The Theory of Greek Tragedy 37 
such asperity is natural enough to a person or a people in the 
reaction succeeding immediately upon a tremendous crisis. But 
if that were all, if the point were merely psychological, Sophocles 
would hardly have been so careful to restore the equilibrium by 
meting out a final judgment to Creon for exceeding the just 
measure. There is no doubt, it seems to me, about his intention; 
he will not countenance contempt of the supreme impersonal law 
on the part of an individual whatever his or her title on other 
grounds to admiration or respect; for “value dwells not in par- 
ticular will.” 
But at the same time, while Antigone fits the framework of its 
genre and is no exception to the general definition of Greek 
tragedy, I am well aware that for us to-day, whose ideas of re- 
ligious and civic duty are so different, such an interpretation 
must seem far fetched and forced. Indeed, there is no tragedy, 
I fancy, even of the Greeks, with respect to whose moral bases 
we are at such a disadvantage. The burial motive is as remote 
from our instinct as the cult of the city; we are as unfitted to 
respond to the one as to the other. It is the person of the 
heroine almost exclusively that appeals to us. Elementally she 
is not the representative of any special duty or set of duties— 
though if she were not sustained by a sense of duty, she would 
not be the noble and touching figure she is. For our emotions 
it is not the mere political and social crux which makes the play— 
this is but the vehicle; it is the case of conscience. What renders 
the tragedy peculiarly affecting among the tragedies of Sophocles, 
what gives it its specific favour is not merely the bare dilemma— 
the consciousness of rectitude which can neither surrender its 
convictions without shame nor persist in them without ruin, but 
the nature of the protagonist—her sex and youth, her ill-omened 
birth and her attachment to the son of her executioner. No 
wonder that she has become for the modern one of the great 
sympathetic characters of literature, like Cordelia, and her tragedy 
a sentimental one. 
On the other hand, while Sophocles holds the scales even— 
while he gives the ethical and the moral elements alike their due 
—to the heroine’s womanliness its meed of compassionate admi- 
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