Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 80

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 j.a.panese 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."

"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 G.o.ds, 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion, but a congress of pa.s.sions," 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 pa.s.sion of love." Long before him Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "felt the pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, utter a cry like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the

"dignity of divinity, which informs the most pa.s.sionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such pa.s.sion."

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

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 gra.s.s"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his bosom," and his tongue to be embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal sensual pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.e.xes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by violent jealousy and other symptoms of inters.e.xual pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sions 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 s.e.xual appet.i.te is as natural a pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]

ANACREON AND OTHERS

There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest Greek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720 B.C.--say 2700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end of the seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear--little more than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come down to us--Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of all these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when he remarks (25) regarding Mimnermus: "'What is life without love?' he says; he does not say, 'What is life without your love?'" Even in Sappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of her pa.s.sion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking or weak, for she is constantly transferring her attention from one girl to another. And as Sappho's poems are addressed to girls, so are Anacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases.

The following, preserved by Athenaeus (XIII., 564D), is a good specimen:

[Greek: "O pai parthenion blepon, dixemai se, su d' ou koeis, ouk eidos hoti taes emaes psuchaes haeniocheueis."]

Such a poem, even if addressed properly, would indicate nothing more than simple admiration and a longing which is specified in the following:

[Greek: Alla propine radinous, o phile, maerous.]

It would hardly be worth while, even if the limitations of s.p.a.ce permitted, to subject the fragments of the other poets of this period to a.n.a.lysis. The reader has the key in his hands now--the altruistic and supersensual ingredients of love pointed out in this volume; and if he can find those ingredients in any of these poems, he will be luckier than I have been. We may therefore pa.s.s on to the great tragic poets of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.

WOMAN AND LOVE IN AESCHYLUS

In the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus is made to declare that he had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays--[Greek: ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainly has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes would not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast of having kept out of his writings the element which const.i.tutes the greatest fascination of modern literature; but after reading his seven surviving tragedies we do not wonder that Aeschylus should not have introduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith he competed for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the great festivals at Athens; for love of an exalted kind, worthy of such an occasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideas prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of s.e.xual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on the latter.

An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial reception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, when he returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return the most joyous of her life, a.s.serts her complete fidelity to him during his long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fond feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him till the gus.h.i.+ng fountains of her eyes have been exhausted. Indeed, she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims, "Pamper me not after the fas.h.i.+on of women, nor as though I were a barbaric monarch.... I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a G.o.d." But ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine talk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse--deadly hypocrisy.

In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuineness and intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferred from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous a.s.sault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead.

"And I glory in the deed" she afterwards declares, adding that it "has long since been meditated."

Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a new concubine, Ca.s.sandra, and installed her in his home with the usual Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he really was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of the Chorus,

"Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a woman, and as a first offering for the fleet: and the chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her supplications and her cries to her father, and her maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid, high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth, a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles and strength which allowed no vent to her cry."

The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.

Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Seven against Thebes_:

"And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas!

alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their hair, while their vestments are rent about their persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries of children at the breast all b.l.o.o.d.y resound, and there is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against these all-mournful sorrows."

For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as they are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women, but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In _The Persians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which emphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius, consort of the Persians, G.o.d and mother of a G.o.d thou art," while Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words: "I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has been left empty."

We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a "man-detesting host of Amazons;" of fifty virgins fleeing from incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands'

throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one's own rank. In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only one noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality--the injunction of Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are travelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, as Danaus adds--characterizing the coa.r.s.eness and lack of chivalry of the men--violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, "and on the fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that pa.s.ses by sends forth a melting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire." Masculine coa.r.s.eness and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as Aeschylus--in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of Eteocles:

"O ye abominations of the wise. Neither in woes nor in welcome prosperity may I be a.s.sociated with woman-kind; for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one can live with; and when affrighted she is still a greater mischief to her home and city."

WOMAN AND LOVE IN SOPHOCLES

Unlike his predecessor, Sophocles did not hesitate, it seems, to bring "a woman in love" on the stage. Not, it is true, in any one of the seven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three he is said to have written. But there are in existence some fragments of his _Phaedra_, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on as the "first tragedy of love." It has, however, nothing to do with what we know as either romantic or conjugal love, but is simply the story of the adulterous and incestuous infatuation of Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus. It is at the same time one of the many stories ill.u.s.trating the whimsical, hypocritical, and unchivalrous att.i.tude of the early Greeks of always making woman the sinful aggressor and representing man as being coyly reserved (see Rohde, 34-35). The infatuation of Phaedra is correctly described (_fr_., 611, 607 Dind.) as a [Greek: Theaelatos nosos]--a maddening disease inflicted by an angry G.o.ddess.