"A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." This was
the celebrated _wish_ of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, next
to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your
lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who have no objection
to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that
they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game,
and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at
a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will
desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and
play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table.
One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said,
that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them.
Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from
her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency,
willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a
thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave,
no concessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor
ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost
forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her
good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; and
neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people
have their blind side--their superstitions; and I have heard her
declare, under the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit.
I never in my life--and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of
it--saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or
snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it
was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous
conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed,
cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine
last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a
literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand;
and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was
no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies,
in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble
occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that
light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the
world to do,--and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards--over a
book.
Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite
work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards)
his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how
far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ
from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I
had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but
I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes
upon that author.
Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist
had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy
and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty
and quick shifting of partners--a thing which the constancy of
whist abhors;--the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of
Spadille--absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of
whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his
brother-nobility of the Aces;--the giddy vanity, so taking to the
inexperienced, of playing alone:--above all, the overpowering
attractions of a _Sans Prendre Vole_,--to the triumph of which there
is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of
whist;--all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation
to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the _solider_ game:
that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast
of snatches. One or two rubbers might coextend in duration with an
evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate
steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever
fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she
would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the
little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing
postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings
to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;--but the wars of
whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational,
antipathies of the great French and English nations.
A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game.
There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage--nothing
superfluous. No _flushes_--that most irrational of all pleas that
a reasonable being can set up:--that any one should claim four by
virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference
to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions
of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful
an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised
superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things.--Suits
were soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to
distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who
should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets,
that never were to be marshalled--never to take the field?--She even
wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, would
have stript it of some appendages, which, in the state of human
frailty, may be venially, and even commendably allowed of. She saw no
reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not
one suit always trumps?--Why two colours, when the mark of the suits
would have sufficiently distinguished them without it?--
"But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety.
Man is not a creature of pure reason he must have his senses
delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where
the music and the paintings draw in many to worship, whom your quaker
spirit of unsensualizing would have kept out.--You, yourself, have a
pretty collection of paintings--but confess to me, whether, walking
in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the
Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with
an elegant delight, at all comparable to _that_ you have it in your
power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment
of the court cards?--the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a
procession--the gay triumph-assuring scarlets--the contrasting
deadly-killing sables--the 'hoary majesty of spades'--Pam in all his
glory!--
"All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon
the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less.
But the _beauty_ of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped
of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere
gambling.--Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on,
instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena
for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys
in!--Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers--(work of Chinese
artist, unconscious of their symbol,--or as profanely slighting their
true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out
those little shrines for the goddess)--exchange them for little bits
of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate!"--
The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic;
and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that
evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a
curious cribbage board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her
maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated)
brought with him from Florence:--this, and a trifle of five hundred
pounds, came to me at her death.
The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with
religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never
greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have
heard her say,--disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to
it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "_go_"--or
"_that's a go_." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging
teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake),
because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would
have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful
tenure of declaring "_two for his heels_." There is something
extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a
gentlewoman born.
Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she
would ridicule the pedantry of the terms--such as pique--repique--the
capot--they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two,
or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate,
or square. She would argue thus:--Cards are warfare: the ends are
gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport: when
single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable.
By themselves, it is too close a fight; with spectators, it is not
much bettered. No looker on can be interested, except for a bet,
and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck
_sympathetically_, or for your play.--Three are still worse; a mere
naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without
league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory
interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty
infractions of them, as in tradrille.--But in square games (_she
meant whist_) all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is
accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, common
to every species--though the _latter_ can be but very imperfectly
enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a
participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals
too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not
wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist
abhors neutrality, or interest beyond its sphere. You glory in some
surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold--or even
an interested--by-stander witnesses it, but because your _partner_
sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for
two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their
disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness)
your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one
in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying
the channels. War becomes a civil game.--By such reasonings as these
the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime.
No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where
chance entered into the composition, _for nothing_. Chance, she would
argue--and here again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion!--chance
is nothing, but where something else depends upon it. It is obvious,
that cannot be _glory_. What rational cause of exultation could it
give to a man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself?
or before spectators, where no stake was depending?--Make a lottery
of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortunate number--and what
possible principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it
gratify to gain that number as many times successively, without a
prize?--Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon,
where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and
those people idots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such
circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played
for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for
glory, they were a mere setting of one man's wit,--his memory, or
combination-faculty rather--against another's; like a mock-engagement
at a review, bloodless and profitless.--She could not conceive a
_game_ wanting the spritely infusion of chance,--the handsome excuses
of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room,
whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with
insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles,
and Knights, the _imagery_ of the board, she would argue, (and I think
in this case justly) were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard
head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form
and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper
arena for such combatants.
To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions,
she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always
trying to get the better in something or other:--that this passion can
scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards: that cards
are a temporary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but _play_
at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake,
yet, during the illusion, we _are_ as mightily concerned as those
whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting;
much ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means for
disproportioned ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more
innoxious, than many of those more serious _games_ of life, which men
play, without esteeming them to be such.--
With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these matters, I
think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at
cards _for nothing_ has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or
not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a
game at piquet _for love_ with my cousin Bridget--Bridget Elia.
I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a toothache, or a
sprained ancle,--when you are subdued and humble,--you are glad to put
up with an inferior spring of action.