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Updated: June 1, 2025
Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building imitate any part of reality?
And, though it is to this that we owe the noble "Antigone," "Oedipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of Æschylus's "Eumenides."
Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be everything in the country.
And now, I think, our business is done; you'll keep to your side of the bargain about the Oedipus and Antigone?" "I will do my best," said Tito on this strong hint, immediately moving towards the door. "And you'll let me know at Nello's. No need to come here again." "I understand," said Tito, laughingly, lifting his hand in sign of friendly parting.
Thought is a solitary, wandering, fugitive force, which advances towards us today and perhaps on the morrow will vanish, whereas every deed presupposes a permanent army of ideas and desires which have, after lengthy effort, secured foot-hold in reality. But we find ourselves here far away from the noble Antigone and the eternal problem of unproductive virtue.
It is only in the Passion of Christ, the Phaedo, Prometheus, the murder of Orpheus, the sacrifice of Antigone it is only in these that we find the drama of the sage, the solitary drama of wisdom. But elsewhere it is rarely indeed that tragic poets will allow a sage to appear on the scene, though it be for an instant.
When Europe was aroused from the slumber of the Middle Ages and the spiritual authority which had governed it for centuries was shattered, the same right of resistance as that which Antigone claimed was insisted upon by various reformers.
The Roman school does not stand well, but in statuary it is better. A young American artist, Mr. Harnisch, seemed to me to be doing the most creditable work. His busts have already given him reputation, and he has a figure now in plaster, "Antigone," which I rate as the best classical statue in process of completion which we saw.
It was no secret that his stories of ancient Greece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom; yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applause on the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with the censorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing his plays at Siena.
We have passive resisters, conscientious objectors, strikers and a host of young and imperfectly educated persons, some armed with the very serious power of voting, who claim to set their wills in flat opposition to recognised authority. One or two contributions to the solution of this problem may be found in the Antigone.
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