Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/268

244 lover Hæmon, son of Creon, intercedes for her: both in vain. Hæmon forces his way into the tomb where she has been immured alive, finds her dead, and slays himself.

Apart from the beauty of detail, especially in the language, one of the marks of daring genius in this play is Antigone's vagueness about the motive or principle of her action: it is because her guilty brother's cause was just; because death is enough to wipe away all offences; because it is not her nature to join in hating, though she is ready to join in loving (l. 523); because an unburied corpse offends the gods; because her own heart is really with the dead, and she wishes to go to her own. In one passage she explains, in a helpless and pathetically false way, that she only buries him because he is her brother; she would not have buried her husband or son! It is absolutely true to life in a high sense; like Beatrice Cenci, she "cannot argue: she can only feel." And another wonderful touch is Antigone's inability to see the glory of her death: she is only a weak girl cruelly punished for a thing which she was bound to do. She thinks the almost religious admiration of the elders is mockery (l. 839).

Creon also is subtly drawn. He is not a monster, though he has to act as one. He has staked his whole authority upon his edict. Finding it disobeyed, he has taken a position from which it is almost impossible to retreat. Then it appears that his niece is the culprit. It is hard for him to eat up his words forthwith; and she gives him no faintest excuse for doing so. She defies him openly with a deep dispassionate contempt. Ismênê, bold in the face of a real crisis, joins her sister; his own son Hæmon, at first moderate, becomes