Chesterton's play Magic as a milestone in the spiritual development of the author.

Chesterton's first play Magic (1913) is a parable with the elements of comedy, drama, love-story novel. Chesterton studies the categories of the good and the evil, the sacred and the devilish. The play is a modernist one with its characters, each bearing the definite idea. The author depicts different human types: a skeptical youth, self-assured doctor, an inconsistent politician (duke), an impressionable maiden. They are confronted with a conjurer who is curiously enough the defender of faith. Chesterton encodes some knowledge, sets parallels, gives rise to associations and makes his reader to read between the lines referring to the names of W. B. Yeats and T. H. Huxley. The theme of spiritual purification was topical for Chesteron. The play is a retrospection: describing the magician's tricks and his conjuring with supernatural, the author recalls the vices of his youth when he himself was fond of spiritualism. It is a revelation, a talk about sin, chaos and its overcoming. The play is an important stage in spiritual development of the author and his later conversion to Catholicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]