36 £... Prye 
pulsion. Her only abettor is her conscience. She acts of her 
own accord and by the exigency of her own nature. 
But after all the clearest illustration of Sophocles’ conception 
of the tragic as something intimate and essential is to be found 
in neither of these pieces but in the Antigone. Ethic I was 
about to call it. And for that matter what is the source of 
tragedy in the Antigone but the collision of an ethic with a moral 
principle—of the fatal propensities of character with the pre- 
scriptions of social or civil expediency or necessity? It is the 
usual Sophoclean theme, the theme of Oedipus and Electra; but 
it comes out here more distinctly than elsewhere on account 
of what appears to us the superior sanctity of the former, the 
individual principle—or rather, probably, on account of the com- 
parative insignificance of the latter. And yet in view of the 
Greek’s devotion to his city—a devotion for which, narrow, 
shortsighted, and suicidal though we esteem it, he showed him- 
self willing again and again to sacrifice every advantage and 
undergo every hardship, I can not make so light of Antigone’s 
contempt of what to her countrymen was patriotism as do many 
critics for whose opinions I usually feel the greatest deference. 
What else was her conduct in Greek eyes than treasonable? And 
little as we are at a point of view to appreciate this sentiment 
(though this is by no means the only instance on record of sec- 
tional or parochial animosity or of the obliquy incurred by non- 
adherents of local or party politics) I still believe that Antigone’s 
disloyalty to the polity—or what was bound to seem such in the 
heat of a great public excitement—must have been a scandal to a 
Greek audience, which was, on the other hand, in no less favour- 
able disposition of spirit, in comparison with us, to sympathize 
with her religious scruples as distinct from the purely personal 
pathos of her condition and being. And so it is, I believe, that 
Sophocles intended her to appear—like other tragic protagonists, 
as an object of horror no less than of pity ; otherwise there would 
be something gratuitous in the extraordinary severity which 
characterizes his chief magistrate, by her attitude to whom, as 
the representative of the government, Antigone’s faithlessness 
to the commonwealth is dramatically measured. To be sure, 
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