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?