Doctor. Weren’t there as many who believed passionately in Apollo?

  Smith. And what harm came of believing in Apollo? And what a mass of harm may have come of not believing in Apollo? Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as irreligious mania? Is there no such thing in the house at this moment?

  Doctor. Then you think no one should question at all?

  Smith. [With passion, pointing to the next room.] I think that is what comes of questioning! Why can’t you leave the universe alone and let it mean what it likes? Why shouldn’t the thunder be Jupiter? More men have made themselves silly by wondering what the devil it was if it wasn’t Jupiter.

  Doctor. [Looking at him.] Do you believe in your own religion?

  Smith. [Returning the look equally steadily.] Suppose I don’t: I should still be a fool to question it. The child who doubts about Santa Claus has insomnia. The child who believes has a good night’s rest.

  Doctor. You are a Pragmatist.

  Smith. That is what the lawyers call vulgar abuse. But I do appeal to practice. Here is a family over which you tell me a mental calamity hovers. Here is the boy who questions everything and a girl who can believe anything. Upon whom has the curse fallen?

  At this point the curtain was made to fall on the Second Act. The Third and last Act takes place in the same room a few hours later. The Conjuror has packed his bag, and is going. The Doctor has been sitting up with the patient. Morris is in a more or less delirious state, and is continually asking how the trick was done. The Doctor believes that the explanation would satisfy the patient and would probably help him to turn the corner. But the Conjuror will not provide an explanation. He has many reasons, the most practical of which is that he would not be believed. The Duke comes in and tries to make a business matter of the secret, even to the extent of paying £2000 for it. Suddenly the Conjuror changes his mind. He will tell them how the trick was done, it was all very simple. “It is the simplest thing in the world. That is why you will not laugh. . . . I did it by magic.” The Doctor and the Duke are dumbfounded. Smith intervenes; he cannot accept the explanation. The Conjuror lets himself go, now he is voicing Chesterton’s views. The clergyman who merely believes in belief, as Smith does, will not do. He must believe in a fact, which is far more difficult.

  Conjuror. I say these things are supernatural. I say this is 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.

  Conjuror. Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

  Here Patricia enters. She wants to speak to the Conjuror, with whom she is left alone. A little love scene takes place: rather the result of two slightly sentimental and rather tired persons of different sexes being left alone than anything else. But they return to realities, with an effort. Patricia, too, wants to know how the trick was done, in order to tell her brother. He tells her, but she is of the world which cannot believe in devils, even although it may manage to accept fairies as an inevitable adjunct to landscape scenery by moonlight. In order to convince her the Conjuror tells her how he fell, how after dabbling in spiritualism he found he had lost control over himself. But he had resisted the temptation to make the devils his servants, until the impudence of Morris had made him lose his temper. Then he goes out into the garden to see if he can find some explanation to give Morris. The Duke, Smith, the Doctor, and the Secretary drift into the room, which is now tenanted by something impalpable but horrible. The Conjuror returns and clears the air with an exorcism. He has invented an explanation, which he goes out to give to Morris. Patricia announces that her brother immediately took a turn for the better. The Conjuror refuses to repeat the explanation he gave Morris, because if he did, “Half an hour after I have left this house you will all be saying how it was done.” He turns to go.

  Patricia. Our fairy tale has come to an end in the only way a fairy tale can come to an end. The only way a fairy tale can leave off being a fairy tale.

  Conjuror. I don’t understand you.

  Patricia. It has come true.

  And the curtain falls for the last time.

  No doubt Magic owed a great deal of its success to the admirable production of Mr. Kenelm Foss and the excellence of the cast. Miss Grace Croft was surely the true Patricia. Of the Duke of Mr. Fred Lewis it is difficult to speak in terms other than superlative. Those of my readers who have suffered the misfortune of not having seen him, may gain some idea of his execution of the part from the illustrations to Mr. Belloc’s novels. The Duke was an extraordinarily good likeness of the Duke of Battersea, as portrayed by Chesterton, with rather more than a touch of Mr. Asquith superadded. Mr. Fred Lewis, it may be stated, gagged freely, introducing topical lines until the play became a revue in little — but without injustice to the original. Several of those who saw Magic came for a third, a fourth, even a tenth time.

  The Editor of The Dublin Review had the happy idea of asking Chesterton to review Magic. The result is too long to quote in full, but it makes two important points which may be extracted.

  I will glide mercifully over the more glaring errors, which the critics have overlooked — as that no Irishman could become so complete a cad merely by going to America — that no young lady would walk about in the rain so soon before it was necessary to dress for dinner — that no young man, however American, could run round a Duke’s grounds in the time between one bad epigram and another — that Dukes never allow the middle classes to encroach on their gardens so as to permit a doctor’s lamp to be seen there — that no sister, however eccentric, could conduct a slightly frivolous love-scene with a brother going mad in the next room — that the Secretary disappears half-way through the play without explaining himself; and the conjuror disappears at the end, with almost equal dignity. . . .

  By the exercise of that knowledge of all human hearts which descends on any man (however unworthy) the moment he is a dramatic critic, I perceive that the author of Magic originally wrote it as a short story. It is a bad play, because it was a good short story. In a short story of mystery, as in a Sherlock Holmes story, the author and the hero (or villain) keep the reader out of the secret. . . . But the drama is built on that grander secrecy which was called the Greek 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 serious. If I were to see, let us say, a sheet of newspaper flying down the road against the wind, and a friend of mine, who happened to be a gifted liar, told me that he was directing the paper by means of spirits, I should still be justified in believing that another explanation could be possible. I should say, “My dear friend, your explanation is romantic; I believe in spirits but I do not believe in you. I prefer to think that there is an air-current going the wrong way.” That is the matter with the Conjuror’s explanation. Why should the Clergyman or the Doctor — professional sceptics, both of them, which is to say seekers after truth — take the word of a professional deceiver as necessarily true?

  There are two works which the critic of Chesterton must take into special consideration. They are Magic and Orthodoxy; and it may be said that the former is a dramatized version of the latter. The two together are a great work, striking at the very roots of disbelief. In a sense Chesterton pays the atheist a very high compliment. He does what the atheist is generally too lazy to do for himself; he takes his substitute for religion and systematizes it into something like a philosophy. Then he examines it as a whole. And he finds that atheism is dogma in its extremist form, that it embodies a multitude of superstitions, and that it is actually continually adding to their number. Such are the reasons of the greatness of Magic. The play, one feels, must remain unique, for the prolegomenon cannot be rewritten while the philosophy is unchanged. And Chesterton has deliberately chosen the word orthodox to apply to himself, and he has not limited its meaning.

  IV

  THE CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS

  The heroes of Chesterton’s romances have an adipose diathesis, as a reviewer has been heard to remark. In plain English they tend towards largeness. Flambeau, Sunday, and Innocent Smith are big men. Chesterton, as we have seen, pays little attention to his women characters, but whenever it comes to pass that he must introduce a heroine, he colours her as emphatically as the nature of things will admit. Which is to say that the Chestertonian heroine always has red hair.

  These things are symptomatic of their author. He loves robustness. If he cannot produce it, he can at any rate affect it, or attack its enemies. This worship of the robust is the fundamental fact of all Chesterton’s work. For example, as a critic of letters he confines himself almost exclusively to the big men. When Mr. Bernard Shaw a few years ago committed what Chesterton imagined was an attack upon Shakespeare, he almost instinctively rushed to the defence in the columns of The Daily News. When Chesterton wrote a little book on The Victorian Age in Literature he showed no interest in the smaller people. The book, it may be urged in his excuse, was a little one, but we feel that even if it was not, Chesterton would have done much the same thing. Among the writers he omitted to mention, even by name, are Sir Edwin Arnold, Harrison Ainsworth, Walter Bagehot, R. Blackmore, A. H. Clough, E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, George Gissing, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Henry Hallam, Jean Ingelow, Benjamin Jowett, W. E. H. Lecky, Thomas Love Peacock, W. M. Praed, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. The criticism which feeds upon research and comparison, which considers a new date or the emendation of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of effort, knows not Chesterton. He is the student of the big men. He has written books about Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only one common quality can be noted, which is that they are each the subjects of at least twenty other books. To write about the things which have already yielded such a huge crop of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagination. The truth is quite otherwise. Anybody, so to speak, can produce a book about Alexander Pope because the ore is at the disposal of every miner. But that larger mine called Dickens has been diligently worked by two generations of authors, and it would appear that a new one must either plagiarize or labour extremely in order to come upon fresh seams. But Chesterton’s taste for bigness has come to his service in criticism. It has given him a power of seeing the large, obvious things which the critic of small things misses. He has the “thinking in millions” trick of the statistician transposed to literary ends.

  Or as a poet. The robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others would prefer a rapier.

  Or as a simple user of words. Chesterton has a preference for the big words: awful, enormous, tremendous, and so on. A word which occurs very often indeed is mystic: it suggests that the noun it qualifies is laden with undisclosable attributes, and that romance is hidden here.

  Now all these things add up, as it were, to a tendency to say a thing as emphatically as possible. Emphasis of statement from a humorist gifted with the use of words results sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in all things except the dull things (except when the dullness is due to an unhappy succession of scintillations which have misfired). For these reasons Chesterton is regarded as entirely frivolous — by persons without a sense of humour. He is, in point of fact, extremely serious, on those frequent occasions when he is making out a case. As he himself points out, to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny. The opposite of to be funny is not to be funny. A man may be perfectly serious in a funny way.

  Now it has befallen Chesterton on more than one occasion to have to cross swords with one of the few true atheists, Mr. Joseph MacCabe, the author of a huge number of books, mostly attacking Christianity, and as devoid of humour as an egg-shell is of hair. The differences and the resemblances between Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe might well be the occasion of a parable. Chesterton has written some of the liveliest books about Christianity, Mr. MacCabe has written some of the dullest. Chesterton has written the most amusing book about Mr. Bernard Shaw; Mr. MacCabe has written the dullest. Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe have a habit of sparring at one another, but up to the present I have not noticed either make any palpable hits. It is all rather like the Party System, as Mr. Hilaire Belloc depicts it. The two antagonists do not understand each other in the least. But, to a certain degree, Mr. MacCabe’s confusion is the fault of Chesterton and not of his own lack of humour. When Chesterton says, “I also mean every word I say,” he is saying something he does not mean. He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating, but not serious, like a circus clown. And he sometimes appears to be critical, but is not serious, like the young lady from Walworth in front of a Bond Street shop-window, regretting that she could not possibly buy the crockery and glass displayed because the monogram isn’t on right. Chesterton’s readers have perhaps spoiled him. He has pleaded, so to speak, for the inalienable and mystic right of every man to be a blithering idiot in all seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when he exercised this inalienable and mystic right, the only man not in the secret was G. K. Chesterton.

  There are few tasks so ungrateful as the criticism of a critic’s criticisms, unless it be the job of criticizing the criticisms of a critic’s critics. The first is part of the task of him who would write a book in which all Chesterton’s works are duly and fitly considered; and the second will not be wholly escaped by him. Concerned as we are, however, with the ideas of one who was far more interested in putting the world to rights than with guiding men and women around literary edifices, there is no need for us to give any very detailed study to Chesterton’s critical work. Bacon said “distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things.” A second distillation, perhaps even a third, suggests a Euclidean flatness. The sheer management of a point of view, however, is always instructive. We have seen an author use his exceptional powers of criticism upon society in general, and ideas at large. How is he able to deal with ideas and inventions stated in a more definite and particular manner? The latter task is the more difficult of the two. We all know perfectly well, to take an analogous illustration, how to deal with the Prussian militarist class, the “Junker caste,” and so on. But we differ hopelessly on the treatment to be meted out to the National Service League.