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.
