eek irony. In the drama, the audience must know
the truth when the actors do not know it. That is
where the drama is truly democratic: not because
the audience shouts, but because it knows--and is
silent. Now I do quite seriously think it is a
weakness in a play like _Magic_ that the audience
is not in the central secret from the start. Mr.
G. S. Street put the point with his usual unerring
simplicity by saying that he could not help
feeling disappointed with the Conjuror because he
had hoped he would turn into the Devil.

A few additions may easily be made to the first batch of criticisms.
Patricia's welcome to her brother is not what a long-lost brother might
expect. There is really no satisfactory reason for the Doctor's
continued presence. Patricia and Morris can only be half Irish by blood,
unless it is possible to become Irish by residence. Why should the
Conjuror rehearse his patter out in the wet? Surely the Duke's house
would contain a spare room? Where did the Conjuror go, at the end of the
Third Act, in the small hours of the morning? And so on.

But these are little things that do not matter in an allegory. For in
_Magic_ "things are not what they seem." The Duke is a modern man. He is
also the world, the flesh, and the devil. He has no opinions, no
positive religion, no brain. He believes in his own tolerance, which is
merely his fatuousness. He follows the line of least resistance, and
makes a virtue of it. He sits on the fence, but he will never come off.
The Clergyman is the church of to-day, preaching the supernatural, but
unwilling to recognize its existence at close quarters. As somebody says
somewhere in _The Wisdom of Father Brown_, "If a miracle happened in
your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops are
atheists." The Doctor is a less typical figure. He is the
inconsistencies of science, kindly but with little joy of life, and
extremely Chestertonian, which is to say unscientific. Morris is the
younger generation, obsessed with business and getting on, and
intellectually incapable of facing a religious fact. Patricia is the
Chestertonian good woman, too essentially domestic to be ever
fundamentally disturbed. The Conjuror, if not the Devil, is at any rate
that inexplicable element in all life which most people do not see.

Nevertheless there is a flaw in _Magic_ which really is ser