1875: Alban Fitzartur
Anetis House, London
This evening I have been reading that curious little Etymologicon Aesthetica which the Reverend Dr. Amsel published at his own expense, and with considerable impropriety, if the bishops are to be believed. Its section on the word magic has detained me for nearly an hour. He asserts—it is all rather scholarly thunderclouds—that magic, before it descended into the vulgar stage-trickery of conjurers and Parliamentarians, belonged to an ancient order of ascetic Persians who burned aromatic grasses in silver bowls and whispered their theology to the stars. Their word, he claims, was Magu, which signified not wonder but duty: the tending of divine fire, the morning’s maintenance of light. Thus our modern abracadabra derives from a forgotten chore.
How strange that a word once so devout has become the mere furniture of illusionists with waxed moustaches! I attended one such act last night at the Pavilion—Mr. George Savoy’s Lecture on Shadows—and though the audience gasped at his vanishing ring of fire, I confess the deeper trick eluded them: his wrists, long and nervous as tendrils, caught the gaslight in such a way that it appeared the flesh itself remembered some older, nobler command. He bowed as a priest might, though to what altar none dared infer.
Afterwards, Lady Rosevale, in her fashionable moral disgust, declared that such performances were “unmanly.” What, I asked her, could be more virile than deception conducted with perfect composure? She fluttered, poor creature, and said men ought to act plainly. Ah, but plainness is never the Englishman’s virtue; it is his alibi.
The blue curtains of my room now breathe faintly, as if the night were a lung. I have covered my mirror with indigo silk—it offends me this week, that infinite repetition of one’s own decline—and I write by the flame of a single alcohol lamp. The stage-call tomorrow is for The Boy-King of Babylon, which I wrote after hearing Symonds remark that all religion is but “the choreography of loneliness.” The public adores the crown scenes; they have embroidered the tyrant’s robe with metallic peacocks, and I find myself losing any distinction between costume and skin.
This losing, perhaps, is what the Reverend meant when he said magic is “the art by which the material obeys without faith in the command.” I see it sometimes in the bodies of the young men I employ as pages—each movement a syllable of a grammar they never studied. I call it rehearsal; they call it work; but neither of us can quite shake the sense that something liturgical has been misplaced. There is no wonder left at morning. Their shoulders gleam with simple fatigue, not divine instruction. And yet when one stretches before the mirror, unaware of my watching, the gesture recalls some original temple where men prayed by flexion alone.
A portraitist—young Laughton—has begged to paint me “as a magician of decadence.” I told him only half the title is admissible. The rest belongs, perhaps, to those extinct Magi who believed the sun itself was a conscientious object. I fear I am less convinced; I rise too often at noon.
At dinner tonight His Grace (my father, that venerably bored figure) asked whether theatre is now entirely “saturated by scandal.” I said it had always been so, only now the scandals are decorative. Last week the Argus accused Miss DeLys of immoral sympathy with her dresser; the week before, the composer Vane was tried for writing music not only unwholesome but unmathematical—an offence uniquely English in phrasing. Every artist, it seems, must stand before a pulpit of accountants.
Still, the town thrives on breathless invention. There is a new novel by Quentin Hathermere—The Lamps of St. Swiven’s—in which a consumptive curate discovers paradise in an omnibus conductor’s hands. I read it greedily over coffee, thinking how our century confuses confession with contagion. The critics call it “a parable of inverted light.” How correct they are, though none appear to grasp where the inversion truly resides.
Sometimes, in the quieter intervals after rehearsal, I imagine the word magic returning to its first resonance—the daily labour of summoning light. The thought makes me sentimental, almost humble, which is dangerous. For sentiment is a fire one cannot control; it burns past its cue. My servant, Kerne, reminds me that I am expected at Whitehall tomorrow to advise on the Masque for the Prince’s birthday—an undress performance, at least in ambition. They have asked for something “radiant but respectable,” which is the mortal enemy of theatre.
I shall give them a procession of dusk instead: actors veiled in deep blues, carrying extinguished torches. Let the courtiers marvel at the absence of illumination; they will call it subtle and pay me twice. That, too, is a form of priestcraft.
What the Reverend’s book never admits is that language decays not from misuse but from embarrassment. Having lost its gods, a word grows self-conscious and begins to pantomime its origin. So magic, ashamed of its sacred ancestry, conceals itself in sequins. I understand the impulse. I, too, have built my miracles out of borrowed smoke.
The clock murmurs three. One of the boys has fallen asleep on the chaise, all curled like a letter the alphabet abandoned. His name, I think, is Laurence. He smells faintly of cold iron and amber soap. When I touch his hair, it resists and then yields—the oldest gesture, the motion of belief before it grew weary of itself.
So this is magike tekhne: not sorcery, not spectacle, but obedience without conviction, the torch-carrying of a day that no longer dawns. And yet when he stirs and murmurs my name, the world again appears possible, though only for an indigo minute between the flame and the dark.
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