Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/22

 credit is given to him for doing “brilliant justice to her deathless genius.” Arnold rejects the Leucadian rock legend as well as the alleged Phaon episode. His translation of the immortal hymn into English Sapphic metre is easily the best up to the time of its appearance, and is only rivalled by that of J. A. Symonds, first printed in Wharton’s edition of the poetess. The rhythm and the majestic lyrical qualities of the original are preserved in this rendering, but naturally something must be lost by the transfer of such a masterpiece from its original into any language. Arnold also gives translations of nine other fragments, and adds a number of illuminating comments. J. A. Symonds’ own work, “Studies of the Greek Poets” which passed through several editions is almost entirely historical and critical, not being much concerned with translations into English. Arnold was happily able to shake himself entirely free from the effect of the scandals which he so justly condemns, but, as we have seen, the earlier writers, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were too easily led astray in this particular. Donne’s works afford an example of how difficult or perhaps impossible it was for even great writers to escape the effects of such scandalous traditions. They were far too ready to accept these stories, and to use them in connection with Sappho as a peg on which to hang some gaudy product of their licentious imaginations. Donne’s poem, published in 1633 and entitled “Sapho to Philaenis” is an instance. It is as impossible to deny to Donne the possession of poetic instinct, as it is to assume that he had any particular tendency to exploit the indecent, so we must explain such poems as this by his ignorance of Greek and of all that concerned Sappho, except the unpleasant tradition which her name connoted at the time when he wrote. Some modern writers have also been guilty of the same sort of thing.

An important article on Sappho appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” for July 1871, by T. W. Higginson.