Читать книгу Chess Throughout the Ages - Henry Bird - Страница 14

It has been a subject of regret with writers that complete games of chess cannot be found for the earlier ages, and it has been suggested that a few well annotated games of the great Eastern players of one thousand years ago, and of the rival champions of Spain, Italy and Sicily in the Sixteenth century would be of more interest than all the problems and positions handed down to us in existence and, it certainly would be pleasing and instructive to be able to compare the styles Ali Suli, Adali, Lajlaj, Abbas and Razi, the great players of the Golden Age of Arabian Literature, and that of Ali Shatranji of Timur's Court and Ruy Lopez, Leonardo and Paolo Boi with those of Philidor and the leaders of the Nineteenth century.

The first half of the Nineteenth century witnessed the commencement of Press notice, and the growth of a literature for chess, and was distinguished by the number of works devoted to the play of the game, not half a score of books could be traced in England before Philidor's, besides which Caxton, 1474, dedicated to the Duke of Clarence, Rowbotham, 1561, to the Earl of Leicester, and Saul and Barbiere, 1617 and 1640, to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, which constitute the most noted works recorded, conveyed but little knowledge concerning the game, and were scarcely more than translations of foreign works from that of Jacobus de Cesso1us, 1290, and others, and were rather moralities and philosophical treatises than works of practical utility from a scientific point of view.

During the second half, the advance in the appreciation and practice of chess has been yet more astonishing as compared with the single club in St. James' Street, and the meeting place for chess players in St. Martin's Lane, which existed in Philidor's time, and the thirty clubs or so which had arisen by 1851, we have now at least five hundred, and as against the earliest chess columns in the Lancet, Bell's Life, and the Illustrated London News, we can specify near one hundred. It is among the middle and humbler classes that the spread of a taste for chess has been most apparent, with the fashionable or higher classes, so far as any manifestation of public interest or support is to be taken as a criterion, its appreciation has died out, and for twenty noble names among its patrons in Philidor's time, we cannot reckon one in ours. Another singular feature is the grave diminution in the recognized number of able exponents, commonly called Masters, which in the British list are reduced to less than a third of the well-known names of 1862. The support of chess, trifling as it is, comes from about a score of Her Majesty's subjects, and the total in a year does not now equal a sum very usual in a glove fight, or a Championship Billiard match, and the sums provided in a generation by our present machinery would not equal the value of one Al Mamun's musk balls or the rewards to Ruy Lopez for a single match.

The time allowed for consideration of the moves in chess, and the management of the clocks used to regulate such is a most important element in estimating the relative strength of chess players. So important, in fact, that pure chess, and chess with clocks is found by experience to be a very different thing with certain players. Bird finds the clocks more trouble than the chess, and as everybody knows is heavily handicapped by them, hence his force and success in ordinary play is far greater than in tournaments. Take the time limit alone for two players of equal reputation, who may not be disturbed or distracted by the clocks, a difference in the time limit of ten or even five moves an hour would in some cases turn the scale between them. Passing over the faster Bird; and other English players who prefer the slower rate take a very notable example, Steinitz and Zukertort. After the Criterion Great Tournament of 1883 opinions differed much as to which of these was the stronger player, but after the match at 15 moves an hour, in the United States, won by Steinitz with a score of 10 to 4, the palm has been generally awarded to Steinitz, and without any qualification whatever the term of champion of the chess world has been universally accorded to him and still continues to be so, notwithstanding the superior claims of Dr. Tarrasch based upon victory in three successive International Chess Tournaments, Breslan 1889, Manchester 1890, and Dresden in 1892, in the two first named not losing a single game, and in the last, one only, feats never accomplished by Steinitz.

Zukertort was undoubtedly a far more ready, and we have long thought a finer player than Steinitz, but skill was so nicely balanced between them that a very slight variation or acceleration in rate would have been in Zukertort's favour. At 25 moves an hour or at any faster rate it would have been odds on Zukertort, at 15 moves an hour or less it would have been safer to back Steinitz. Staunton, Kolisch, and Paulsen seem to have been the slowest of the players, 10 moves an hour would suit them better than 15, a 10 or 12 hour game with them was not uncommon. Bird is the fastest, and his best games have averaged 40 moves an hour or two or three hours for a game, a reasonable rate for recreationary chess.

In the last century one-and-a-half or two hours was considered a fair duration for a good game, 30 moves an hour would give three hours for a game of 45 moves or four for a game of 60 moves, and such could be finished at the usual sitting without adjournment.

The period dating from the France and England Championship Match between St. Amant and Staunton in 1843, to the Vienna Tournament of 1873, was singularly prolific in very great chess players. In addition to Anderssen 1851, and Morphy 1858, there appeared in the metropolis in 1862 Louis Paulsen, William Steinitz, and J. H. Blackburne, three players who, as well as Captain Mackenzie competed in the British Chess Association's Tournaments of that year, and were destined with Zukertort and Gunsberg of ten years later growth, to rank as conspicuously successful among even the score or so of the pre-eminently distinguished players of the highest class the world has ever produced, the Rev. G. A. MacDonnel1 and Barnes were of five and Boden of 12 years earlier reputation, all were competing in the 1862 contest, Buckle died in this year, and his opponent Bird had retired from chess, other pursuits entirely absorbing his time mostly abroad. He had been the hardest fighter and most active of the English combatants of 15 years before, and it was his fate about four years later, once more to become not the least prominent and interesting of the leading chess players.

Chess as now played with the Queen of present powers, imported into the game dates back about four centuries, to near the time when the works of the Spanish writers, Vicenz and Lucena, appeared in 1495, and shortly before that of Damiano the Portuguese in 1512. In 1561 Ruy Lopez, the Spanish priest of Cafra, a name familiar to the present generation, from one of the openings most approved in modern practice being named after him, wrote the best work of a scientific character which had appeared in Europe to that time, and he was considered in Spain the very best player in the world, until the memorable contests between him and Leonardo da Cutri, and Paolo Boi of Syracuse left the question of supremacy doubtful. These famous struggles are reverted to not without interest in our days, when the not very profitable task of attempting to institute comparisons between past and present great players is indulged in, for in the absence of a single published complete and annotated game until the 19th century, there is little advantage in conjecturing whether Al Suli was equal to Philidor, Razi or Greco to A. McDonnell of Belfast, Ali Shatranji to La Bourdonnais, Paoli Boi to Anderssen, Ruy Lopez to Staunton, or Leonardo to Morphy, though these conjectural comparisons in varied forms are not uncommon in modern chess talk.

The records of incidents, and the anecdotes appertaining to chess or chess players in the middle ages, are so scattered, scant, and meagre, that no writer has attempted to put them into shape, or make a consecutive or connected narrative of them. Even Professor Duncan Forbes the most elaborate of all the European writers on the history of chess, dismisses the period from 750 to 1500 A.D., in a very few words not vouchsafing to it in his volume of 400 pages a chapter of a single page, though his book able as it is, contains much description of games of the past in different countries, the interest in which seems not considerable in present days. The Hon. Daines Barrington writing in 1787, says, (and others have followed him to a like effect), "Our ancestors certainly played much at chess before the general introduction of cards, as no fewer than twenty-six English families have emblazened chess boards and chess rooks on their arms, and it therefore must have been considered as a valuable accomplishment."

The opinions so commonly entertained and expressed, however, so far at least as they can be taken to apply to the period before Queen Elizabeth's reign, rest upon but slender data, and it is highly probable that even in that monarch's reign the practice of chess was confined to a very limited circle for we read of no fine player, great games, or matches, or public competitions of any kind, in our climes until Philidor's time; his career in England though intermittant extended close upon fifty years and from his time may be dated the budding forth of the popularity of chess, which began to come to full bloom about 1828, (33 years after his death) and produced its fruits in the France and England championship contests of 1834 and 1843, and the inception of International Tournaments in 1851 which first established Germany's great reputation and furnished a chess champion of the world from among them.

Though the contests between the rival champions of Spain and Italy, were promoted as tests of skill, at the courts of Philip and Sebastian, and rewarded with a liberality unheard of, since the days of Chosroes and Al Mamun, and took place during the contemporary reign of Queen Elizabeth, when chess had become decidedly fashionable in England, we find no record of the games, or that any interest or enthusiasm appears to have been evoked by them in any country except those where they took place. They seem to have led to no emulation in other parts of Europe, and we read of no chess competitions of any kind in France, Germany, or England. It was not till a century later that the debut and successes of the brilliant Greco the Calabrian, in Paris, began to cause a little more chess ambition in France and gave the ascendancy in the game to that country which it still held in Legalle and Philidor's time in 1750, and continued to maintain until the matches of 1834, between Alex. McDonnell of Belfast and the famous Louis de La Bourdonnais of Paris, followed in 1843 by Staunton's victory over M. S. Amant, first advanced British claims to a first class position in chess, and left our countryman Staunton the admitted world's champion in chess, until the title was wrested from him by Professor Anderssen of Breslau, in the International tournament held in London during the Exhibition year 1851.

The career of England's champion, Staunton, for about ten years successful as it was, is considered generally to have been even surpassed by that of Anderssen which lasted till his death in 1879 near thirty years. Their chess performances like those of Philidor from 1746 to 1795, and of Paul Morphy from 1855 to 1858, would well merit full record in a longer work.

NOTE. A translation of Greco was published in London in 1656, with a likeness of Charles the First in it.

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Space precludes the admission of the sketches and comparisons of the chess careers of Philidor, Staunton, Anderssen, and Morphy, and confines us to the brief account of Philidor's extraordinary support and influence on the future of chess and such references as occur in the sketches of Simpson's.

Continuously from the date of Philidor's death in 1795, to the ascendancy of Deschapelles in 1820, France maintained the lead in chess which she had held for one hundred and fifty years, producing in the interval the famous de La Bourdonnais, who for genius, invention and force has never been excelled, and may be ranked with Anderssen, whose supremacy for Germany first became manifested in 1851, and the unparalleled Paul Morphy, of New Orleans, who in 1857 and 1858, electrified the whole chess world by his signal successes in New York, London and Paris.

Taking strength, style, and rapidity of conception combined, these are probably the three greatest players which the world has produced since Al Suli in the Tenth century who was considered a marvel among the best of the Eastern players, and Paolo Boi, Leonardo and Ruy Lopez in the Sixteenth century.

Even in the pools at Paris in 1820, when Deschapelles essayed to give the pawn and move to La Bourdonnais and Cochrane, and in a boastful manner challenged the whole world on the same terms the superiority of La Bourdonnais was already manifested, and for succeeding years became unquestionable.

There are yet remaining old chess enthusiasts who recall with pleasure the satisfaction of the British chess circle at the zeal and prowess of Alexander McDonnell, of Belfast, on his appearance in London in 1828, and his continued pluck, perseverance and improvement, and gallant stand against the most formidable of French or living chess players, and which first began to establish English chess claims to equality with France and the very learned German school which had sprung up of which Dr. Bledow, Heydebrand Der Lasa, Hanstein and Bilguer soon became like Anderssen so especially distinguished. Staunton, a household word in chess, first came decisively to the front in 1840, the year in which La Bourdonnais died. McDonnell had already departed in 1837. They lie close together in the northwest corner of Kensal Green Cemetery. Staunton became the recognised English Champion, and by defeating St. Amant, the French representative, and all other players he encountered, further enhanced British chess reputation by upholding his title against all comers, until his wane and defeat by Anderssen, of Breslau, in the First International Tournament of 1851, a result quite unexpected at home and abroad, but subsequent events confirmed what the character of Staunton's play in this competition seemed to indicate that he had passed his best, for two English amateurs, very young, but rising into fame, not then considered by any means equal in force to Staunton, yet fully held their own in 1852 against Anderssen, the first great German conqueror in games which Germany has ever held in very high estimation.

In British chess circles, H. T. Buckle, writer and historian was now the most patient and scientific of the players. S. S. Boden, the most learned and profound, H. E. Bird the most rapid, ready and enthusiastic. The last-named, a favourite opponent of the English leaders, also encountered one by one the phalanx of great Foreign players assembled, such as Anderssen himself, Szen, Lowenthal, Kieseritzky, Harrwitz and Horwitz, and sustained our chess reputation, particularly in those dashing contests of short duration, which exigencies of time and other pursuits alone rendered practicable. The years 1853 to 1857 were not notable for first-class chess contests. Boden and Bird had both retired. The appearance of the invincible Paul Morphy from America in 1858, caused a revival of chess; he came to play a great match with Staunton, but no individual contest ever took place between them. Barnes a very strong amateur chess player encountered Morphy but lost by a large majority. Boden next came forth from his retirement and played some excellent games with him. Bird, long out of chess happening to return from a long absence abroad, also met him, but neither English player proved equal to Morphy, and it was regretted that the more experienced Staunton would not, and that Buckle could not test conclusions with him, Lowenthal and Paulsen had both been defeated by Morphy in America, and the young American proved decisively successful in matches against Lowenthal and Anderssen in London (Paris), and Harrwitz in Paris.

NOTE. Schallop, Dufresne and Alexis at the Berlin Chess Club pointed out the great appreciation by Anderssen for these games when Bird was in Berlin some years ago.