I.
It is rather difficult for the spectator at a game of chess (who is not himself a player) to comprehend the pleasure of it, and to believe that those two grave, silent individuals are not only seeking but actually finding amusement and recreation.
Yet no game is more beautiful in its appointments; beautiful in the mathematical precision of its moves; beautiful in its colored, carved, and varied pieces; intellectually beautiful in its very quietude—in the power with which it represses every manifestation of hope or disappointment, in its wordless intensity of thought.
Other games come in some degree within the scope of the most humble capacity; but chess, royal chess, loftier in its requirements, demands the most noble. It has attractions all-absorbing and fascinating as well as profitable unto wisdom; but they stand fully revealed to him only who can widely plan and steadily execute; whose circumspection is never beguiled and whose caution never sleepeth; who is elated not overmuch by success nor despondent under disasters; who keepeth his own counsel and can baffle an opponent's penetration; whose well-schooled eye gives no clue, by a glance, to his intended victim, and whose well-trained finger never hovers in irresolution. Behold the requirements of chess!
It has been justly called in olden English The Royalle Game; for not only is a king its hero, but it has afforded amusement to kings and warriors through many a past age, and in countries widely distant from each other.
The origin of the game of chess is still an unsettled question. Like some of the oriental monarchs, it might write itself "brother to the sun and moon"—so ancient is its pedigree. Some writers have proved, to their own satisfaction at least, that it was chess which enlivened the tedium of the Greeks encamped about the walls of Troy, and that its inventor was Palamedes, son of Nauplius, King of Eubœa. Who can doubt the inventive genius of Palamedes after all the tales told of him?—tales we learn once and then forget. I repeat one. When the Greek heroes were gathering for the mighty Trojan conflict, Palamedes, himself a warrior, was sent to Ithaca, to summon Achilles and Odysseus to join them. The latter, desirous of evading the call, feigned himself insane, and Palamedes, to test his truthfulness, seized his infant child and laid it before him in a furrow which he was ploughing. Odysseus paused, raised the child, and removed it, thus giving evidence of his sanity. Who after this can doubt the inventive powers of Palamedes or his historian, and who can say that either might not have invented chess?
In a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the Harleian collection, in the British Museum, is a drawing in which two warriors are represented, evidently Greeks, with a chess-board between them, engaged in play. The author of the MS. traces the game back to Odysseus, and concludes that one of these chiefs is intended for him.
In the great Egyptian collection of the British Museum, specimens are preserved of a kind of chess-men taken from a tomb of one of the Pharaohs, which prove that they had a game similar if not identical with our chess; and some hieroglyphics on the ruins of Luxor, Thebes, and Palmyra have been interpreted as indicating such a game.
Caxton, who printed a Boke of Chesse in 1474, quoting from some other writers, gives a wonderful story, showing that it was devised in the reign of Evil-Merodach, King of Babylon, by a philosopher "whyche was named in Caldee Exerses, and in Greke Philemetor." The Greek cognomen of the philosopher leads somewhat to the belief of such a possibility.
Chaucer, without any proof, gives us in rhyme another candidate for the glory—Athalus. He describes, in a sort of dream, a visionary opponent, Fortune—
"At chesse with me she gan to pleye
With hir fals draughtes dyverse,
She staale on me and toke my ferz, (now queen.)
And when I saugh my ferz awaye,
Alas, I kouthe no longer pleye.
With a powne errante, allas I
Ful craftier to pleye she was
Than Athalus, who made the game
First of the chesse, so was hys name."[167]
A repetition of half the assertions and conjectures on this subject would fill volumes; indeed, volumes have been written on it; for no other thing of pure amusement has ever enlisted in its cause so many learned commentators of all tongues and nations, who unite, however, upon two points—its remote antiquity and its mighty renown.
The most reliable account of the origin of the game is, without doubt, that given by Sir William Jones. His high official rank for many years under the English government in India, and his familiarity with oriental languages, gave him opportunities for oriental research beyond almost any other writer. He asserts, as the result of his inquiries, that it was invented by the Hindoos, and from them (according to a universal Persian tradition) it was brought, in the sixth century, to Persia. Its next step was to Arabia, and from thence it was carried by the Saracenic conquest of Spain to western Europe. He found no mention of it in the classic writings of the Brahmins, although (he continues) they say confidently that Sanscrit books on chess exist.
Who the gifted individual was from whose brain emanated such an ingenious complication of mathematics and strategy, disguised under the mask of amusement, we shall perhaps never know. He might well have exclaimed with Horace,
"Exegi monumentum ære perennius."
But alas! the name of the builder is lost; or perhaps a future Layard, in exhuming the splendors of some ancient city, may find a record on some crumbling stone of the inventor of chess.
To an indefinite number of persons the honor is at present ascribed, evidently in mere conjecture, as in the following extract translated from a Chinese annal on chess; but it has an interest, in showing the antiquity of the game and the high esteem in which it was held:
"Three hundred and seventy-nine years after the time of Confucius, or 1965 years ago," says the annal, "Hung Cochu, King of Kiangnan, sent an expedition into the Shense country, under command of a mandarin named Hansing, to conquer it. After one campaign, the soldiers went into winter quarters, and they grew homesick and wanted to return. Then Hansing invented the game of chess. They were well pleased. In the spring they took the field again, and soon added the rich country of Shense to the kingdom of Kiangnan."
It is more likely that Hansing only taught the soldiers what he had himself learned elsewhere; but Shense is still the name of a northern province of China, and Chinese soldiers still play chess.
For the name of the game also, as well as its origin, we rely most on Sir W. Jones, who traced it to Chaturlinga, signifying in eastern dialect certain parts of an army; and in his time the Malays still called it Chatur.
The whole vocabulary of chess—the only sound which breaks the monotonous silence of the game, is the little word check; and it is a singular fact, remarked by Mr. F. W. Cronhelm, that, however varied the names of the pieces in different languages, yet the Italians, French, English, Danes, Icelanders, Germans, Poles, and Russians all give the king warning in the same word—check! Somebody traces it to sheik, the title of a high ruler in the Arabian dynasty, and supposes that they so named the principal piece, which we call king; hence when the adversary placed him in danger, he called out to him "sheik!" or, as we say, "check!" This is certainly plausible; for mat in Arabic, as also in some dialects of Persia and India, signifies to kill, to slay; hence comes "sheik-mat," king-slain, or the modern "check-mate."