maiden had come back from Lesbos to spread the cult of knowledge and beauty, to found other esthetic clubs which should give a new impulse to women’s lives. But when we try to give a living form to these famous poets, we grasp at shadows. We simply know that they lived and sang and had their little day of glory, with grand tombs at the end, and statues in various parts of Greece. They were teachers of Pindar, and Corinna is said to have defeated him five times in poetic contests at Thebes. Several centuries later there was still at Tanagra a picture representing her in the act of binding a fillet about her beautiful head, probably in token of these victories. Five crowns on her tomb also told the story. She was the friend and critic of the great lyric poet, but he said some unkind things of his successful rival, and insisted that the prize was due to her beauty rather than her genius. In spite of this, he went to her for counsel. She had advised him to use the Greek myths in his poems, and he did it so lavishly that she wittily told him to “sow with the hand and not pour out of a sack.” She was not quite generous, however, to her other friend, who also won a prize in the same manner. She says, “I blame the clear-toned Myrtis that she, a woman born, should enter the lists with Pindar.” Why it was not proper for a sister poet who had taught both of them to do what she did herself, is not clear. She was called the first of the nine lyrical muses, who were the earthly counterparts of the “celestial nine.” Myrtis was another. As the immortal Maids who dwelt on the slopes of Helicon were apt to visit their rivals with summary vengeance of much more serious character, perhaps their mortal representatives ought to be forgiven for a shade of jealousy so delicately implied.
Corinna left five books of poems, but small trace of them remains. Many of her verses were sung by maidens at religious festivals. Her modest niche in the temple of fame she owes mainly to her victories over Pindar, though she was second only to Sappho. Why her work, which was crowned with so many laurels, has not lived beside his, is one of the mysteries of buried ages. Perhaps it was because she made use of purely local legends and the local dialect, to which many thought she owed her success in her own day.
This wave of feminine genius that passed over the hills and valleys of Greece spent itself in little more than a century on Doric soil. The last of the lyrical muses were Praxilla and Telesilla. We have a faint glimpse of the first at Sicyon, where she lived, and ancient critics gave her a place by the side of Anacreon. She drew her inspiration largely from mythology, and sang successfully on that favorite theme of poetic maidens, the death of Adonis. In the most critical age of Greece she was honored with a statue by Lysippus, which may be taken as sufficient proof that she was much more than a writer of sentimental verses.
More noted was Telesilla, the poet and heroine of Argos, an antique Joan of Arc, whose exaltation took a poetic form instead of a religious one. A curious little story, mythical or otherwise, is related of her. She was very ill and consulted the oracle, which told her to devote herself to the Muses. This species of mind-cure proved more effective than medicine, and she recovered under the magic of music and poetry. But she had the spirit of an Amazon as well as the genius of a poet. At a crisis in the war with Sparta, she armed the women, and manned the walls with slaves too young or too old to fight. The Spartans thought it discreditable to kill the women, and disgraceful to be beaten by them, so they retreated. The event was commemorated by an annual festival at which men appeared in feminine attire. Many centuries afterward a statue of Telesilla was still standing on a pillar in front of the temple of Aphrodite at Argos. She held in her hand a helmet which she was about to put on her head, and several volumes of poetry were lying at her feet. Among her themes were the fated daughters of the weeping Niobe; she also wrote famous hymns to Artemis and Apollo. In spite of her allegiance to the Muses, she was more conspicuous for her service to Ares, who was henceforth worshiped at Argos as the patron deity of women.
The poetry of the Æolians was largely inspired by love, or a religion of beauty. But the Doric genius was not a lyrical one, and the passionate personal note which made the charm of Sappho and her contemporaries was lost in stirring martial strains. Women ceased to write or to be known at all in literature until a later time, when they dipped into philosophy a little, especially in the Dorian colonies, where they were educated and held in great consideration. Pythagoras had many feminine followers, and his school at Crotona was continued after his death by his wife Theano and a daughter who had assisted him. But most of them live, if at all, only as names, or in the reflected light of famous men whose disciples they were.
At no other time in the history of the world has the poetry of women reached the height or the honor it attained in this first flowering of their intellect and imagination. One may doubtless take with a shade of reservation the “female Homers,” like Anyta, of whom we have only a few epigrams, but there is a dim and rather vague tradition of seventy-six women poets in a scattered and by no means large population. In the revival of poetry during the Renaissance, there were about sixty, and none of them had the same quality of perfection which we find in Sappho. No one claims that we have equaled her to-day on her own ground, however superior our achievements may be in other directions.
That the Æolian women did so much with so little, and in spite of their limited advantages, is the best proof of their inborn gifts. Mediocre talents do not thrive in so adverse a soil, though this outburst of mental vigor belongs to a time when women had a degree of freedom and honor which for some reason they lost in the golden age of Athens. But the books they wrote were not printed, the manuscript copies were limited, most of them were lost with other classic works, and the few that escaped the pitiless fingers of time were destroyed by fanatics and iconoclasts. Yet one woman shines across twenty-five centuries as a star of the first magnitude, and we have fading glimpses of others who received honors due only to genius, or to talent of the first order. They were not judged apart as women, for they have come down to us as peers of great men. The divine gift of genius was rare then, as now and always, but even in women it did not lack recognition. To prove the gift and exact the homage, perhaps in any age, we have simply to show the fruit, except in a decadence, when the finest fruit loses its savor for corrupted tastes. If the number who wrote for immortality was small, it must be remembered that probably there were not enough people in all Greece to make a good-sized modern city.
The statues that were reared to these women have long since vanished from the classic hills they graced, and their voices are heard only in the faintest of musical echoes. Most of them have fallen into eternal silence. That there were many others devoted to things of the intellect, but unknown to fame, it is fair to presume, as we see only those who look back upon us from the shining peaks of that far past, while the dark waters of oblivion have settled over the possible t
