Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him. The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.
With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the Scotch Gambit, partially anticipated indeed by Italian writers in the last century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London, 1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian players hit upon the Vienna or Queen’s Knights game which was first made famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that the Illustrated London News began in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of publishing chess problems.
An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle classes than by acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle class ladies who do most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the fancy work. What transformations has this latter passed through? In 1857, as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross stitch was fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion soon after Rowland’s Macassar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that known to the Afghans as ‘boning,’ and to Britons as crochet, while chairs and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons, began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.
More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine brush made an effective background. Ruskin’s gospel of following Nature had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of embroidering flowers, plants, birds and butterflies in wool or silk; while the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or Nottingham.
The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting on pottery, wood, and glass came in during the early South Kensingtonian period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend’s walls. Brass work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful glass painting in churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than reproduced.
Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem stitching, or unbinding work into the spaces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the outline traced by this simple instrument on a wooden board, is practised successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.[118]
CHAPTER XXXI
THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:—HOME AND COLONIAL