The Spoils of Song

Irish Jesuit Province

The Spoils of SongAuthor(s): Arthur LittleSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 47, No. 553 (Jul., 1919), pp. 362-368Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20505337 .

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362 j

THE SPOILS OF SONG.

BY ARTHUR LITTLE.

A ROUND the memory of Sappho there has fallen a delicate halo of romance which to the eye of history veils even while it illuminates her. To the onetime

honoured goddesses of Greece old age has brought a ruin worse than wrinkled cheeks and feebleness; the empire of Juno is discredited among men and the votaries of Diana

have abandoned her fanes to the driving rain and the dirge

of tempests. But the centuries have come and gone and

to Sappho they have but brought the sanction of her

vchangeless renown. Her image has passed as an inalien

able element into the world's imagination, as she leans

myrtle-crowned upon the marble balustrade of a Liesbian villa, and gazes with dreamy eyes out over th? glimmering deep.

Her times were troublous and filled with din of battles. The world was yet ringing with the thunderous echoes of the fall of Niniveh, and the lions of Babylon were destined soon to be chained in the rear of the funeral hearse of

Nebuchadnezzar. East and west went the glory of Asia Minor; her military genius homed for a short space m Persia, and the soul of her art was embodied in the nations of Greece. Of this precious heritage Sappho entered upon her portion. Moreover in Greece itself political and social grievances were stirring up the people to vindicate their rights; and to remedy both Sappho seems to have set her hand. In the year 606 B.C. Pittacus had accepted the tyranny of Mytilene in the isle of Lesbos, and with it

many cares and unbounded odium. All the hate came from the nobles, having at their head one Alcaeus, poet and politician (for in those days even politicians were poetic); the conspirators also included a loyal friend of Alcaeus, to

wit, the lady Sappho. Eventually, of course, the plot was revealed, the guilty arraigned, and Sappho and they all



THE SPOILS OF SONG. R63

were sent into exile for a term. On her home-coming an other cause claimed her pen; for the society of Greece, in its reaction from the matriarchal system, was beginning to hold woman in contempt, and predisposed her-thus despised--to lose her self-respect and her honour. Against this system Sappho seems to have striven in song and counsel. This therefore is all that is known of the ex

ternals of the poetess in relation to her times, for the tale that she was the beloved of Phaon lacks foundation.

But in effect external life was not her sphere n6r did she so consider it. The remains of Alcaeus and Anacreon teem with contemporary references, whereas the poetry of Sappho is all but wholly free from such. No, her signi ficance lay not in her public life but in her domesticity. She is eminently the singer of the common things of life.

With a rare keenness of vision to discern the romance that underlies the ordinary and the everyday she sang almost entirely of her children and her girl-friends, of her house hold and social functions, of all the thousand secret occu pations and pre-occupations that go to make up a stay-at home existence. In this Sappho is singular among ancient writers, if not unique. Modern scholars have decided in their wisdom that the ancients must have had a domestic life, that they did not subsisi like chameleons entirely on light and air. They will describe a Roman kitchen from their evidence and even predicate laundries. But almost the sole living token of this home-life we possess in litera ture, besides some lovely episodes in the Odyssey, is the poetry of Sappho; hers is the first and onlv voice that sings straight from the spinning-wheel and the hearth. It is

words like these that prove a greater affinity between her and the modern school of poetesses, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mrs. Meynell, or those that are now writing in Ireland than with any writer of the ancient world; she writes of her own child:

Fair is Cleis, little daughter, As the golden blooms her mien, I would not give up my darling To be made the Lydan queen.

A certain delight in the objective beauty of nature was



364 THE IRISH MONTHLY

natural to this lover of quiet and retirement. The mild airs of those

" cloudless climes and starrv skies " seem to

have entered into her being. Her songs are filled with the

morning silences and azure clearness of her lovely island. And she sangr of them spontaneously. Let none who reads

lines like these say that the Greek took no pleasure in landscape for its own sake:

Through the apple-blossom boughs Ripple of cool water plays; Quiet slumbers droop and drowse

In the whispering sprays. Or consider these words:

Swiftly hide them in -the shadows Stars around the daedal moon, As she creeps upon the meadows

With her silver shoon. Was ever the magic of moonlight more exquisitely felt? I am tempted to quote a little song of Goethe's to show how cormpletely Sappho has here anticirPated the modern

ceilt of nature

O'er the green tips Is rest, 'Twixt the leaved lips

Thou wilt quest In vain for a breath, The birds o' the wood are still, Quiet be until Thou sleep beneath.

But on the sympathy of Sappho with Goethe and his age

there will be more to say hereafter.

And the naivet~ and childishness that interested her in

nature and the things that lay about her is at the root of

Sappho's character. It shows itself in somewhat discon certing form on occasion. For in the confessional of poetry nothing of her inmost life is hid. Both of her faults and her virtues she is frank and unashamed. She tells us that she loves daintiness, that

Love shakes my heart as the oaktrees vail Their crests in the lap o' the mountain gale;

she explains her quarrels with her friends; and she tells of

her dresses with such zest as to persuade us that had she



T'HE SPOILS OF SONG. 365

been of this century she would have found Switzer's win dow as irresistible as any of the Dublin ladies find it to-day. And nothing so militates, in my opinion, against the theory that her character was not of the fairest, as the fact that

she was so intensely fascinated by these trifles for their own sake. All this easy self-revelation is somewhat start ling, if altogether delightful, to one who is accustomed to the hypocrisy and mock-modesty and gentlemanly dissimu lation of modern literature. Modern poets and modern life have in general lost the habit of being open, so that of

all our mannerisms none is so affected as our simplicity. In a poetess so modern as Sappho this divergence from present-day usage is notable.

In nothing is she so modern, however, as in hdr sensi bility. Her nature responded like an 2Eolian harp to the liahtest wind of emotion. Anything like neglect or jilting

was a torture; Atthis, her favourite pupil, was a flyaway girl and seems to have plagued her sore in this wise. In

this quality, I say, she is unexampled among the ancients. Had Sophocles taken to pure lyric song he might have been her peer; but the emotion of Theocritus is hard as marble statuary, and that of Propertius is miserably selfish. In Sappho there is something of Ronsard, sometbing of

Edmund Spenser, but the fulness of her art in the expres sion of simple-emotions Is not paralleled until the rise of the nineteenth-century Romantic school in Europe. One

may well contemn such surfeit of tenderness in a man, but in a woman it is surely a thing wholly fitting. In Sappho I believe it to be an effect of her exceeding goodIness of disposition itself, and in any case her sunny nature heldi none of the morbidty of some of those dyspeptic poets of the last century. The following extract from the new fragments puiblished in 1909 well illustrates this. It is to

Atthis, speaking of a oommon friend, Mnesedice, who has crossed the seas to Sardis, and is perhaps the most lovely of all Sappho's lovely remains:

'Our friend is hence, my dearest, Beyond the Sardian foam, But in her secret musings Her dreams are of her home.



366 THE IRISH MIONTHLY

Her dreams are of the oldtime When thou her goddess wert And of all songs flew thy songs The liefest to her heart.

0 fair the Lydian ladies, But fairest she, as soon Gleams in the wake of sunset The rosy-fingered moon,

All in the wake of sunset From out the starry plain

And lightens flowery meadows And all the salty main;

Then doth the dew lie quiet, And the rose grows young in the glooms, And the dainty anthryso opens And the honey-lotus blooms.

So our beloved wanders And broods like a noonday dove For her wistful heart is eaten

With longing for thy love.

But thou and I are cunning And we list to her unsung plea, For night the many-eared whispers In the winds of the restless sea.

So far then of the personality expressed in her art; I

now turn to her absolute place in literatture. We say that

Sappho is a lyric poet, but this does not define her craft.

Lyric poetry. is not a star in the firmament of art, it is a

planetary system; and one of its moons is the song. The

song is at once the first and the last of poetic forms. It

is the first because it is the most natural and primitive

means of self-expression; and it is the last because it was

not definitely recognised as an authentic art form until perhaps the sixteenth century. It was the sudden and

precocious maturing of the art of music that finally estab lished its technique. This technique demanded a power over expression that should not be sophisticated nor ex cessively lofty, united to ability to attain perfect form in a narrow compass. Thus it insisted on extreme simplicity without commonness, and, what is still more exacting, on

realism without sordidness. The poet was thus required



THE SPOILS OF SONG. 367

to walk in a very straitened- path, and those who had the

eagle-wings of the higher lyrical inspiration, like Shelley and Crashaw, found it no small matter to brook such re

straint. Indeed the quiring angels were none too lavish in their bestowal of the specific gift of song, and perhaps only three modern poets are acknowledged universally as consistent and not fitful masters in the form; I mean Goethe, Heine, and Robert Burns, albeit Thomas Campion also will be acclaimed by not a few.

Now the Lesbian bards were the premature spring of

the modern song; Alcaeus and the jollv Anacreon were, to change the image, the original fathers of Goethe and

Burns. Had these earlier poets enjoyed the advantage of a freer verse technique they might have left the song in a

state of perfection. As it was they instinctively fore shadowed .the modern masters in many points of form. Like them they adopted short stanzas generally of four lines each and avoided complexity and irregularity in the internal structure of the lines. But the true metrical spon taneity of the song was all but impossible under the classical system of versification.

Sappho was at the same disadvantage as her compeers in the matter of her technique. In range and variety of subject too she had, perforce to yield the palm to her suc cessors. But in native grace and a certain well-nigh Christian quality of lowlihead she is not inferior to any singer of any age. That artistic mentality I have en deavoured to analyse was well adapted to the needs and behests of song. Its gracious nalivete successfully gathered her song apart from the nebulous idealism that from the first invaded the ancient drama. Its sensibility enabled her to fuse Attic purity of form with a Gothic richness and warmth, to break loose ever and anon from the frigid em braces of soulless beauty into the light and splendid free dom of life and truth. That peerless proud simplicity, that brow ensanguined with the thorns of passion, that eye burning intrepidly upon injustice, big with tears for the pangs of humanity, these are all in her verse, and all

approve her inspiration as of the highest. Her song is a

prophecy and she a prophetess of a future not to be realised 31



368 THE IRISH M1ONTHLY

by Hellas but bridging all the abysm of years even to the

present day. Sublime sybil foreshowing the glory await ing the young empire of song, she has flung her books away to be consumed by time all save the one poor splendid fragment that is ours, while she herself has vanished into the shadows whence she came.

And assuredly the world was more worldly when she had passed away from it. At her dving a deeper silence must

needs have mourned in those caves of Lesbos that once rang with the cadences of song. What then of us who have all but lost even her legacy of art? For the worm

has fed upon her song, the reflection of her soul, which, like that, owned the prerogative of immortality. Yet it

may be that her words are not silent for ever. It may be that the spade of the excavator will find more precious things than gold, when exploring the burial-grounds of nations. It may be tha-t her tears and Paradisal laughter

will have a resurrection, and that so much beauty is not lost for ever. However it be, she is to us now an enigma

only half-explained. But if her eyes be inscrutable, it is not with the dread riddle of a sphynx, but with the mystery in the eyes of a little child. And in that word is the whole of Sappho.

HOSPITALITY. From Kuno Meyer's prose version in " Ancient Irish Poetry."

King of stars ! be dark or bright This my dwelling in thy sight, May its portals open be Lest Christ close His doors on me. For if with you stays a guest And you give not of your best, 'Tis not he that lacks there on,

It is Jesus, Mary's Son. MARY GBOGHUGAN.



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The Spoils of Song