Purgatory

PURGATORY THE DUAl-ISM OF SOUL AND BODY which runs through Yeats' poetry is almost as plainly marked in his work for the theatre. At the root of his lifelong scorn of naturalism was the dislike of a religious mind for an art that denies the primacy of the supernatural. His problem, therefore, as a dramatist was to find a form that would admit this primacy without rejecting the life of the passions and the senses. This problem could emerge only gradually, as Yeats' awareness of the natural world grew to a conviction of its reality and value. In his plays this conviction is reached in On Baile's Strand. The problem, however, remains unsolved-its difficulties, indeed, only now become apparent: how to give passion dramatic expression without trapping the soul in character, and how to affirm. a world opposed at once to the supernatural and, by its naturalness, to the formality of art. Not until Purgatory are these difficulties resolved. "In my play," Yeats told the press, "a spirit suffers for its share, when alive, in the destruction of an honoured house. The destruction is taking place all over Ireland today." The strength of Yeats' feeling for the aristocratic culture which he saw being submerged in Ireland may account in part for the vehemence of the writing: Great people lived and died in this house; Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, Captains and governors, and long ago Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne. The whole passage has the vigour that animates the prefatory verses for Responsibilities written more than twenty years before. But the sin for which the spirit suffers is specifically lust, a marriage made not from love but from desire. Its purgatory is therefore to live again and again through the wedding night: Butthere's a problem: she must live Through everything in exact detail, Driven to it by remorse, and yet Can she renew the sexual act And find no pleasure in it, and if not, Ifpleasure and remorse must both be there, Which is the greater? This conception of purgatory as a reliving by the soul of the sins of its life on earth Yeats held to firmly. In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley he quotes from a speech he made after the first production: "I have put nothing into the play because it seemed picturesque; I have put 397 398 MODERN DRAMA February there my own conviction about this world and the next." In The Words Upon the Windowpane Dr. Trench had voiced this conviction: Sometimes a spirit relives not the pain of death but some passionate or tragic moment of life. . . . If I were a Catholic I would say that such spirits were in Purgatory. In vain do we write requiescat in pace upon the tomb, for they must suffer, and we in turn must suffer until God gives peace. The reliving of such a moment is often the central action of the Noh plays Yeats had studied. In Purgatory, however, the spirit that suffers is silent, and the action centres on the struggle of the Old Man to release his mother from the agony of living repeatedly through her sin: . . . they know at last The consequence of those transgressions Whether upon others or upon themselves; Upon others, others may bring help, For when the consequence is at an end The dream must end; if upon themselves There is no help but in themselves And in the mercy of God. On the wedding night was conceived the Old Man who was to murder his father and who stands now by the gutted house with the final consequence of the sin, his own son. He stabs the boy, and for a moment can believe that he has freed his mother's spirit: Study that tree. It stands there like a purified soul, All cold, sweet, glistening light. Dear mother, the window is dark again, But you are in the light because I finished all that consequence. I killed that lad because had he grown up He would have struck a woman's fancy, Begot, and passed pollution on. But the hoof-beats that will inaugurate again the spirit's agony return...