BOOKS.
THE NEW ANTIGONE.* Tuts is, in truth, a romance, and not a novel,—and a romance of considerable power. The strength of it lies not in the con- ception or the painting of individual character, but in the strong grasp laid by the author on the tragic side of modern doubts and denials, and the retribution which they are capable of working upon the society which is pervaded by them. The motto chosen from the Antigone of Sophocles is, indeed, much more applicable to the heroine of this tale than to Antigone herself. Antigone went to the utmost limits of audacity only in vindicating her sisterly right to comply with an immemorial custom of burial which had obtained the authority of a pious religious observance rather through the instinct than the reason of mankind. As is observed in the course of this romance, " Antigone died the martyr of a custom," and of one which, though it had the name of a pious custom, could hardly compare for a moment in sacredness with the religious authority which marriage gives to the tie between man and woman that is essential to con- stitute a family. Now the modern Antigone shows the extent of her audacity not by observing any pions custom, but by violating this highest of natural pieties in deference to the teaching of a father who has broken with religion. She refuses to lend the sanction of marriage to her relation with her lover, though he is utterly horrified at the thought of dispensing with it, and she threatens rather to put an end to her life altogether than to comply with what she then regards as the false superstition of Christian teaching. Thus, while she too, like the Antigone of Sophocles, "strikes against the lofty pedestal of law and justice," it is divine law and justice against which she is broken, not, as in the case of the original Antigone, the mere arbitrary law of a tyrant's decree. And seeing that the modern heroine is expiating her father's sins in a much deeper
sense than any in which that phrase could apply to the Antigone of Sophocles, for the new Antigone applies in practice the evil teaching which had been sedulously enforced upon her with all a father's authority, it must be admitted that the true motive of tragedy, the exposition of the mystery of retribution, is
more adequately embodied, to our modem conceptions at all events, in this story, than in that of the heroine of Sophocles, great play. The power of the romance consists, indeed, in the delineation, first, of the unswerving fidelity with which * The Noe Antigone; a Romance. 3 Tole. London Macmillan and Co. the new Antigone embraces her father's revolutionary creed, and thrusts it upon her lover, and next, of the rebellion of the outraged woman's instincts, so soon as she finds to what horrors
this creed of free love actually leads in the practical life of the world. The only flaw, so far as we can judge, in this part of the book, is that this new Antigone is not consistent with her- self in consenting to assume the name and outward bearing of a married woman. One who could have rejected the reality of marriage with so much disdain would certainly have disdained also the conventional disguise. The outcome of the very fine scene in the second volume of which the following passage is the opening, could never have been Hippolyta's consent to pretend
to act the falsehood, the real acceptance of which she had so indignantly rejected :— "There was silence in the room. They could neither of them speak or move in the flood of happiness which came over them. Hippolyta was the first to release herself, and go back to her former attitude by the fire. She waited for him to take up the conversation.Then mid Rupert with a pleasant laugh, sinking back into the chair by the easel, 'I must get a special license as early as I can—to-morrow morning, if possible.'—Hippolyta gave him a curious smiling look. 'Who grants you the special license ?' she asked.—' I don't know, I am sure,' ho answered. 'I am not learned in these things. I fancy it is the Archbishop of Canterbary.'—' Do you believe in the Arch- bishop of Canterbury ?' she inquired, still smiling. He, too, smiled at the question on her lips at such a time.—' Not a great deal,' ho said ; 'but he is an institution, a piece of antiquity. And we cannot be married without him.'—' Can we not r she said. 'What a strange thing that would be ! No, Rupert, we do not want the Archbishop's license, or any one else's.' The words sounded strangely on her lover's ear.—' You are excited, Hippolyta,' he said, 'and it makes you talk in a fanciful way. I care nothing for the license. We can be married by banns, in the old fashion, if you like ; but it will take more time, and you will have to be called by Mr. Truscombe in Trelingham Church.'—' Not in any church,' was her firm reply.'Listen, Rupert, I are you do not understand me yet. I love you with my whole heart, but I have not ceased to be Hippolyta Valence. Do you know how I have been brought up ? I am not a Christian ; I have no religion, except to follow my conscience ; to live the highest life and help towards realising the noblest ideas. My father has taught me that all religions debase them. And do you imagine it would become my father's daughter, at the very moment he is staking his life in the battle for the future, to stand at a Christian altar and submit to in. stitutions which he and I have renounced ? I will never do such a thing.'—' But my dear, dear Hippolyta,' be cried in amazement, 'it is only a ceremony. It can do you no harm.'—' Yes, it can do me this harm—that I shall be acting a falsehood. I have neither regard for the Christian ceremonies nor belief in the creed they express. — 'Bat surely you believe in the sacredness of wedlock.'—' I believe in the sacredness of love, but I will have no priest to utter his super- stitious formulas over my head, or recite legends to which I most hearken while despising them, or pretend that you and I may not consecrate our bearte to one another without his leave. Nor will I submit to any civil ordinance. To bind myself before man would be more foolish even than to take an oath in the presence of a God I do not believe in. Why should you care, Rupert You think really as I do; and yet you are the slave of old customs. Are we not alone in the world, simply given into each other's hands by nature and destiny? Can a priest bid you cease to love me, or change our feelings ? Here is the marriage of true minds. Can he allege an impediment against it ?' " It seems to us that for one who announced such principles, and was willing to destroy herself, if her lover repudiated them, rather than go through with him a religious rite in which she did not believe, to have tamely acquiesced in the attempt to deceive the world into the belief that
she had gone through that rite, and was entitled to all the respect which Christians accord to it, was a depth of humilia- tion to which such a one as Hippolyta would never have submitted. This is the chief flaw which we find in the ground-conception of this romance, but it seems to us a very serious flaw. Could Hippolyta, if she bad been so willing as she is to take all the outward advantages of an insincerity
which she professed to loathe, have really been resolved to die rather than commit the insincerity of which she took all the credit ? A woman, too, who, when she felt how deep and sacred were the instincts she had outraged, could thirst to expiate her sin as she does, would have been too sincere even in the stage of revolt to consent to the deception which she then practised. In the selfish fever of that expiation, she might perhaps have abandoned the lover whom she had tempted into a con- nection without marriage, in the somewhat heartless way she
did, without even letting him know that her eyes had been opened, and that she regarded their life together as one of deadly
sin, though it seems to us that this silent abandonment was distinctly a selfish proceeding, and that she was bound to let him whom she had loved know why she had left him, and how deeply she condemned herself for what she had done. But even if she feared herself too much, when her eyes were opened, to risk any farther communication with her lover, she evidently did not fear herself at all while she was still confident in her revolutionary heathenism; and with courage like hers, the cowardice that made her accept the shelter of a rite she despised, would have been impossible.
That part of the book which is devoted to illustrate the Nemesis of the more violent, though not more subversive article of the revolutionary creed,—the revolt against law and order,—is perhaps hardly so impressive as that which concerns the modern Antigone, though in the sketch of Hippolyta's half-brother, Ivor, the anonymous author has more nearly succeeded in drawing a distinct character than in any other part of his story. Ivor's diary is, to our mind, one of the best parts of the book. Still, it is not possible to make of the story of the son who passionately rejects the more dangerous and subversive side of his father's teaching, so impressive a picture as is made of the fate of the enthusiastic daughter who passionately accepts just that part of the creed which is most deadly for her own moral safety. Still, the story of Ivor's revolt against his father's creed, and of the difficulties into which it brings him with the anarchists who heartily embrace that creed, is very effectively told; and the scene where the older revolutionist, bringing the news to his Society of the Czar's murder, is confronted with the younger one who does not believe in dynamite or assassination, and is not aware that the man whose doctrines he is denouncing is his own father, is a very impressive one.
Take this romance as a whole, and we are disposed to think that it may do more to make negative thinkers realise that their negative creed can never found a new and better order of things, though it must, if it spread far enough, utterly subvert the order now existing, than any amount of elaborate argument. There is an imaginative breadth about the book, and a distinc- tion of style, which prove that this romance is the work of a mind of no mean order. The writer is evidently a Catholic, but a Catholic who has a very deep insight into the higher and nobler side of revolutionary creeds, and who portrays them without caricature, and without denying a certain nobility, as well as sincerity, to many of those who hold and propagate them.
We must say a word as to the romantic framework of this tale, which gives it a considerable portion of its interest and moral effect,—we mean the manner in which the tradition con- cerning the Madonna of San Lncar, and the fate of that picture itself, axe connected with the family of the Earl of Trelingham, and with the destructive propaganda of the revo- lutionary Colonel Valence. No doubt this part of the story is not very probable, and the melodramatic crowding of the stage at the tragic close, in the precincts of the old Spanish monastery, is still less so. But one does not desire probability in a romance, but only dignity, and, if possible, something of grandeur in the framework of the romantic incidents; and this, we think, the writer has amply secured. It is a story which steadily increases in interest from the middle of the second volume to the close, and which leaves on the mind an impression of artistic power.
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