Your true teacher of chess, your subtle chess-poisoner, your cunning Comus who changes men to chess-players, begins quite the other way round.  He will, let us say, give you King, Queen, and Pawn placed out in careless possible positions.  So you master the militant possibilities of Queen and Pawn without perplexing complications.  Then King, Queen, and Bishop perhaps; King, Queen, and Knight; and so on.  It ensures that you always play a winning game in these happy days of your chess childhood, and taste the one sweet of chess-playing, the delight of having the upper hand of a better player.  Then to more complicated positions, and at last back to the formal beginning.  You begin to see now to what end the array is made, and understand why one Gambit differeth from another in glory and virtue.  And the chess mania of your teacher cleaveth to you thenceforth and for evermore.

It is a curse upon a man.  There is no happiness in chess—­Mr. St. George Mivart, who can find happiness in the strangest places, would be at a loss to demonstrate it upon the chess-board.  The mild delight of a pretty mate is the least unhappy phase of it.  But, generally, you find afterwards that you ought to have mated two moves before, or at the time that an unforeseen reply takes your Queen.  No chess-player sleeps well.  After the painful strategy of the day one fights one’s battles over again.  You see with more than daylight clearness that it was the Rook you should have moved, and not the Knight.  No! it is impossible! no common sinner innocent of chess knows these lower deeps of remorse.  Vast desert boards lie for the chess-player beyond the gates of horn.  Stalwart Rooks ram headlong at one, Knights hop sidelong, one’s Pawns are all tied, and a mate hangs threatening and never descends.  And once chess has been begun in the proper way, it is flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone; you are sold, and the bargain is sealed, and the evil spirit hath entered in.

The proper outlet for the craving is the playing of games, and there is a class of men—­shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men—­who gather in coffee-houses, and play with a desire that dieth not, and a fire that is not quenched.  These gather in clubs and play Tournaments, such tournaments as he of the Table Round could never have imagined.  But there are others who have the vice who live in country places, in remote situations—­curates, schoolmasters, rate collectors—­who go consumed from day to day and meet no fit companion, and who must needs find some artificial vent for their mental energy.  No one has ever calculated how many sound Problems are possible, and no doubt the Psychical Research people would be glad if Professor Karl Pearson would give his mind to the matter.  All the possible dispositions of the pieces come to such a vast number, however, that, according to the theory of probability, and allowing a few thousand arrangements each day, the same problem ought never to turn up more than