LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE QUALIFICATIONS FOR CHESS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
you allow me, before the present interesting corre- spondence is closed, to add a few remarks on the subject of chess- playing?
Your article of January 8 goes to show that the chief faculty which makes a really good chess-player is a power of readily grasping " space-relations." " A. H." expresses this capacity by the phrase, "picturing-faculty," which seems to be the same thing in different words. Taking, then, the meaning of the two ex- pressions as identical, I venture to suggest that your very ingeni- ous theory may receive a certain corroboration from my own experience. I have often noticed that skill in drawing is found in the same persons side by side with skill in chess. Of course this combination may have been accidental in those instances in -which I observed it, and I should be glad to fmd my position— that a good chess-player is commonly a good draughtsman—con- firmed by the larger experience of some of your readers.
I fear that the wider question, whether really great chess- players have ever been remarkable for anything else, must be answered negatively. A friend, however, reminds me of the name of Sir Roderick Murchison, but I was not aware that he was in the front rank of chess players. I also find that in a late inter- University contest at this game, most of the representatives of Oxford had taken good honours ; -while amongst the Cambridge men was one who, I believe, became second wrangler in the fol- lowing year. Allow me further to point out that chess is essentially a game which those who work with the brain know, or should know, only to avoid. It is scarcely a recreation, for, given an equally-matched party, and the result is a severe mental effort, and consequent exhaustion. After such a struggle, the chess-player's state of mind may, perhaps, be compared to the battered condition of one who has suffered at a Rugby football-match. Statesmen and politicians, indeed most professional men, have neither time nor inclination for a game which demands such intense application. Chess is best suited to a mildly-contemplative life, like that of our country clergy (many of them excellent players), or that of
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