olves, or
transported people on carpets to distant lands, or might be more simply
a play that dealt with Magic in the sense that there really was such a
thing.

The play was a success--I could see that it would be at the moment Mr.
Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had
not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far
as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real
phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned
the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public
shiver and think at the same time, an unusual combination.

I rather fancy that Magic is a theological argument, disguised in the
form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the
moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer
and may have also been a magician.

When I say that the play is really a theological one, I do not mean to
say that it has anything to do with the Thirty-Nine Articles, the
Validity of the Anglican Orders, or even the truth of the Virgin Birth;
rather it is about an indefinable 'something' that is so simple that it
is misunderstood by every one.

The play turns upon five people who are thrown together in a room that
has a nasty habit of becoming ghostly at times.

The five people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in
anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical
clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are
proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a
fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which
is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke
who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson to Bernard Shaw.

These five people are influenced by a Pied Piper kind of fellow who
calls himself a conjurer, and is rather too clever for the company.

Apparently the conjurer has been strolling about the garden when he
meets Patricia, who thinks he can produce fairies. In due course the
conjurer comes into the room, where he has encounters with the various
occupants, who don't believe in his tricks; the conjurer is unlucky
enough to meet the young American cad Morris Carleon, who is really
quite rude to the conjurer and discovers (so he thinks) all the tricks
except one in which the conjurer turns the red lamp at the doctor's gate
b