Isles, in particular, it had been carried
to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of
assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate,
minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity,
imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the
fixed forms and restricted measures. The very metropolis of this lyric
realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples,
the sunlit silver of the fountains, the hyacinth gardens by a soft blue
sea, Beauty and Love in their young warmth could fuse the most rigid forms
to fluency. Here Sappho was the acknowledged queen of song--revered,
studied, imitated, served, adored by a little court of attendants and
disciples, loved and hymned by Alcaeus, and acclaimed by her fellow
craftsmen throughout Greece as the wonder of her age. That all the tributes
of her contemporaries show reverence not less for her personality than for
her genius is sufficient answer to the calumnies with which the ribald
jesters of that later period, the corrupt and shameless writers of Athenian
comedy, strove to defile her fame. It is sufficient, also, to warrant our
regarding the picturesque but scarcely dignified story of her vain pursuit
of Phaon and her frenzied leap from the Cliff of Leucas as nothing more
than a poetic myth, reminiscent, perhaps, of the myth of Aphrodite and
Adonis--who is, indeed, called Phaon in some versions. The story is further
discredited by the fact that we find no mention of it in Greek literature--
even among those Attic comedians who would have clutched at it so eagerly
and given it so gross a turn--till a date more than two hundred years after
Sappho's death. It is a myth which has begotten some exquisite literature,
both in prose and verse, from Ovid's famous epistle to Addison's gracious
fantasy and some impassioned and imperishable dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne;
but one need not accept the story as a fact in order to appreciate the
beauties which flowered out from its coloured unreality.

The applause of contemporaries, however, is not always justified by the
verdict of after-times, and does not always secure an immortality of
renown. The fame of Sappho has a more stable basis. Her work was in the
world's possession for not far short of a thousand years--a thousand years
of changing tastes, searching criticism, and familiar use. It had to endure
the wear and tear of quotation