Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[313] and that the decline of literature began with lyric poetry. “A ready subjection,” he says, “to the fascinations of the inferior order of their species can hardly be a solid basis of renown for kings or heroes.” Such a critic could hardly be expected to look with favor upon one who not only chose an inferior order of themes, but had the temerity to belong to an inferior order herself.

Apart from this, I am unable to see that this writer brings forward anything to disturb the verdict of abler scholars. He does not indeed claim to produce any direct evidence of his proposition that Sappho was a corrupt woman, and her school at Lesbos a nursery of sins; but he seeks to show this indirectly, through a minute criticism of her writings. Into this he carries, I regret to say, an essential coarseness of mind, like that of Voltaire, which delights to torture the most innocent phrases till they yield a double meaning. He reads these graceful fragments as the sailors in some forecastle might read Juliet's soliloquies, or as a criminal lawyer reads in court the letters of some warm-hearted woman; the shame lying not in the words, but in the tongue. The manner in which he gloats over the scattered lines of a wedding song, for instance, weaving together the phrases and supplying the innuendoes, is enough to rule him out of the class of pure-minded men. But besides this quality of coarseness, he shows a serious want of candor. For though he admits that Sappho first introduced into literature (in her Epithalamia) a dramatic movement, yet he never gives her the benefit of this dramatic attitude except where it suits his own argument. It is as if one were to cite Browning into court and undertake to convict him, on his own confession, of sharing every mental condition he describes.

What, then, was this Lesbian school that assembled