Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/23

 It occupies ten pages, and in it the writer gives as much general information of a biographical and critical nature as was available at the time. He repudiates the calumnies of the comic writers of later centuries, such as Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus and Timocles, who by the way are known only by very scanty references, and he traces the Phaon legend to its Ovidian source. He mentions Welcker’s important essay published in 1816, “Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreit,” this being a successful effort to clear away the obloquy for which willing credulity and a certain foul-mindedness among these comic writers had supplied the foundations upon which a later superstructure of scandal rested. Higginson’s estimate of Sappho’s genius was one of enthusiastic appreciation, and he subjects Mure, the sour Scot, to a number of hard, but not too hard, knocks for his narrow-minded and unreasoning support of these comic writers. He offers versions in English of practically all the fragments known up to the time when he wrote, the Hymn, as might be expected, being the most ambitious effort, and of this he says, “it is safe to say that there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic structure inspired more enthusiasm than this.” He devotes a page to the legend of the Leucadian rock and treats it, as far as Sappho is concerned, as of little account and insubstantial. He also discusses the question whether such a poem as the Hymn to Aphrodite is in any way autobiographical. There should not, however, be any difficulty in arriving at a conclusion in this respect. The poem may be autobiographical, but is probably not so in the ordinary sense. It represents perhaps the autobiography of a poetic mood, a mood evanescent and transitory which no more represents autobiography in the ordinary sense than do Hamlet's introspective musings or the malign meditations of Iago.

In 1885, H. T. Wharton published his “Sappho,” a choice example of bookmaking, a careful general biblio-