Wizardry is, we know, one of the very oldest of human avocations.... Yet I recall how my friend Richard Harrowby, of Montevideo, once told me that, to his mind, the most strange feature of wizardry was the adroit consistency with which truth here has always been distorted or concealed. For it stays an indisputable fact, as Harrowby pointed out, that many persons still believe wizardry, in common with its sister branch of witchcraft, to have been a delusion; and that the majority of those who are wiser remain at considerable pains not actively to dispute this quite common belief. The art of censorship had, in fact, here achieved its oldest and capital triumph.
"Well, you," I admitted, "know more about such matters than I even pretend to. So far as I can judge, your friends the wizards have just emulated the family doctor and all business men, in their usual endeavors, to prolong life and to change less rare materials into gold. Their sagas, from the history of Geber to that of Cagliostro, present—in so far, anyhow, as the tale is formally told,—mighty dull and sordid reading: and each of these ancient fakirs would seem to have got little enough out of the powers and privileges of the mage who, in that jolly old sonorous phrase, holds in his left hand the branch of the blossoming almond, and in his right hand the clavicles of Solomon."
To which Harrowby replied quite gravely: "Cabell, you tempt me. You really should distinguish between wizards and sorcerers— But, no! I shall not voice any indiscretions. The day is not yet come, I too concede, for wise persons to speak candidly about magic, though already, I believe, the day dawns."
His faith in that day is perennial, and at times rather pathetic....
"For one thing, though," I urged him on, "I am ready to argue that, just on material grounds, much of the fabulous wonder-working which our long-headed fathers used to dismiss with a shrug, to-day is taking on a different aspect; and that it becomes increasingly difficult to reject as a popular delusion performances which our own senses note to the right and left of us every day."
"And what," asked Harrowby, "imply these rolling periods?"
"Well, I mean that, when I was younger, no intelligent person for one instant saw more than nonsense in the legend that Simon Magus had ridden visibly through the air in a winged car or that Apollonius of Tyana could be acquainted with remote events within a minute or two after they happened. Such old wives' tales were outgrown superstitions, and that was all there was to it. But to-day—"
"In this enlightened age," he suggested, with a small smile.
"—To-day, with the manufacture of aeroplanes ranking as a standardized business, and with radios in every third home, these miracles, as you see for yourself, do not sound a bit remarkable. To-day, with one precaution, nobody need question that Pietro d'Apone actually did hold imprisoned, each in his separate metal vase, seven spirits to instruct him audibly in astronomy, alchemy and philosophy, in painting, physic, poetry and music. The needful precaution is, of course, merely to call these vases phonographs."
"I see, I see," said Harrowby, quietly. He was still smiling, for some reason or another. "They were crystal vases, by the way. And they were not phonographs."