INFORMAL MAGIC BY CHARLES J. WHITBY

The man who does not believe in magic is an ignoramus or a fool.  Perhaps he regards Nature as a machine; he himself may for aught I know be a machine, but I am very sure that Nature is none. She, on the contrary, is a wizard, a witch rather, and works always by incantations and spells.

Ask a lover what makes him the slave of his mistress, the fond puppet of her whims and caprices; and he will shake his head and vow that it must be because he has been bewitched. And that his explanation is literally true, I have not the shadow of a doubt. Nature in the person of some little piece of incarnate femininity has bewitched him — for her own relentless if not inscrutable ends.

Ask the shades of Napoleon’s devout followers what made them smile in their death-agony, feeling that the price was a small one to pay for a glance or a word of commendation from the man for whose greater glory they died.

 - “He had a way with him,” they will tell you; “you felt that he was not as other men.”

Dr. Bucke, the Canadian physician who in 1877 sought out the broken-down poet of democracy at Camden, relates how “he was almost amazed by the beauty and majesty of his person and the gracious air of purity that surrounded and permeated him.”

In the brief interview that followed Walt Whitman said nothing memorable, nothing at any rate that Bucke remembered, but “a sort of spiritual intoxication set in. . . . It seemed to me at that time certain that he was either actually a god or in some sense clearly and entirely preterhuman. Be all this as it may, it is certain that the hour spent that day with the poet was the turning point of my life.”

Clearly here, too, there is magic at work; the physician was, as with little sense of the significance of the word we so often say, “enchanted” with or by the old gray bard; he beheld him with englamoured eyes. And he became thenceforth his willing slave.

“Perhaps it is,” writes Frances Forbes Robertson, “that from those whom the angel of success follows there emanates some spring of life that flows into men’s hearts; how else can we account for the hero-worship that has always attended the triumphant?”

You may object that Walt Whitman was hardly a successful man. He would not have agreed with you, nor do I.

All men of genius believe in magic, for all such men practice it in their works. Not formal magic, perhaps, although many of them (Goethe, Leibnitz, Newton, among others) have dabbled in that. Every great poem, picture, symphony or drama is an embodiment of concentrated and rhythmic will, in virtue of which it exercises occult power upon all who are in any sort of affinity with its creator.

Browning, no doubt, had in mind this magical function of Art when he made Abt Vogler say of musical improvisation:

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;

It is every here in the world— loud, soft, and all is said:

Give it to me to use. I mix it with two in my thought:

And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

What do we mean when we speak of the “charm” of such or such a lyric, that ineffable quality of metre or phrasing wherein by magical power has been imprisoned in permanently active-form the spiritual essence of a transient poetic mood?

It is no mere accident that has applied to such qualities a title pregnant with occult associations and significance.  It is not only poems that have “charm”; we all know people of both sexes who attract others in a degree out of all proportion to their formal beauty or ability.

This power is perhaps commoner among women than among men. “Wherever they go,” says a modem writer, “some women naturally raise the pulse of life to quicker beating, till the paths they trace are marked by a vivider life, like the bright green circles where the fairies tread.” A beautiful symbol, to convey a fine and penetrating thought!

Readers of Ibsen may recall how his Master Builder attributes his phenomenal success in his profession to a mysterious power of constraining unseen helpers to work on his behalf. One would like to question a number of very fortunate people as to whether they had any dim or clear consciousness of the possession of some such gift.

An objection that occurs to me is that some fortunate individuals I have known have not been strong characters — rather the reverse, easy-going, debonnaire. Perhaps there are two types of good luck, in one of which the individual constrains the elementals to work for him, while in the other they work for love.

Ibsen’s hero would be an example of the former class; and his fate suggests that such individuals are apt to end tragically: the elementals are proverbially treacherous and capricious, ever on the alert for an opportunity of escape and revenge. Who does not remember the eagerness of Ariel for the hour of his promised release?

Nature in her dealings with men and women resembles those Indian jugglers who by some traditional art know how to make folk see what they will them to see. For every age-period, she invests with appropriate glamour those objects to which she desires to attract our eager interest, so that we see them not as they actually are, but as she wishes that they shall appear.

Things that might unduly distract our attention or lead us astray from our destined path she conceals with a veil of illusion, so that they do not exist for us until their time has come.

As the glamour fades from one set of toys, it passes to another; as one veil of illusion lifts, it reveals another beyond. On her favourite children she bestows a share of her own wizardry, so that, as I have said, they practise informal magic in all their works and ways.

These are the men of genius, the mere utterance of whose names, when those who bore them have long vanished from our midst, can thrill us with a sudden sense of mystery and power. These are the lovely and beloved women, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Francesca da Rimini, Mary Stuart, to think of whom is to be transported instantly from the dull earth of commonplace actuality to the seventh heaven of romance.

Some day we shall understand these things, be able to demonstrate the super-potency of the emanations of the eye of genius, to estimate the passional quality and rank of a given temperament or apply the principles of spectrum-analysis to the classification of souls.

There is a chemistry of human affinities, a law determining the subtlest most occult manifestations of human magnetism; the charm of a given personality upon another is theoretically capable of exact statement in terms of a mathematical formula.

Meanwhile, I repeat: The man who does not believe in magic is an ignoramus or a fool.

(Occult Review, June 1911, p.312-314)