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 honor, 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 theater to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a coldor even an interested - bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathizes 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 favorite 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 dis liked the mixture of chance in backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people idiots 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 overreaching. 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 while whist was stirring in the center, 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 color. 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 a 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 in 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 ankle, when you are subdued and humble, you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. I grant it is not the highest style of man- I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle-she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologize. At such times those terms which my old friend objected to come in as something admissible. I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her dare I tell thee how foolish I am?), I wished it might have lasted forever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play; I would be content to go on in that idle folly forever. The pipkin should be ever boiling that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over; and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. I HAVE no ear. A CHAPTER ON EARS. Mistake me not, reader, nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inletsthose indispensable side-intelligencers. Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement which constrained him to draw upon assurance to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny that I ever should be. When, therefore, I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean-for music. To say that this heart never melted at the concord of sweet sounds would be a foul self-libel. “Water parted from the sea" never fails to move it strangely. So does "In infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman - the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation- the sweetest why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats, and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite for Alice W―n. I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practicing "God save the King" all my life, whistling and humming it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspicion that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my mild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlor, on his return he was pleased to say "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being-technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts — had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny. Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is, or how one note. should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thoroughbass I contrive to guess at from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton. It is hard to stand alone in an age like this (constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut), to remain as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes, willingly enduring stripes while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive— mine at least will-spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze, like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds; and the purgatory of the enraged musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!), immovable, or affecting some faint emotion, till (as some have said. that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold theater in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that -Party in a parlor All silent, and all DAMNED. Above all, these insufferable concertos and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and imbitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore trage dies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable ram |