Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess

by David Lawson

  Pawn-and-Two

  8.

  Dinner Address of

  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  at Banquet for

  PAUL MORPHY

  Revere House, Boston May 31, 1859

  We have met, gentlemen, some of us as members of a local association, some of us as invited guests, but all of us as if by a spontaneous, unsolicited impulse, to do honor to our young friend who has honored us and all who glory in the name of Americans, as the hero of a long series of bloodless battles, won for our common country.

  His career is known to you all. There are many corners of our land which the truly royal game of kings and conquerors has not yet reached, where if an hour is given to pastime, it is only in an honest match of checquers played with red and white kernels of corn, probably enough upon the top of the housewife’s bellows. But there is no gap in the forest, there is no fresh trodden waste in the prairie, which has not heard the name of the New Orleans boy, who left the nursery of his youth, like one of those fabulous heroes of whom our childhood loved to read, and came back bearing with him the spoils of giants whom he had slain, after overthrowing their castles and appropriating the allegiance of their queens.

  I need not therefore tell his story; it is so long that it takes a volume to tell it. It is so brief that one sentence may embrace it all. Honor went before him, and Victory followed after.

  You know the potential significance and the historical dignity of that remarkable intellectual pursuit, which although it wears the look of an amusement and its student uses toy-like instruments, as did the great inventor of logarithms, Napier of Merchiston, in the well known ivory bones or rods by which he performed many calculations, has yet all the characters of a science, say rather of a science mingled with a variable human element, so that the perfect chess player would unite the combining powers of Newton with the audacity of Leverrier, and the shrewd insight of Talleyrand. You know who of the world’s masters have been chess players; happy for the world, had some of them been nothing worse than chess players! You know who have celebrated the praises of the art in prose and verse. Among them the classic Italian remembered in those lines of Pope:

  Immortal Vida on whose honored brow

  The poet’s bays, and critic’s ivy grow,—

  Who wrote one poem on the Heavenly Teacher, one on the art of Poetry, and one on the game of Chess.

  That you know all this may be taken for granted: I need not say that there is something very different from, something far deeper than, the pride which belongs to the professed amateurs or the outside admirers of this particular game, noble as it is, famous as it is, which brings us together.

  No, gentlemen: This seemingly gracious and pleasing occasion is far more than it seems. Through these lips of ours, as through those which have spoken before us and shall speak after us, the words of welcome to our young friend, there flows the warm breath of that true American feeling which makes us all one in the moment of every great triumph achieved by a child of the Great Republic.

  We who look upon the sun while the old world sleeps, are after all but colonists and provincials, in the eye of the ancient civilizations. There are Europeans enough, otherwise intelligent, who, if we may trust the stories of travelers, would be puzzled to say whether a native American of the highest race, caught in one of our streets, would be white, or black, or red; it cannot be disguised that we have been subject to the presumption of inferiority as a new people, and that nothing has been granted us except what we have taken at the cannon’s mouth, at the point of the bayonet or in that close Indian hug of peaceful but desperate competition in which, sooner or later, must crack the loins of the civilization belonging to one or the other of the two hemispheres.

  It would be tedious and ungenial to show in all its details how the American has had to make his way against these obstacles to the position he now holds before the nations. It took the revolutionary war to disprove the assertion that a British officer with a few regiments could march through the length and breadth of our land, in the face of its disorderly rebels. Once more we had to argue the question over with our dear obstinate old parents, and it was only after lugging in a dozen of his sea bulldogs by the ears that we succeeded in satisfying him that we could reason yard-arm to yard-arm as convincingly as we had argued bayonet to bayonet. You are not old enough, my young friend, to remember the eighth of January, 1815 but you may have heard of a great discussion which took place on that day near your native city of New Orleans. The same question was debated. If the logic of Mr. Andrew Jackson had failed to convince the opposite party, and Mr. Pakenham’s syllogism as to provincial inferiority had been followed out in its corollary of sword and fire, your little game of life, sir, might never have been played, which would have been a great misfortune to us and all the world—except perhaps the late champion of England, Mr. Howard Staunton.*

  We love our British cousins too well to repeat all the sharp things they have said of us. Reviewers, tourists, philosophers like Coleridge and Carlyle, nay, some who have lived among us until their flesh and blood had become American, and their very bones were made over again out of our earth, have all had their fling at the Colonists and Provincials. Such tricks are catching, and have reappeared on the other side of the channel. After all the noble words spoken of our land and its institutions by writers like De Tocqueville and Chevalier, M. Jules Janin could not let the Queen of tragedy visit us without warning her against the barbarians of the ne w world, so terrible did we seem to the smooth, round coop-fed feuilletoniste of the Parisian cockneys.

  Now, gentlemen, there are two ways of meeting this prejudice so natural to the good people of the over-ripe half of the planet. We can confess the fact of our green immaturity,—but argue from the history of the past that we may yet come to something. We can show that all mankind are colonists and provincials with reference to some point or points from which they started; that England herself is but a settlement formed by a band of invading robbers, crossed upon a mob of emigrant squatters. We can show that the children of nations have often lived to feed, to teach, and when necessary to chastise their parents. We can remind our old-country friends that Macedonia, the kingdom of the world’s conqueror, and the home of the world’s philosopher, was but a rough province, speaking a language hardly understood at Athens; and that the great epic, the great poem, the great work of antiquity was written, or spoken, or sung, not in the phrase familiar to Attic ears, but in the liquid dialect of remote provincial Ionia.

  That is the first way of arguing the matter. The second course is much shorter and more satisfactory. It consists in administering what in the dialect of our Yankee Ionia is called “a good licking,” of course in the most polite and friendly way, to the other party in discussion, whenever we get a chance. And that chance has of late years been afforded us pretty often.

  Let us look very briefly at the experiments we have tried in this direction. The first was to take the rod of iron with which we were ruled,—namely, a ram-rod with a ball-cartridge at the end of it—and break it over the backs of those who had abused it. This lesson, as we said, had to be repeated, and we trust that costly way of teaching will never have to be tried again with our sturdy old parent. And thus the great and beneficent era of competition in the arts of peace was at last inaugurated. Now it is not fair to ask everything at once of a young and growing civilization. When our back-woodsmen have just made a clearing, we do not expect them to begin rearing Grecian temples; but was not and is not the settler’s log cabin good of its kind—better than Irish shanties and English hov-els? As larger wants unfolded, we have had a fair opportunity of showing what we could do. The first great work of civilized men everywhere is to tame nature. And some of her wild creatures are never yet wholly tamed, though the old world has been at work at them for thousands of years. There is the earth,—that huge dumb servant, out of whose sturdy strength, by goading and scourging and scari-fying, we wring the slow secret toil that fills his brown arms with food for
our necessities. There is the sleepless, restless complaining monster, that overlaps two-thirds of our globe with his imbricated scales: the great ocean,—architect and destroyer of continents. There is man’s noblest servant among the unreasoning tribes of being, of whom the oldest and grandest of books says, that “his neck is clothed with thunder,” whose nature the classic fable blended with that of man himself to make the centaur, rival of demigods.

  Who has tamed the earth, gentlemen, like the Americans, whose instruments of husbandry so far surpassed all others in the day of trial that they reaped not only all the grain before them, but all the honors and all the prizes, without leaving anything for the gleaners? Who has tamed the ocean like the American shipbuilder, whose keels have ploughed the furrows in which all the navies of the world may follow at their leisure? Who has so merited that noble Homeric name of horse-subduer, the proud title of heroes, as the American enchanter, whose triumphs have never been approached before since Bucephalus trembled and stood still at the voice of Alexander. It is time for the men of the old world to find out that they have to do with a people which, if we may borrow an expression from one of its earliest and greatest friends, “tramples upon impossibilities.”

  Let me give you proofs from one department of applied science. In the book before me (London, 1852) Mr. Ross, the great English optician, says that 135 degrees is the largest angular pencil of light that can be passed through a microscopic object-glass. On the cover of the object-glass before me, a glass made by Charles A. Spencer, then of Canastota, in the “backwoods” of New York, as they got it in London, is marked 146 degrees, which impossible angle he has since opened, as all the microscopic world knows, to the thrice impossible extent of 170 degrees and upwards.

  I mention this exceptionally to illustrate the audacity of democratic ingenuity in a department remote from the wants of common life. But it is to supply these common wants that the American brain has been chiefly taxed. Here it has known no equal. One other example is enough. It took a locksmith trained among the guessing Americans to pick the locks of the world’s artificers and defy them all to push back the bolts of his own. So much, then, we have made thoroughly and triumphantly ours; the breast of the earth to feed us, the back of the ocean to bear us, the strength of the horse to toil for us, and the lock of the cunning artisan to protect the fruits of our labor from the rogues the old world sends us! We have had first to make life possible, then tolerable, then comfortable, and at last beautiful with all that intellect can lend it!

  And when the old world gets impatient that we will not do everything in the best way at once, when it is not contented with our material triumphs, and that greatest of all triumphs, the self-government of thirty empires, not contented that we should move on as the great tide-wave moves—one broad-breasted bil-low, and not a host of special narrow currents; when the old world, filled with those experts, who have often gained their skill for want of nobler objects, like the prisoners who carve cunning devices in their cells, becomes impatient, we must send over sometimes a man and sometimes a boy, to try conclusions with its people in some peaceful contest of intelligence. And this young gentleman at my right, looking as tranquil and breathing as calmly as if he were not half-smothered in his laurels, is one of the boys we sent. No! I am wrong. The thought-ful mothers of America would have cried out against us with one voice if we had sent this immature youth, his frame not yet knit together in perfect manhood, to task his growing brain in those tremendous conflicts which made the huge Père Morel, the veteran of the Café de la Régence, strike his broad forehead and beg to be released from the very thought of following the frightful complexity of their bewildering combinations. No! the men, with their ambition and proud confidence in his strength, might have been willing to send him, but the women, with their tender love as mothers and sisters and well-wishers, would have said, “He shall not go!”

  He went. It was not we that sent him,—it was Honor! And when we meet to welcome his triumphant return, we know what his victories mean. We have had one more squeeze at the great dynamometer which measures the strength of the strongest of the race. There it lies in the central capital of Europe. The boy has squeezed it, and it is not now the index that moves, but the very springs that are broken.

  The test is as true a one of cerebral powers as if a hundred thousand men lay dead upon the field where the question was decided,—as if a score of line-of-battle-ships were swinging, blackened wrecks, upon the water after a game between two mighty admirals. Where there is a given maximum there is always a corresponding average, and there is not one of us who does not think better of the head he carries upon his own shoulders, since he finds what a battery it is that lies beneath the smooth forehead of this young brother American.

  As I stretch my hand above this youthful brow, it seems to me that I bear in it the welcome, not of a town or a province, but of a whole people. One smile, one glow of pride and pleasure runs over all the land, from the shore which the sun first greets to that which looks upon the ocean where he lets fall the blazing clasp of his dissolving girdle,—from the realm of our Northern sister who looks down from her throne upon the unmelted snows of Katahdin, to hers of the broad river and the still bayou who sits fanning herself among the fullblown roses and listening to the praises of her child as they come wafted to her on every perfumed breeze.

  I propose the health of PAUL MORPHY, the world’s chess champion: his peaceful battles have helped to achieve a new revolution; his youthful triumphs have added a new clause to the declaration of American Independence!

  At the end of the evening Dr. Holmes exclaimed: “Gentlemen, I am the automaton chess player, and I now cry check. But before we part, there is one toast in which I am sure you will all cordially join— The Boston Chess Club.” The sentiment was received with great enthusiasm and Professor Agassiz proposed three cheers for the Boston Chess Club, which were heartily given. Soon after, Dr. Holmes pronounced, checkmate, and shortly before one o’clock the company dispersed.

  (From The Boston Journal, June 1, 1859.)

  9.

  Howard Staunton in the Illustrated London News—March 31, 1860

  (with a Letter from Frederick Deacon)

  M.D.—“Disgraceful,” indeed! The recklessness of imputation and utter disregard of all decency which characterize the lower members of the press in the United States is absolutely revolting. The plain facts are these. Some months since we received two very good games from a well-known English amateur, which were played between him and Mr. Morphy, the American chessplayer, of which each won one. The games were published, accompanied by annotations from the pen of the English player, Mr. Deacon, in our paper of December 17, 1859. Upon their reaching America, Mr. Morphy flatly denied that he had ever played a single game with Mr. Deacon. This denial might be pardoned, if expressed in gentlemanly terms on the ground that the American had forgotten, among battles with so many eminent opponents, an encounter with one so little known. But Mr. Morphy, not content with denying ever having played with Mr. Deacon, condescends to depreciate his skill, and asserts, in the most offensive manner, that “some one has been guilty of deliberate falsehood.”

  Upon this, with a yell of execration, up spring all that very small fry which, not being very literary, keep a feeble hold on the skirts of literature, and boldly denounce the games as “forgeries,” “spurious,” “fabrications,” a base attempt to sully the star-spangled banner, &c. Now, apart from the incredible stupidity and grossness of such a charge, what is most remarkable in the affair (giving Mr. Morphy credit for really having forgotten his play with Mr. Deacon) is the surpassing vanity of that gentleman and his friends in believing that his fame as a chessplayer is of sufficient importance to move sundry Englishmen, ourselves among the number, to the commission of a shameful fraud, the publication of games as his which he never played. And for what? For the paltry purpose of making it appear that he had won one less game than he had accounted for! Below is a note from the young and clever pla
yer to whom we are indebted for the game; and we have no hesitation in asserting, from what we know of him, that, if there has been any “deliberate falsehood” in the matter, it originated on the other side of the Atlantic.