Hemon, the son of Creon, unable to save her life, kills himself upon her grave: but throughout the whole tragedy we are left in doubt whether Antigone does or does not return the affection of this devoted lover.
Thus it will be seen that in the Antigone there is a great deal of what may be called the effect of situation, as well as a great deal of poetry and character: she says the most beautiful things in the world, performs the most heroic actions, and all her words and actions are so placed before us as to command our admiration. According to the classical ideas of virtue and heroism, the character is sublime, and in the delineation there is a severe simplicity mingled with its Grecian grace, a unity, a grandeur, an elegance, which appeal to our taste and our understanding, while they fill and exalt the imagination: but in Cordelia it is not the external coloring or form, it is not what she says or does, but what she is in herself, what she feels, thinks, and suffers, which continually awaken our sympathy and interest. The heroism of Cordelia is more passive and tender—it melts into our heart; and in the veiled loveliness and unostentatious delicacy of her character, there is an effect more profound and artless, if it be less striking and less elaborate than in the Grecian heroine. To Antigone we give our admiration, to Cordelia our tears. Antigone stands before us in her austere and statue-like beauty, like one of the marbles of the Parthenon. If Cordelia reminds us of any thing on earth, it is of one of the Madonnas in the old Italian pictures, "with downcast eyes beneath th' almighty dove?" and as that heavenly form is connected with our human sympathies only by the expression of maternal tenderness or maternal sorrow, even so Cordelia would be almost too angelic, were she not linked to our earthly feelings, bound to our very hearts, by her filial love, her wrongs, her sufferings, and her tears.
FOOTNOTES:
——The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult of the soul.
Wordsworth.
"Il pouvait y avoir des vagues majestueuses et non de l'orage sans son cœur," was finely observed of Madame de Staël in her maturer years; it would have been true of Hermione at any period of her life.
[49] Winter's Tale, act v scene 11
[50] Only in the last scene, when, with solemnity befitting the occasion, Paulina invokes the majestic figure to "descend, and be stone no more," and where she presents her daughter to her. "Turn, good lady! our Perdita is found."
[51] Act iii, scene 3.
[52] Which being interpreted into modern English, means, I believe, nothing more than that the pattern was what we now call arabesque.