Her martyrdom is correspondingly more moving, not because it is graphically described, but because it seems inexorable. Celia’s illumination is also characterized by a sense of having failed another person. In The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, respectively, Harry and Celia experience a sense of having sinned and the desire to atone.
In almost all of his plays, Eliot presents characters on a continuum of spiritual understanding, including the martyr or saint figure, the “guardians” (the spiritual advisers), the common folk (capable of limited perception or at least of accommodation), and the uncomprehending. For example, Becket’s understanding, in Murder in the Cathedral, that salvation is a willing submission to a larger pattern is developed and tempered in the later social comedies. Modern religious drama, Eliot believed, “should be able to hold the interest, to arouse the excitement, of people who are not religious.” Redemption is the theme of all of his plays, a theme explored on different levels. In Sweeney Agonistes, he made use of the rhythms of vaudeville, believing that such robust entertainment contained the seeds of a popular drama of high artistic quality, comparable to the achievements of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. On the other hand, he created new verse forms, convinced that traditional forms such as Shakespearean blank verse would be inadequate to express modern experience. In consequence, Eliot relied on a number of traditional forms, including the Mass and Greek drama. Eliot’s conservative dramaturgy is clearly expressed in his 1928 essay “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” in which he suggests that “genuine drama” displays “a tension between liturgy and realism.” To be sure, Eliot differed sharply from the advocates of Ibsenite realism, maintaining throughout his career that untrammeled realism operating outside the limitations of art did not produce classic harmony.
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