Sappho lies remote from us, beyond the fashions and the ages, beyondsight, almost beyond the wing of Thought, in the world's extremestyouth.
To thrill the imagination with the vast measure of time between theworld of Sappho and the world of the Great War, it is quite useless toexpress it in years, one must express it in æons, just as astronomers,dealing with sidereal distances, think, not in miles, but in lightyears.
Between us and Sappho lie the Roman Empire and the age of Christ, andbeyond the cross the age of Athenian culture, culminating in the whiteflower of the Acropolis.
Had she travelled she might have visited Nineveh before its destructionby Cyaxares, or watched the Phœnicians set sail on their Africanvoyage at the command of Nechos. She might have spoken with Draco andJeremiah the Prophet and the father of Gautama the founder of Buddhism.For her the Historical Past, which is the background of all thought,held little but echoes, voices, and the forms of gods, and theimmediate present little but Lesbos and the Ægean Sea, whose waters hadbeen broken by the first trireme only a hundred and fifty years beforeher birth.
Men call her the greatest lyric poet that the world has known, basingtheir judgment on the few perfect fragments that remain of her song. Buther voice is more than the voice of a lyric poet, it is the voice of aworld that has been, of a freshness and beauty that will never be again,and to give that voice a last touch of charm remains the fact that itcomes to us as an echo.
For of Sappho's poetry not a single vestige remains that does not cometo us reflected in the form of a quotation from the works of someadmirer, some one captured by her beauty or her wisdom or the splendourof her verse, or some one, like Herodian or Apollonius the sophist ofAlexandria, who takes it to exhibit the æolic use of words oraccentuation, or Hephæstion, to give an example of her choriambictetrameters.
Only one complete poem comes to us, the Hymn to Aphrodite quoted byDionysius of Halicarnassus, and one almost complete, the Ode toAnactoria, quoted by Longinus; all other quotations are fragments: a fewlines, a few words, a word, the merest traces.
What fate gave us the shipping lists of Homer, yet denied us Sappho;preserved the Lexicon Græcum Iliadis et Odysseæ of Apollonius, yet cutthe song to Anactoria short, and reduced the song of the orchard tothree lines? or decided that Sophists and Grammarians, exhibitingdry-as-dust truths, should be a medium between her and us?
Some say that her works were burned at Constantinople, or at Rome, bythe Christians, and what we know of the early Christians lends colourto the statement. Some that they were burned by the Byzantine emperorsand the poems of Gregory Nazianzen circulated in their place.
But whatever the fate it failed in its evil intention. Sappho remains,eternal as Sirius, and it is doubtful if her charm and her hold upon theworld would have been strengthened by the full preservation of her work.
As it is, added to the longing which all great art inspires, we have thelonging inspired by suggestion. That lovely figure belonging to the feetshe shows us "crossed by a broidered strap of Lydian work," would ithave been as beautiful unveiled as imagined? Did she long formaidenhood? Why did the swallow trouble her, and what did the daughterof Cyprus say to her in a dream?
There is not a fragment of Sappho that is not surrounded in the mind ofthe reader by the rainbow of suggestion. Just as the gods draped thehuman form to give desire imag