But it could be, and was, for the time being forgotten--as the play went
on with a smooth perfection, and with a constantly increasing dramatic
force, as the action strengthened and quickened in accord always with
the requirements of dramatic art.
Without any apparent effort to secure picturesque effect, with a
grouping seemingly wholly unstudied and always natural, the stage
presented a series of pictures ideal in their balance of mass, and in
their colour and tone, while the turning off and on of the electric
lights produced effects analogous to those in music when the soft and
hard pedals are used to give to the more tender passages an added grace
and delicacy, and to the stronger passages a more brilliant force. And
always, be it remembered, the play thus presented was one of the most
tenderly beautiful tragedies possessed by the world, and the players--by
natural fitness and by training--were perfect in their art.
Presently came the end--not a climax of action; not, in one sense, a
climax at all. With a master-touch, Sophocles has made the end of
"Antigone" the dead after-calm of evil action--a desolate despair.
Slowly the group upon the stage melted away. _Creon_, with his hopeless
cry upon his lips, "Death! Death! Only death!" moved with a weary
languor toward the palace and slowly disappeared in the darkness beyond
the ruined portal. There was a pause before the chorus uttered its final
solemn words. And then--not as though obeying a stage direction, but
rather as though moved severally by the longing in their own breasts to
get away from that place of sorrow--those others also departed: going
slowly, in little groups and singly, until at last the stage was bare.
The audience was held bound in reality by the spell which had seemed to
bind the chorus after _Creon's_ exit. Some moments passed before that
spell was broken, before the eight thousand hearts beat normally again
and the eight thousand throats burst forth into noisy applause--which
was less, perhaps, an expression of gratitude for an artistic creation
rarely equalled than of the natural rebound of the spirit after so tense
a strain. In another moment the seats were emptied and the multitude was
flowing down the tiers--a veritable torrent of humanity--into the pit:
there to be packed for a while in a solid mass before it could work its
way out through the insufficient exits and so return again to our modern
world.
And then the Roman Theatre--with a fresh legend of beauty added to the
roll of its centuries--was left desert beneath the bright silence of the
eternal stars.
SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE,
_December, 1894._