Baudelaire (1821-1867), the morbid realist, uses the story of the Leucadian Leap in his Lesbos:

In a literary fragment (1845), entitled Sapho, he refers to a famous and remarkable tragedy on Sappho which was to be published soon afterwards by Arsène Houssaye. He quotes some verses which are reminiscent of Sappho’s second ode:

In 1873 we have a translation by Etienne Prosper Dubois-Gucham, La Grecque Pléiade; in 1878 that of P. L. Courier; in 1882, the verses of de la Roche. About this time J. Richepin published in his undated romance, Grandes Amoureuses, prose translations of several fragments, and in 1889 Paul Lenois made a prose version. In 1884, Alphonse Daudet, after writing a novel on French life and customs as a warning to young men, and picturing a courtesan carried upstairs in the arms of her lover, gave the courtesan and the novel the title of Sapho. Soon afterwards appeared anonymously Madame E. Caro’s Sapho. In 1895 were heard the songs of Pierre Louys, who in Les chansons de Bilitis traduites du Grec pour la première fois176 transforms Mytilene into a modern Sodom and Sappho into the mistress of a band of hetaerae. He pretends that he is translating Greek poems that were found in excavating the poetess’ grave on Amathus. He even represents them as published by a Doctor Heim of Leipzig. Further to mystify the reader Louys tells of some of the poems that have not been translated and marks restorations in the text, as if these songs had actually been found marred and mutilated and as if the archaeologist had restored the missing words. He even uses, to give a Greek atmosphere, many Greek expressions such as Kypris Philommeïdès. Many of his Greek forms, such as Dzeus, are absurd. Charming as are these Bucoliques en Pamphylie, Élégies à Mitylène, Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre, they belong rather to pornographic literature, as does his romance called Aphrodite, in which the pseudo-Lesbian idea of two girls marrying one another is to be found. Such bits of perverted Sapphism as appear in many other French writers have no place in the literature of the real Sappho, who can now, after the discovery of all the new papyri, easily be distinguished from the Sappho of romance and legend. Unfortunately the last French translation by Meunier (1911) does not include these recent relics.

One of the latest French imitations of Sappho is by that great reviver of Aristophanes, Maurice Donnay, whose comedies have attracted such large audiences in Europe. In his Lysistrata (Act I, scene II), Donnay makes the pretty Hirondelle as she walks along the shore of the violet sea recite to the accompaniment of the music of the waves the song which divine Sappho composed for the Egyptian courtesan Rhodopis, although we have no evidence for such a song:

This, of course, is an echo of the famous second ode of Sappho which has influenced all ages and countries and continues so to do. Hardly a year passes without some translation or reminiscence of it in Greece or Italy, in France or Germany, in England or America.

XI. SAPPHO IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Sappho was little read in England and as a writer of poetry probably did not exist, except for a few Englishmen of great learning, before the sixteenth century. Even in the seventeenth century Thomas Stanley, a man of considerable culture, omitted Sappho from his translation of Anacreon (1650). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the imitations limit themselves to the Sapphic metre,177 with the exception of the famous line in Ben Jonson’s pastoral drama, The Sad Shepherd (Act II, 2): “But best the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and of Sir Philip Sidney, who seems to have been entirely forgotten by modern writers on Sappho. But it is interesting to note, in the movement led by Gabriel Harvey in pre-Shakesperian days to write English poetry in classical metres, that sapphics were attempted by Harvey’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney, in The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which was begun in 1580. One stanza will suffice to show how strained were the strophes thus manufactured:

It is rather strange that Sir Philip did not use this metre in his translation of the second ode of Sappho, but employed anacreontics.

This being a wholly iambic measure does not appear so exotic as the sapphics. Indeed, the youthful experimenter achieved a noteworthy success in rhythmic effect by ending each line with a foot composed of one strong syllable.

Most of the knowledge there was of Sappho in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, however, seems to have been superficially based mainly on the Ovidian legend. Such a wonderful story told by such a wonderful story-teller interested the early classicists in England, and the Phaon myth permeated much literature.

Ben Jonson (Under-Woods, No. 45) says:

Thomas Nashe in his novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), is a typical example: “Golde easily bends, the most ingenious minds are easiest moved, Ingenium nobis molle Thalia dedit, said Psapho to Phao.” It is just possible that Robert Herrick (1591-1674), who published so many poems to or upon Sapho, the name of his own love, knew from Athenaeus the fragment (E. 62) “much whiter than an egg,” when he published in Hesperides, No. 350 (1648) the verses:

John Lyly made Sappho an allegorical image of the Virgin Queen: “I will ever be virgin,” says Sappho. The play, Sapho and Phao, was produced in 1584 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Lyly makes Sappho a princess of Syracuse and takes many liberties with the historical Sappho. Lyly’s Sappho resembles the Queen, and Phao is supposed to be the Duke of Leicester, but in such an allegory all reference to the Leucadian Leap has to be omitted, and there are no echoes of Sappho’s own fragments. When Phaon comes, Sappho soliloquizes: “Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.” Aphrodite interrupts their love and Phaon says: “This shall be my resolution, where-ever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho’s good.” Even Robert Burton in that famous storehouse of quotations, his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), does not know Sappho as a poetess, and refers only to the Leucata Petra: “Here leaped down that Lesbian Sappho for Phaon on whom she miserably doted, hoping thus to ease herself and to be freed of her love pangs.” The first English translation of Sappho’s second ode (1652), quoted by Edwin Cox, is John Hall’s version in his translation of the Treatise an the Sublime. He does not mention Sidney, and Addison did not know even Hall’s translation or that of Pulteney, for he says that the versions by Ambrose Philips in 1711 were the first. In 1675 Edward Phillips in his Theatrum Poetarum devoted a chapter to Ancient Poetesses and Sappho. He knew the tradition of a second Sappho, but quoted no fragments. In 1680 Pulteney, who had a knowledge of small Latin and less Greek, gave a filtered translation from the French of the Treatise on the Sublime and the second Sapphic ode. In 1695 appeared another translation by an unknown author, but it was not till 1711 that any detailed study of Sappho began. In that year, in the Spectator (nos. 223, 229, and 233), Joseph Addison discussed Sappho at length. Even then we have only the namby-pamby verses of Ambrose Philips, so overpraised by Addison. Soon followed translations by Herbert in 1713, in his edition of Petronius (pp. 325-328); and in 1719, by Green. In 1735 John Addison published the works of Anacreon with Sappho added, in which the Loeb Classical Library idea of putting the Greek text on one page and the translation on the opposite page was anticipated. Philips’ version of the Aphrodite hymn was forty-two lines long, but Addison gives one of his own in twenty-eight lines, which is the number in the original Greek. His own rendering is as good as that of Philips, which perhaps is damning it with faint praise. His translations of the eight fragments which he includes are also not remarkable. In 1748, we have Tobias Smollett’s version of the second ode in Roderick Random. About 1745, Mark Akenside in his tenth Ode on Lyric Poetry based a stanza on Sappho’s first ode. In 1760, “a Gentleman of Cambridge” published his verse translations. In some publications he is considered to be different from Francis Fawkes, who undoubtedly is the gentleman referred to. In 1768 appeared E. B. Greene’s free and mediocre translation, in which Aphrodite’s doves become “feathered steeds,” and which ignores the Sapphic metre. In 1796, Mrs. Mary Robinson published Sappho and Phaon, but these sonnets of hers are not, as she claims, legitimate descendants of the real Sappho.

It was not till the nineteenth century, however, that the actual literary remains of Sappho were scientifically studied. In 1814, we have the translations of Elton, in 1815 of Egerton, in 1833 the Sapphics by Merivale, in 1854 Palgrave, in 1877 Walhouse. In 1869, Edwin Arnold’s Poets of Greece gave one of the best renderings of the Aphrodite hymn in Sapphic metre and included pretty translations of nine of her fragments. Edwin Arnold called her: “that exquisite poetess ... whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest.” He protests against Swinburne’s repetition of the scandal against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented; he rejects the Leucadian Leap and the Phaon myth. In 1871 T. W. Higginson wrote his important article on Sappho for The Atlantic Monthly, which can now be found in his Atlantic Essays. He translated several of the fragments and the hymn than which, he says, “there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic structure inspired more enthusiasm.” He subjects to many a hard blow that paltry Scot soul, Colonel Mure, whose history of Greek literature ought to be tabooed. He repudiates the calumnies of the comedians and scandal-mongers. His appreciation of Sappho is one of the best that has been written.

In 1883 J. A. Symonds published his translations, and some of them were made for and included in that charming little book of Wharton’s, which appeared in its first edition in 1885. Even before Wharton, Swinburne had given his high estimate of Sappho and had melted together many of the fragments into his Anactoria. In 1894, Maurice Thompson published in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Sapphic Secret,” and gave a fine appreciation of Sappho with translations of the shorter fragments. During the last thirty years the discovery of new papyri has stimulated interest in Sappho and many books and articles, scientific and popular, have been printed. For a discussion of the recovery of Greek literature from papyri and the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring Sappho’s new fragments, I refer the reader to my introduction on the subject in Miller-Robinson, The Songs of Sappho. I refer the reader to the bibliography for some of the books and to a note178 for references to some popular articles, and call special attention to the volumes of Easby-Smith, Miss Patrick, Petersen, Edmonds, Cox, Tucker, and Edward Storer, most of whom give their own verse renderings of some, if not all, of Sappho’s fragments. Many modern poets, both British and American, have adapted or expanded Sappho’s fragments in English verse, Lucy Milburn, Bliss Carman, Percy Osborn, that pure Pelasgian, John Myers O’Hara. Recently Dr. Marion Mills Miller, formerly of Princeton University, has published metrical adaptations of all the old and new fragments, which are graceful and witty. He has also given the romance of Sappho’s life in verse and has made a new poetical translation of Ovid’s Sappho to Phaon. In the same volume (cf. Bibliography), I have published the Greek text of all Sappho with a literal translation and two introductions. One deals with the recovery and restoration of Sappho’s relics and shows the romance as well as the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring her poems. The other discusses Sappho’s life and works.

The influence of Sappho on English and American literature has been large. We have already shown this in our citations, as it seemed better to quote some of the great English writers when we were speaking of Sappho herself. Addison was devoted to her, but his contemporary, Pope, by translating Ovid’s Sappho to Phaon, aggravated the ill-fame which Ovid had given her. Pope often mentions her, but without knowledge of the true Sappho. In Moral Essays (Epistle III, 121) we have the line: “Why she (Phryne) and Sappho raise that monstrous sum?”, referring to Lady Montague and to Miss Skerrett, the latter of whom was the mistress and later the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. Lady Mary (Montague) is alluded to also in Epistle II, 24:

Also in the Prologue to the Satires, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 369, we read: “Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.” Sappho is mentioned again in Imitations of Horace (Satire I, l. 83) and in Satires of Dr. John Donne (II, 6), in these words: “As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.” In his letters to Cromwell, Pope often mentions two Sapphos, one his own and the other Cromwell’s: “My service, pray, to the other Sappho, who it is to be hoped, has not yet cast herself headlong from any of the Leucades about London, although her Phaon lately fled from her into Lincolnshire.” Even in the letter to Steele, when he makes acknowledgment to the “fine fragment of Sappho,” Pope is disingenuous and affected, as he suppresses the name of Flatman, to whom he was really indebted.

Wordsworth, influenced probably by Welcker’s defense, had a good opinion of Sappho (cf. the quotation, p. 247). But his dear friend, Sir Walter Scott, seems to be ignorant of her, though the lines on the Evening Star, which we have quoted (p. 64), sound strikingly Sapphic. Coleridge seems to echo the famous fragment about the pippin on the topmost bough in his One Red Leaf on the Topmost Twig; but as he shows no other influence of Sappho this is probably an accidental resemblance. Thomas Moore, as a translator of Anacreon with whom Sappho was generally linked, knew Sappho well and translated some of her fragments into Latin as well as English. His rendering of the Weaving Song is especially charming (cf. p. 79). Another contemporary Irish poet, the Reverend George Croly, tells how:

Of the post-Revolution poets the bombastic Byron, who may have learned something about Sappho from his friend and editor, Thomas Moore, refers to her most. In Don Juan (III, 107), he expands, none too well, into a stanza of eight the two lines in which Sappho has painted such a beautiful miniature landscape of reunited village life. As Livingstone says in The Legacy of Greece (p. 265): “the English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho.” Was Livingstone not thinking also of Swinburne and many another modern poet who plays so many indistinct, un-Greek variations on that divine line: “I loved thee once, Atthis, in the long ago,” which Mackail has called “just one sliding sigh and whisper of sound.” There is another expansion by the poet laureate of Canada, which we have quoted in a note (p. 257). It is Byron who in Don Juan (III, 76) speaks of

and in Don Juan (II) he speaks of “Sappho, the sage bluestocking in whose grave All those may leap who rather would be neuter.” In the controversy between Byron and Boules with regard to the second ode, Byron says: “Is not this sublime and fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Philips’ translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this?” Byron echoes the element of fire which has so often been noted in Sappho’s songs, by critics from Plutarch to Sara Teasdale. He knows the story derived from Ovid and Maximus of Tyre that she was dark (p. 35) and also the legend of the Lover’s Leap (Childe Harold, II, 39-41):

While Shelley and Keats do not have clear echoes of Sappho, they come nearer to her in spirit than any other modern poets; but, even so, Keats’ sensuousness removes him from Sappho. W. L. Courtney, in a very interesting article on Sappho and Aspasia,178 says: “Shelley has the true lyrical note, and Keats some of that chiselled loveliness which makes each Sapphic stanza a masterpiece.” One might even suspect that Shelley knew the second ode, at least in some secondary source, when he composed To Constantia Singing.

Women poets naturally have taken an interest in Sappho. Mrs. Hemans, the English lyrist (1793-1835), speaks of “Sappho’s fervent heart.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems to have known only the song of the rose to which we have referred above (p. 68). She is familiar with the Lover’s Leap legend, as was Byron, for she speaks in A Vision of Poets of

In Matthew Arnold there is much classical influence, but A Modern Sappho has nothing of ancient Sappho. Walter Savage Landor,179 who looked back to Greece from Rome and by his delightful dialogues made the ancient ages live again, is one of the few who decry Sappho. He seems to be jealous when he says that “Sappho is not the only poetess who has poured forth her melodies to Hesperus, or who had reason to thank him.” He composes ten verses himself entitled Sappho to Hesperus, which are not like Sappho’s at all. Likewise he takes eight lines to express the thought of the despair of the love-sick maiden over her faithless lover, which Sappho depicts in a better picture of a single couplet. Landor finds Sappho deficient in delicacy in her answer to Alcaeus and attributes to her an epigram about Alcaeus which she never wrote. He would obliterate no letter of the invocation to Hesperus by a tear of his. Among the poems of Sappho he finds one written in a different hand from the rest, which pleases him as much as any of them, but it reads like Landor and is inferior to what Sappho would have said. In Simonidea he tries his hand at the Weaving Song:

Charles Kingsley wrote a beautiful poem on Sappho, which well represents her mood; but there is hardly even a faint echo of Sappho’s own fragments unless the words “all her veins ran fever” are accidentally suggested by the second ode.

William Cory, famous translator of the Heraclitus epigram, who published poems on Stesichorus and other classical subjects, prettily transformed one of the fragments into:

William Morris, a fine classical scholar, as shown in his Life and Death of Jason, in The Earthly Paradise (1868-1871), expands in a very readable form the story of the Egyptian courtesan, Rhodopis, whom Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, ransomed. About the same time (1870) Rossetti made the combination of two fragments which we have mentioned above (p. 93). Some tell us that Oscar Wilde’s heart goes out to Sappho, but so far as I have read I have not been able to find in him any trace of the real Sappho.178a On the other hand, Tennyson and Swinburne read her fragments over and over. Tennyson, who thought the Sapphics of Horace to be “much inferior to those of Sappho,” beautifully paraphrases the second ode in Eleänore (1832). In the original edition of Fatima (Dec. 1832), published under the title O Love, Love, Love, he prefixed the first line of this ode as a motto. Many as are the echoes of the sweet-bitter, bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho (E. 81, above, p. 57) in Wharton and other critics, it seems strange that perhaps the most beautiful and deep-hearted of all, Elaine’s song in Tennyson’s Idyl is never cited, so far as I know.180

Tennyson echoes the third fragment, as we have seen (p. 63); and he re-echoes through Horace another fragment in his Epilogue (p. 36). In Fatima, “Love, O withering might” suggests another fragment. In Leonine Elegiacs we have a better adaptation than in Byron of the Hesperus hymn:

In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After he again uses the same Sapphic fragment: “Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.” His brother, Frederick Tennyson, who was such a good Greek scholar that he won the medal at Trinity College for a Greek poem, in his Isles of Greece (1890) used several adaptations and translations of Sappho, the prettiest being those about Sappho’s child Cleïs, about Hesper and the summer noonday siesta by the cool waters. Many writers of lyrics in England and Scotland have thought of Sappho, but generally of the Phaon story, as recently did Thomas McKie in his Lyric on Love:181

Swinburne is one of Sappho’s greatest admirers, and we have quoted some of his praises among the appreciations of Sappho (p. 11). We have cited Noyes’ appreciation of Swinburne’s love of Sappho, and here are Thomas Hardy’s interesting lines to Swinburne:

While perhaps Swinburne exaggerates in his praise of Sappho, he owes much to the great poetess of love:

He makes her say:

In Tristram of Lyonesse he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,” and in Anactoria:

His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of Anactoria, where she is a nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is expanded into:

The famous fragment of four lines which we have quoted above (p. 69) becomes:

The Aphrodite hymn which he paraphrased in Anactoria is used again in Songs of the Spring-tides:

In the same poem the mature Swinburne comes closer than in his youth to Sappho, when he says: “The tawny sweet-winged thing, Whose cry was but of spring.” But even in this poem he dilutes Sappho’s one line into six or more:

We cannot take leave of Swinburne without paying tribute to his Sapphics. English and American poets in general have not been successful with the Sapphic strophe, though in modern times Canning’s Needy Knife-grinder is a good specimen; and Tennyson caught the real Greek cadence in his specimen:

Many have experimented with the Sapphic stanza, as recently Clinton Scollard and Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in their Sapphics.

Sara Teasdale (Mrs. Filsinger), who has been called one of the best of contemporary lyric poets and who is an ardent admirer of Sappho, has written the following striking lyric in the Sapphic stanza:

Marion Mills Miller182 has written some good Sapphics, though his theory of the proper rendition of Sapphic metre will cause some controversy among scholars. We have not the space here to discuss the history of the Sapphic metre, which if not first used by Sappho was first perfected by her. It has been employed extensively in all ages. Horace has it some twenty-six times. Elizabethan renderings can be found in Robinson Ellis’ preface to his translation of Catullus. By Rhabanus (766-856) it was fitted to hymns such as those for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, for Candlemas, Michaelmas, and for the Feast of St. Benedict, and it was employed for his hymns in the Common of Confessors and the Common of Virgins. But no one else has ever caught the Sapphic rhythm and melody so well as Swinburne in his early poem called Sapphics: