The moral purity of Sappho shines in its own light. She expresses herself, no doubt, in very passionate language, but passionate purity is a finer article than the purity of prudery, and Sappho’s passionate expressions are always under the control of her art. A woman of bad character and certainly a woman of such a variety of bad character as scandal (cf. p. 128 and note 147) has attributed to Sappho might express herself passionately and might run on indefinitely with erotic imagery. But Sappho is never erotic. There is no language to be found in her songs which a pure woman might not use, and it would be practically impossible for a bad woman to subject her expressions to the marvellous niceties of rhythm, accent, and meaning which Sappho everywhere exhibits. Immorality and loss of self-control never subject themselves to perfect literary and artistic taste. It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices which defy the moral instinct and throw the soul into disorder, practices which harden and petrify the soul, should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought. The nature of things does not admit of such an inconsistency. Sappho’s love for flowers, moreover, affords another luminous testimony. A bad woman as well as a pure woman might love roses, but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field, the dainty anthrysc and the clover, as Sappho did. There is, moreover, in a life of vice something narrowing as well as coarsening. An imagination which like Sappho’s sees in a single vision the moonlight sweeping the sea, breaking across the shore and illuminating wide stretches of landscape with life-giving light, and in the midst of all this far-spreading glory sees and personifies the spirit of the night, listening to the moanings of homesickness and repeating them with far-flung voice to those across the sea,—an imagination with such a marvellous range as this is never given to the child of sodden vice. Here once more is a woman who made it her life business to adorn and even to glorify lawful wedlock, and carried on this occupation in a sympathetic and delightful strain of dance and song which, however passionate in their expression, contain no impure words. It is simply unthinkable that such a woman should be perpetually destroying the very foundations of her own ideals. IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO