The Game of Kings



I do not claim to be an authority on either the history or the
practice of chess, but, as the poet Gray observed when he saw his old
school from a long way off, it is sometimes an advantage not to know
too much of one's subject. The imagination can then be exercised more
effectively. So when I am playing Capablanca (or old Robinson) for the
championship of the home pastures, my thoughts are not fixed
exclusively upon the "mate" which is threatening; they wander off
into those enchanted lands of long ago, when flesh-and-blood knights
rode at stone-built castles, and thin-lipped bishops, all smiles and
side-long glances, plotted against the kings who ventured to oppose
them. This is the real fascination of chess.


You observe that I speak of castles, not of rooks. I do not know
whence came this custom of calling the most romantic piece on the
board by the name of a very ordinary bird, but I, at least, will not
be a party to it. I refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat,
the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of
every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the
field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me
that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something
which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that
case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle which
its shape proclaims it.