Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.