Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/42

 irony; in each case suffering is inflicted by the gods, but through this the sufferer passes to a higher state. Athene, the pretended ally of Ajax, humbles him even to death; but this death is a complete atonement, and his immortal fame as a canonized hero begins from the burial with which the drama closes. In the "Œdipus Tyrannus" the primary contrast is between the seeming prosperity and the really miserable situation of the king. A secondary contrast runs through the whole process of inquiry which leads up to the final discovery. The truth is gradually evolved from those very incidents which display or even exalt the confidence of Œdipus. In the "Œdipus at Colonus" this contrast is reversed. The Theban king is old, blind, poor, an outcast, a wanderer. But he has the inward sense of a strength which can no more be broken; of a vision clearer than that of the bodily eye; of a spiritual change which has made a sorrow a possession; of approach to final rest.

It is, however, in the two remaining plays, the "Antigone" and the "Philoctetes," that this irony of drama takes its most subtle and most artistic form. Antigone buries Polyneices against the law of the land; Creon dooms her to death, and thereby drives his own son to suicide. But the issue is not a simple conflict between state-law and religious duty. It is a conflict between state-law too harshly enforced and natural affection set above the laws. Creon is right in the letter and wrong in the spirit; Antigone is right in the spirit and wrong in the