SOME PILLARS OF THE EDIFICE.
PILLAR NO. 1.—THE PHILOSOPHY OF WHIST.
In case the ipse dixit of Cavendish in The Field, or “the preface,” should fail to convince, we have also had the sacred name of Philosophy dragged in to countenance these proceedings.
Ever since there has been any record of philosophers, their schools appear to have been about as numerous as themselves. Plato for his own share had five different sets of followers. All the systems contradicted each other, and the disciples of each master usually held different views as to his tenets; as this has continued down to our own day, for the dogmatic philosopher who recently died in Chelsea spent more than half a century in contradicting himself, while two of the most prominent disciples of Comte are fighting tooth and nail at this very moment, when we hear of the philosophy of Whist, the enquiry naturally arises, which philosophy? The Whist philosophy of Cam, propounded day by day, was, that there is no absolute never or always. The same idea runs through the entire treatise of Clay; and if there is one point more especially distinctive than another in the teaching of that great master, repeated again and again, and constantly insisted upon, it is that all the maxims of Whist are open to innumerable exceptions, that the coat must be cut according to the cloth, and that he is the finest Whist-player who can most readily grasp that fact. (Here I may remark, in a parenthesis, that though the late Mr. Clay eventually gave a qualified assent to the penultimate lead and the forced discard, it has yet to be shown that he assented to either the one or the other, in its present uncompromising and preposterous form, a form which is utterly repugnant to his every public utterance).
This is considerably opposed to the fearful and wonderful philosophy of Dr. Pole, the basis of which appears to be that it is always imperative to lead your longest suit, which he naively admits to be a losing game. It is unfortunate that his lines are drawn in a commercial age, for if he had only lived in the time of Don Quixote he might have taken high rank.
To ignore the teaching of a long line of illustrious dead, to set precedent at defiance, and deliberately to go out of your way in order to lose, is an extension of the old stoical principle, “under all circumstances to keep your temper,” in the very best latter-day manner; but reasonably doubtful as to the success of such an appeal if left to stand upon its own bottom, he invokes elementary algebra to his aid. Now elementary algebra is not devoid of good points; by its means we learn that a man may—either in time or in eternity—hold 635,013,559,600 different whist-hands. Moreover, every hand, he will have an entirely different purpose; sometimes to win the game; sometimes to save it, and with that end in view, will lay himself out to make tricks varying from three to eleven—below and above that number, since the invention of short Whist, he has no need to trouble himself—and the moral most people would draw, would be that in that portentous number of hands, some of them would require very different treatment from others; the philosopher of Whist, however, thinks not, but would fit all those six hundred and thirty-five thousand odd millions of hands into the same Procrustes’ bed, and would always lead the longest suit. Again, Whist is an art; if in any sense a science, it is certainly not an exact science, and the application of algebra to art is somewhat limited. There are far too many unknown quantities in the equation.
Take our old friend king and another in the second hand; Permutations and Combinations will inform us sooner or later—I should imagine later, for to my certain knowledge, a series of four thousand two hundred and nineteen is not enough—as to the number of times we shall make it or lose it, whether we play it, or do not play it; but they will give us no clue as to the extent of damage we may receive when it is played and taken by the third hand, or as to the loss we incur when the ace is in the fourth hand, by importing uncertainty into the game. When we do not put it on and lose it, we may—or may not—lose one trick; when we put it on and lose it, we may lose any number. The whole system of the newly suggested play of the first and second hand is undermined by the fundamentally false assumption that the lead is always from a long suit; that everybody, irrespective of the score, has merely to ascertain which is his longest suit, and then to take immediate steps to put the table in possession of its exact length is so transparently simple, that such extreme simplicity in a game of skill is enough of itself to arouse the gravest suspicion.
Just to see how the plan worked, six consecutive times have I with king and two others—using my best judgment as to the lead—passed the queen led, and six times have I lost a trick; this may show that my judgment was bad; but it shows, with much more absolute certainty, that the lead, in those six cases, was not from numerical strength.
If the lead always were, it needs no demonstration to prove that the holder of the king has seldom anything to gain by heading the trick; that might be granted without the slightest demur; only how about the combination game? If the fourth player has to play the ace on the queen led, where is the king? certainly, not according to our present knowledge, in the second hand with one or two of the suit.
As to not heading the queen with king and another, one of the latest Cavendish coups, it is really so puerile, he must be practising upon our credulity; the veriest bumble-puppist that ever crawled upon this earth is too well aware that, every now and again, a trick may be made by the most absurd and outrageous play—or rather want of play—otherwise the breed would have been as extinct as the dodo.
There are positions enough, where the king is the only card of re-entry and where, unless the fourth hand can get in with the ace and draw the trumps, the game is over, but it is not so here; the coup succeeds, simply and solely, because, by a most improbable chance, the fourth hand holds one, while the second player holds two of the suit. Genuine, unadulterated bumble-puppy! Whenever I am induced to propound a system of Whist philosophy, enlivened with texts from the Gospel according to Cocker (absit omen), its fundamental principle will be that four in thirteen goes twice.
If I with king and another head the queen and make it, and have nothing else to do, I can return the suit, ruff the third round and make three consecutive tricks; not a bad thing in these hard times when the rental of our estates is constantly diminishing, and the income tax has gone up another penny.
Now suppose I pass it and my partner makes the ace, he must open a new suit. We have had a surfeit of statistics lately, still, if the gentleman at present in possession of the calculating machine of the late Mr. Babbage would kindly turn the handle, and let me know how many tricks on the average are lost by merely opening a suit, I should be much obliged to him. When the leader and his partner either hold the whole of it, or nothing at all, it may be done with impunity, but under ordinary circumstances it usually entails a loss of one trick and often two.
I have considered at some length the original lead of the longest suit, and the lead of the penultimate, because on these two commandments hang all the latter-day law, but not the profits: for on the strength—for want of a more appropriate word—of these figments, at this very moment our guide is attacking the recognised play of the third hand, our philosopher is suggesting an entirely new set of proceedings for the second hand, while both guide and philosopher are doing their level best to assist our friend in New York to bouleverse the leads.
PILLAR NO. 2.—ILLUSTRATIVE WHIST-HANDS.
If you watch a thousand ordinary whist-hands, the great bulk will be illustrative of (1) human stupidity; a few (2) of super-human cunning, and out of the remainder the faddist may pick out (3) one or two to countenance any form of mania from which he may be suffering at the moment.
The first class—always provided that you meet it in the spirit and not in the flesh—is often amusing.
The second is, if skilful, generally open to the objection that, as the same result might be attained by a more simple and equally legitimate method of play, there is an enormous amount of good skill gone wrong.
The third class—and this is the class we have now to deal with—is never amusing, seldom skilful, and not uncommonly misses its tip altogether; for instance, two hands given in the ‘Theory of Whist,’ to illustrate certain leading principles of the game, were promptly gibbeted by another eminent authority, and are still hanging in chains in the Westminster Papers, for September and October, 1873, as “most striking examples of brute force and stupidity.”
In any case they prove nothing. Suppose some malefactor, with a turn for leading singletons, were to bring before the public a dozen or two of hands illustrative of results which would make any leader of the top card but three livid with envy, at the same time suppressing two, four, or six dozen hands, where the lead had brought him to condign grief, would that in any way tend to show the lead was good?
Still carefully selected hands, although we may disapprove of their raison d’être, are not necessarily revolting to the intelligence; but there is a limit, and attempting to show such a moral as this, that with king and another, it is dangerous to play the king second hand on the queen led, because your partner may hold the ace single, is perilously near it.
I am not perhaps so conversant with the Whist-hands in The Field as I ought to be, for the difficulty of its Catherine-wheel notation deters me; but about two years ago, I came across a few disjecta membra intended to bolster up some mechanical substitute for brains, and a similar fragment with a similar intention has lately been quoted in that paper. To make the matter more simple we will transpose it from the first to the third person. “A holds ace, knave, five, four, three and two of hearts; his partner B holds king, queen and a small heart; A leads the ace of hearts. He then leads three of hearts. His left hand adversary, Y, plays ten, B queen, and Z, fourth player, nine. Neither adversary has asked for trumps,” which is entirely a matter of opinion; for as no human being knows, or ever will know, where a single trump is, Z might have begun a call, and finding the whole heart suit dead against him, and knowing the exact position of every card in it, thought fit to conceal it. “Consequently two of hearts must be in A’s hand, and three other hearts besides.” Up to this point, except the little difference of opinion as to a signal, our unanimity is wonderful. “All the trumps now come out,” and B, in the confusion, gets rid of his king of hearts. That brief sentence about the trumps, like the pie in Pickwick, which was all fat, is rather too rich. If Y and Z had them and they “came out” against their will, it was rough on Y and Z. If Y and Z, with the fact staring them in the face that B holds the king of hearts and A the remaining four—for we are all agreed that this is clear—took any active steps to induce trumps to “come out,” they must have been rampant lunatics; even if Y and Z were not lunatics, but as ardent admirers of the antepenultimate lead, and anxious for its success, at any cost to themselves, merely did their best to ensure the “coming out” of the trumps, how B got the opportunity to discard the king of hearts would still be involved in Stygian darkness. The most reasonable supposition, if Y and Z really did lead trumps, is that he dropped it quietly under the table, in sure and certain hope that they were the very last people to take a mean advantage of him. If A and B, in addition to the entire suit of hearts, had also the strength in trumps, nothing could prevent those hearts from being brought in.
Though futile for the purpose designed, the fragment has two other morals.
(1) That if A and B hold the command of trumps, and an entire plain suit, they can bring it in, in spite of proclaiming its exact position to the adversary.
(2) That if Y and Z hold the trumps, when an antepenultimate is led, those trumps not only appear to “come out” of themselves like mushrooms—spontaneously and without obvious cause—which in itself would be sufficiently aggravating, but they “come out” at the most inopportune moments, to the dire discomfiture of their unfortunate owners. (If any decently responsible person will guarantee that my adversaries will always do their best to get trumps out for me whenever I lead an antepenultimate, nobody shall in future have to complain of my not going far enough in that direction).
Special arrangements for taking a quantity above five are seldom of practical use; on the contrary, such suits have an innate propensity for making themselves unpleasantly conspicuous, without any mécanique.
It must either be a very weak cause to require such advocacy, or an uncommonly strong one to survive it.
Nec tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis.
PILLAR NO. 3.—DEVELOPMENTS, EXTENSIONS OF PRINCIPLE, AND GENERALIZATIONS.
A development is such an ambiguous expression (for it may be either good, bad or indifferent) that, on that understanding, we may freely admit its existence; but an extension of principle has several varieties, is as slippery as an eel, and both the extension and the principle must be regarded with a wary eye.
The principle that is extended by substituting ‘always’ for ‘generally’ and then appealing boldly to history to sanction the alteration is one form. Another form is to invent both the principle and the extension when the occasion arises, as in the principle of leading the bottom of an intermediate sequence, and its extension to penultimates, antepenultimates, and so forth. Logicians term this petitio, not extensio principii.
Even when you have got firm hold of a good principle, or a good india-rubber ring, you will get into trouble if you stretch it indefinitely.
There is no sounder principle going than that it is generally desirable to acquaint your partner with the state of your hand, but it neither follows that you should place it face upwards on the table, nor avail yourself of those extensions known to Hoyle as “piping at whisk,” though the first is undoubtedly legitimate, and the second, if it were only first duly exploited by some faddist in The Field, would be quite as legitimate as any extension that has appeared there in our time.
While these extensions of principle are in the air, some regard should be paid to the interests of that numerous class whose information is entirely derived from inspection of the last trick. Already they had to find out in that obscure medium what suit was led, who led it, and how each card fell. Now, they have in addition, to track to their lair several missing minor cards, and when they have succeeded in doing so, to decide whether they indicate a signal, a nine suit, the lowest of a long head sequence, or the lunacy of the leader. If their happiness is to be taken into consideration one important extension of principle must be added to the list.
It is a principle—vide law 91—that we may all see the penultimate trick, and the extension that we may all see the antepenultimate and so on up to thirteen, proceeds pari passu with the other famous demonstration; it also conveys the same kind of information, in exactly the same way, for it shows those who have eyes in their heads that which they already knew, and reduces to a more hopeless state of imbecility those dependent on its aid.
I do not advocate it for two reasons; in the first place, because I abjure and detest the principle itself; secondly, because the only time I ever attempted to extend a principle, I was accused of sorites, which sounds like some unpleasant form of skin disease, and such insinuations, though untrue, are disagreeable. As I do not wish to expose myself to them, I make a present of the idea to any pupil of the new academy who may be intent on further spoiling the game.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and what the late Government considered to be extensions of principle, developments and generalizations, their successors stigmatize as—
“Red ruin and the breaking up of laws.”
The present condition of Whist may be briefly and graphically expressed by the well-known epitaph:—
“I was well, I wanted to be better, now I am here.”
Among all the quasi-extensions of spurious principles, one fine old crusted principle is in danger of being lost sight of altogether, and now that attention is called to it, I sincerely hope that no modern pedant will be tempted to extend it. The principle is, TO LEAVE WELL ALONE.
Such are the three remarkably unstable pillars, on which rest the proposals for upsetting the recognized play of the first, second, and third hand; and if they give way, down comes the entire superstructure. Happily, the purely academic discussion on the American leads is not likely to trouble the general public much; its fascinations for them are not great, but if those fascinations should induce the doctrinaire mind to lessen its mischievous activity in other directions, it may yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise. As we are threatened with a book devoted to these leads, I confine myself to mentioning that in answer to eighteen enquiries, “What do you think of the new leads?” sixteen replies were to the effect that a good player, if he took his coat off and went into the matter thoroughly, might master them in six months, and a duffer, under the same circumstances, in half a century, but that in neither case was the game worth the candle; the advice of the other two, to “go to Bath and get my head shaved,” was rude, and the latter half of it quite uncalled for.