22 DECEMBER 1888, Page 21

CHESS: A CHRISTMAS MASQUE.*

A LITTLE poem, this, but dealing with great mysteries, and one which will commend itself to those who, like Milton's fallen angels, love to reason of- " Providence, Fore-knowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixed Fate, Free-will, Fore-knowledge absolute."

The central thought is derived from the old superstition :— " That he who spends the eve of Christmas Day Alone, and falls asleep 'twixt curfew time

And twelve, and wakes before the midnight chime, Finds all things that have known the sway of man Alive, and eager to unroll the plan Of mortal destiny."

A student, Eric, falls thus asleep with a chess-board beside him, in which he has been following a match-game. He sees the white pieces, the hosts of light, arrayed against the powers of darkness ; he watches the mimic battle, the splintered lances, and the empty saddles ; in a pause of the combat he hears the following strange chorus of chessmen:—

"PIECES.

When the play is over, and the match is won, Times of joyous contest ended, joyous rest begun, Then the players, foes no longer, only rival friends, Drink a parting health together : so the evening ends When the play is over.

• PAWNS.

When the work is over, and the reckoning cast Of the loss and gain the Future herits from the Past : Then the struggle recommences, all its hungry need Written in the father's life-blood for the child to read,

When the work is over."

On which Eric moralises :— " A game within a game : not only Black Contends with White, as Evil strives with Good : But lordly Pieces take one view of chess, And common Pawns another."

To those whose birth places them in the high places of the world, it may be easy to look upon all the stir and tumult of life as a merry jest, and to believe that, after all, there may be in the end a reconciliation of principles which apparently are set ever against one another in hopeless antagonism. But the "dim, common populations" below these—unable to beguile their sorrows by any such soothing self-deceptions, feeling only the stress and sorrow and corroding cares of life—for them it seems that-

" Their ever-growing wants make fresh demands,

Till higher culture only makes routine For mind and body lower slavery."

So the game goes forward. Underneath its visible incidents lie two deep, continually suggested questions,—" Will the good or the evil win ?" "Have the pieces any will of their own, or are they mere puppets moved hither and thither by forces which they have no power to control ?" In other words, Manicheanism and Necessitarianism are the two forms of doubt on which the poet's mind is brooding. Notwithstanding some back-currents of thought, he is in the main a strong champion of Free-will. This makes it the more extraordinary that in the very end he appears to give the victory to Evil, and in giving it to admit Necessity. Eric makes the one last move that is needed to give Black the game, and moralises :—

" Hard, though in sport, that wrong should conquer right, Or I should help to lose the day for White, Thinking that Black would recognise my aid."

Surely here an undue love of paradox has tempted the author, who is not pessimist at heart, into apparent pessimism. It is only the general idea of a game played with pieces by some superior intelligence that is taken from the chess-board. There is no attempt to carry it out in detail, or to follow minutely the fortunes of the various pieces, and in this •

Chas: a Christmas Margit., By Louis Tylor. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

abstention the poet has acted wisely. His strength lies in the description of character and the interpretation of motive.

"Black Queen" is a splendid description of the career of Lord Nelson's Lady Hamilton. Black King's Castle" expresses in eloquent hexameters the conflict in the heart of a Confederate soldier in the American War of Secession :—

"Duty ! its claims were divided. Country !' but which was our country ?

That of the larger idea, the one out of many united.' One :" an abstraction sublime, but still at its best an abstrac- tion.

Rather the 'ono' that we knew, the woods we had roamed in our boyhood, Orchards and pastures and waters, faces of neighbours and kinsfolk, All that made sympathy sweet, our home with its loving traditions."

To our thinking, the gem of the whole poem is the father's musing over his dead son, which is printed under the title, White King's Knight;" but it has no special connection with that piece, and might, indeed, be entirely detached from all that precedes or follows it.

We hope we have said enough to induce some of our readers to study Chess : a Christmas Masque, for themselves.

It is not, perhaps, a poem for the multitude, but the thought- ful few will, we think, unravel its inner meaning with delight.