STAMMERING AND CHESS.
One of the apparent calamities of my life (overruled, as I have long
since seen, for good) was the before-mentioned affliction of a very bad
impediment of speech, which blighted my youth and manhood from fifteen
to thirty-five, obliging me to social humiliations of many kinds, to
silence in class and on examination occasions (hence my written poetries
in lieu of spoken prose), and in early manhood preventing me from taking
orders, and thereafter from speaking in the law courts. But I was
hopelessly and practically a dumb man, except under special excitations,
when I could burst into eloquent speech which surprised third persons
more than myself; for when quite alone I could spout like Demosthenes;
it was only nervous fear that paralysed my tongue. Accordingly, my good
father placed me from time to time with well-meaning and well-paid
pretenders to make a perfect cure of my affliction, and I did many
things and suffered much from such false physicians. I am sure no one
can truly say what I can, viz., that in a purposely monotonous note and
syllable by syllable, with a crutch under my chin, and a sort of gag on
the rebellious tongue, I have read all through in a loud voice Milton's
whole Paradise Lost and Regained, and the most of Cowper's poems! That
was the sort of tongue-drill and nerve-quieting recommended and enforced
for many hours a day, through weary months, by a certain Mr. C., while
Dr. P., his successor to the well-named "patient," gave, first,
emulcents, and then styptics, and was fortunately prevented in time by
my father from some surgical experiments on the muscles of lip and
tongue. However, nobody could cure me, until I cured myself; rather, let
me gratefully and humbly confess, until God answered constant prayer,
and granted stronger bodily health, and gave me good success in my
literary life, and made me to feel I was equal in speech, as now, to the
most fluent of my fellows. So let any stammerer (and there are many
such) take comfort from my cure, and pray against the trouble as I did,
and courageously stand up against the multitude to claim before heaven
and earth man's proudest prerogative--the privilege of speech. In my
Proverbial Essay "Of Speaking" will be found two contrasted pictures
drawn from my own experiences: one of the stifled stammerer, the other
of the unbridled orator: which you can turn to as you will. As, however,
some of my old groanings after utterance are not equally accessible, I
will here give a few lines of mine from the "Stammerer's Complaint,"
printed in the medical book of one of my Galens:--
"... And is it not in truth
A poisoned sting in every social joy,
A thorn that rankles in the writhing flesh,
A drop of gall in each domestic sweet,
An irritating petty misery,--
That I can never look on one I love
And speak the fulness of my burning thoughts?
That I can never with unmingled joy
Meet a long-loved and long-expected friend
Because I feel, but cannot vent my feelings,--
Because I know I ought, but must not, speak,--
Because I mark his quick impatient eye
Striving in kindness to anticipate
The word of welcome strangled in its birth?
Is it not sorrow, while I truly love
Sweet social converse, to be forced to shun
The happy circle, from a nervous sense--
An agonising poignant consciousness--
That I must stand aloof, nor mingle with
The wise and good in rational argument,
The young in brilliant quickness of reply,
Friendship's ingenuous interchange of mind,
Affection's open-hearted sympathies?
But feel myself an isolated being,
A very wilderness of widowed thought!"
All this is only sad stern truth; nothing morbid here: let any poor
stammerer testify to my faithfulness. Amongst others afflicted like
myself was Charles Kingsley, whom I knew well at a time when I had
overcome my calamity; whereas he carried his to the grave with him;
though he had frequent gleams of a forced and courageous eloquence,
preaching energetically in a somewhat artificial voice,--in private he
stammered much, as once I used to do, no doubt to his mortification,
though humbly acquiescing in God's will.
* * * * *
Chess is a chief intellectual resource to the stammerer; for therein he
can conquer in argument without the toil of speech, and prove himself
practically more eloquent than the men full of talk whom he so much
envies. Accordingly, in days gone by (for of late years I have given it
up, as too toilsome a recreation) I played often at that royal game. In
these times it is no game at all,--but a wearisome if seductive
science; just as cricket is an artillery combat now, and football a most
perilous conflict, and boating breaks the athlete's heart, and billiards
can only be played by a bar-spot professional, and tranquil whist itself
has developed into a semi-fraudulent system of open rules and secret
signs; even so the honest common-sense old game of chess has come to be
so encumbered with published openings and gambits and other parasitic
growths upon the wholesome house-plant, that I for one have renounced
it, as a pursuit for which life is too short and serious (give me a
farce or a story instead), and one moreover in which any fool well up to
crammed book games may crow over the wisest of men in an easy, because
stereotyped, checkmate. However, in this connection, I recollect a small
experience which proves that positive ignorance of famous openings may
sometimes be an advantage; just as the skilled fencer will be baffled by
a brave boor rushing in against rules, and by close encounter
unconventionally pinning him straight off. When a youth, just before
matriculation, I was a guest at Culham of the good rector there, a
chess-player to his own thinking indomitable, for none of the neighbours
could checkmate him: so he thought to make quick work of a silent but
thoughtful boy-stammerer,--by tempting him at an early period of the
game to take, seemingly for nothing but advantage, a certain knight (his
usual dodge, it appeared) which would have ensured an ultimate defeat.
However, I declined the generous offer, which began to nettle my
opponent; but when afterwards I refused to answer divers moves by the
card (as he protested I ought), and finally reduced him to a positive
checkmate, he flew into such an unclerical rage that I would not play
again; his "revenge" might be too terrible. For another trivial chess
anecdote: a very worthy old friend of mine, a rector too, was fond of
his game, and of winning it: and I remember one evening that his ancient
servitor, bringing in the chessboard, whispered to me, "Please don't
beat him again, sir,--he didn't sleep a wink last night;" accordingly,
after a respectably protracted struggle, some strange oversights were
made, and my reverend host came off conqueror: so he was enabled to
sleep happily. I remember too playing with pegged pieces in a box-board
at so strange a place as outside the Oxford coach; and I think my
amiable adversary then was one Wynell Mayow, who has since grown into a
great Church dignitary. If he lives, my compliments to him.
One of the best private chess-players I used often to encounter,--but
almost never to beat, is my old life-friend, Evelyn of Wotton, now the
first M.P. for his own ancestral Deptford. It was to me a triumph only
to puzzle his shrewdness, "to make him think," as I used to say,--and if
ever through his carelessness I managed a stale, or a draw,--very seldom
a mate,--that was glory indeed. If he sees this, his memory will
countersign it.
Let so much suffice, as perhaps a not inappropriate word about the
Literary Life's frequent mental recreation, especially, where the player
is, like Moses, "not a man of words."
One day, by the by, this text in the original, "lo ish devarim anochi"
(Exod. iv. 10), came to my lot in Pusey's Hebrew class, to my special
confusion: but every tutor was very considerate and favoured the one who
couldn't speak, and Mr. Biscoe in particular used to say when my turn
came to read or to answer,--"Never mind, Mr. Tupper, I'm sure you know
it,--please to go on, Mr. So-and-So." This habitual confidence in my
proficiency had the effect of forcing my consciousness to deserve it;
and it usually happened that I really did know, silently, like
Macaulay's cunning augur, "who knew but might not tell."
Speaking of recreation, Izaak Walton's joy as a contemplative man has
been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found
in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of
country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my
piscatorial friends Kingsley and Leech in old days, and will not be
unacceptable to Attwood Matthews, Cholmondeley Pennell, and the Marstons
with their friend Mr. Senior in these. I have had various luck as an
angler from Stennis Lake to the Usk, from Enniskillen to Killarney, from
Isis to Wotton,--and so it would be a pity if I omitted such an
authorial characteristic; especially as my stammering obliged me to
"study to be quiet."
I.
"Look, like a village Queen of May, the stream
Dances her best before the holiday sun,
And still, with musical laugh, goes tripping on
Over these golden sands, which brighter gleam
To watch her pale-green kirtle flashing fleet
Above them, and her tinkling silver feet
That ripple melodies: quick,--yon circling rise
In the calm refluence of this gay cascade
Marked an old trout, who shuns the sunny skies,
And, nightly prowler, loves the hazel shade:
Well thrown!--you hold him bravely,--off he speeds,
Now up, now down,--now madly darts about,--
Mind, mind your line among those flowering reeds,--
How the rod bends,--and hail, thou noble trout!"
II.
"O, thou hast robbed the Nereids, gentle brother,
Of some swift fairy messenger; behold,--
His dappled livery prankt with red and gold
Shows him their favourite page: just such another
Sad Galatæa to her Acis sent
To teach the new-born fountain how to flow,
And track with loving haste the way she went
Down the rough rocks, and through the flowery plain,
Ev'n to her home where coral branches grow,
And where the sea-nymph clasps her love again:
We the while, terrible as Polypheme,
Brandish the lissom rod, and featly try
Once more to throw the tempting treacherous fly
And win a brace of trophies from the stream."
III.
"Come then, coy Zephyr, waft my feathered bait
Over this rippling shallow's tiny wave
To yonder pool, whose calmer eddies lave
Some Triton's ambush, where he lies in wait
To catch my skipping fly; there drop it lightly:
A rise, by Glaucus!--but he missed the hook,--
Another--safe! the monarch of the brook,
With broadside like a salmon's, gleaming brightly:
Off let him race, and waste his prowess there;
The dread of Damocles, a single hair,
Will tax my skill to take this fine old trout;
So,--lead him gently; quick, the net, the net!
Now gladly lift the glittering beauty out,
Hued like a dolphin, sweet as violet."