Love In Sappho's Poems

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_ Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.

Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possibly deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--the following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and in much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with the distinctness of a painting:

"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or rather fragments of such, comprising the following:

"Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet."
"Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling on the oaks."
"Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend."
"Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will."
"For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like her."

[FOOTNOTE 299: In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose version made by H.T. Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far the best in the English language.]

"Bitter-sweet," "giver of pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems, and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the following fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaika Eromenaen] ("to a beloved woman"):

"That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..."

The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was "not one passion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfect expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greek physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F.B. Jevons, in his history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the "marvellous fidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long before him Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms." Theodore Watts wrote: "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." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the

"dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such passion."

And J.A. Symonds assures us that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some Persian or Provencal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions of overmastering passion."

I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin version of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The more I read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more I marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and opinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to the psychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a long and minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; I have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a lover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved; but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind, deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead, she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.

An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem. Suppose you say to a friend:

"A woman was walking in the woods when she saw something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and looked as if she would faint and die: what did she see?"

The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!" In truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like the symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin, Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becoming husky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizziness which will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "a fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular, but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am glad that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of diagnoses is not my family doctor.

Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of the imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic, affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sappho the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration, yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron deceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):

"To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual manner than we demand that it should be."

That is it precisely. These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic love but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal sensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic; but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic implies something healthy and normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy and normal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been written by a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and her famous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred to in her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton:

"What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies, she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth."

In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen. She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and Constantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray, "too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer, Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that

"it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure woman that her modern apologists would have her."

The following lament alone would prove this:

[Greek:
Deduke men a Selana
kai Plaeiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d' erxet ora
ego de mona katheudo.]

MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES

Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300] but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or _vice versa_, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. They look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls. When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental masculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune, not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species, and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]

[FOOTNOTE 300: P.B. Jevons refers to some of these as "mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings!" Welcker's defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of naivete written in ignorance of mental pathology.]

[FOOTNOTE 301: The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in Moll's _Untersuchungen_, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic references are given. The most striking impression left by the reading of this book is that the differentiation of the sexes is by no means as complete yet as it ought to be. All the more need is there of romantic love, whose function it is to assist and accelerate this differentiation.]

[FOOTNOTE 302: As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hoessli, wrote a remarkable book with the title _The Unreliability of External Signs as Indications of Sex in Body and Mind_. I may add here that if it were known how many of the "shrieking sisterhood" who are clamoring for masculine "rights" for women, are among the unfortunates who were born with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if struck by a ton of dynamite. These amazons often wonder why the great mass of women are so hard to stir up in this matter. The reason is that the great mass of women--heaven be thanked!--have feminine minds as well as feminine bodies.] _

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