Interest and light thus together were focused upon the climax of the tragedy. Leaving the light, and with it love and hope and life, behind him, _Oedipus_ descended the steps of the palace, leaning upon the shoulder of a slave, and moved toward the thickening shadows. Watching after him with a profoundly sorrowful intensity was the group upon the stage: a gorgeous mass of warm colour, broken by dashes of gleaming white and bathed in a golden glow. Slowly, painfully, along that rough and troublous way, into an ever-deepening obscurity merging into darkness irrevocable, the blinded king went onward toward the outer wilderness where would be spent the dreary remnant of his broken days. Feeling his way through the tangled bushes; stumbling, almost falling, over the blocks of stone; at times halting, and in his desperate sorrow raising his hands imploringly toward the gods whose foreordered curse had fallen upon him because of his foreordered sin, he went on and on: while upon the great auditorium there rested an ardent silence which seemed even to still the beatings of the eight thousand hearts. And when, passing into the black depths of the broken archway, the last faint gleam of his white drapery vanished, and the strain relaxed which had held the audience still and silent, there came first from all those eager breasts--before the roar of applause which rose and fell, and rose again, and seemed for a while to be quite inextinguishable--a deep-drawn sigh. X "Antigone," played on the second evening--being a gentler tragedy than "Oedipus," and conceived in a spirit more in touch with our modern times--was received with a warmer enthusiasm. No doubt to the Greeks, to whom its religious motive was a living reality, "Oedipus" was purely awe-inspiring; but to us, for whom the religious element practically has no existence, the intrinsic qualities of the plot are so repellent that the play is less awe-inspiring than horrible. And even in Grecian times, I fancy--human nature being the same then as now in its substrata--"Antigone," with its conflict between mortals, must have appealed more searchingly to human hearts than ever "Oedipus" could have appealed with its conflict between a mortal and the gods. Naturally, we are in closer sympathy with the righteous defiance of a man by a woman--both before our eyes, passionately flaming with strong antagonistic emotions--than we are with a man's unrighteous defiance of abstract and invisible Fate.