Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/281

 our old habits and customs, breaks the thin radiance of new truth. His last and highest function, his divinely dangerous function, committed to him by the great society, is to promulgate the new law in despite of the old one, and, by every power of imaginative representation at his command, to make it prevail from end to end of society, and govern in the ideas and emotions of men. His function, in short, is precisely that performed by Sophocles in his Antigone. You will recall that, after the war against Thebes, Creon, the governor, a precisian and a formalist, ordered the body of Polyneices, who had made war against the city, to be left in the fields to be devoured by the dogs, with penalty of death for disobedience. Antigone, the sister of Polyneices, one of those marvellous women of ancient tragedy, who are vessels incandescent with divine light, recognizes a natural law of kinship and humanity above the law of the state, and in defiance of Creon resolves to go out and perform the last services for the dead. To her sister who tries to dissuade her she says: