Card-playing, for the most part, is so destitute of
science, has involved in it so few intellectual qualities, and is altogether
of so frivolous a character—that it must be matter of surprise, even with
the votaries of the amusement themselves, if they have made it the subject
of serious thought, that it should be capable of supplying any degree of
pleasure to a rational mind. Its prevalence, however, among all classes of
society; the firm ground which it maintains amidst the fluctuations of taste
and of fashion, and that too in spite of the contempt and ridicule with
which it has been constantly assailed, render it sufficiently evident, that
this amusement possesses some intrinsic qualities of powerful interest and
fascination.
Its advocate argues, that as a social amusement,
card-playing is highly convenient. It serves as an agreeable pastime, unites
the friendly circle, excludes conversation of an insipid, frivolous, or
injurious character, and supplies the party with pleasing employment.
Politeness has certainly no easy task to perform in the conduct of a mixed
party. The social circle exhibits a great diversity of mental character,
tastes, habits, education and talent. In the absence of cards, how is it to
be supplied with convenient and agreeable employment, such as will engage
the attention of all, and render fellowship easy, familiar, and pleasant?
General conversation, under the restrictions which
good manners must necessarily impose, cannot be long sustained with
convenience and interest. To meet the circumstances of all, and to be
generally interesting, the topics of conversation must be extremely limited
and barren. The stores of a well-furnished mind cannot be produced without
manifest inconvenience; for this would destroy that mental equality which it
is of the first importance to preserve. Conversation, if it is at all
familiar and unrestrained, throws open the stores of the mind, elicits its
powers, stimulates its efforts, and exhibits the degree of its culture and
talents. The equality of mental circumstance, which, in appearance at least,
should be preserved in the social circle, would thereby be destroyed. All
the care, which the most delicate sense of propriety could exert, would be
insufficient to preserve a seeming level; invidious distinctions would be
produced, and rendered obvious. In proportion to the freedom and vivacity of
conversation, so would the powers of thought, the stores of knowledge, the
ebullitions of wit, and the creations of imagination, be produced, and
unavoidably brought into relationships of rivalry.
With a view to this inconvenience, cards have been
introduced; and it must be admitted that, to a considerable extent, they
accomplish their object. They afford an amusement of which, on equal
terms—all can partake. The interesting and the insipid, the mirthful and the
dull, the beautiful and the unattractive, merge their respective
distinctions in the feelings of interest, which the amusement in common
inspires. There is a provoking mixture of truth and satire in the remarks of
Dr. Johnson on this subject. "I cannot but suspect," says he, "that this
odious fashion is produced by a conspiracy of the old, the ugly, and the
ignorant, against the young and beautiful, the witty and the mirthful; as a
contrivance to level all distinctions of nature and of art, and to confound
the world in a chaos of folly; to take from those who could outshine them,
all the advantages of mind and body; to withhold youth from its natural
pleasures, deprive wit of its influence, and beauty of its charms; to fix
those hearts upon money, to which love has hitherto been entitled; to sink
life into a tedious uniformity, and to allow it no other hopes or fears but
those of robbing and of being robbed."
The apology which is offered is plausible—but by no means
sufficient. It furnishes adequate reason why card-playing should be
tolerated, and why it should frequently invite the attention of the social
circle; it must be evident however, even to the most superficial observer,
that stronger motives than these reasons are able to supply, lead to the
amusement. It is sought with avidity, and produces strong excitement. It is
the first, and not the last resource of gratification. To it—its votaries
are not driven by necessity—but they are led by inclination. It has a power
to fix the attention, and to interest the feelings, beyond almost every
other amusement. An almost magical charm attends it, and however long
protracted, it never wearies. It often painfully and injuriously agitates
indeed—but it never produces boredom. In short, ingenuity has never invented
an amusement so completely absorbing, or that serves more effectually
(employing a common phrase) "to kill time."
The accurate inquirer, therefore, must search for
something more in this amusement than his yet been stated, to account
satisfactorily for the remarkable phenomena which it exhibits. The field
they afford for contest appears to be the secret of the interest which
games in general create. Contest is a pleasure rendered so, by an
instinct of the human mind, namely, the love of power. "The joys of
conquest—are the joys of man." Triumph is a point of ambition, and the
effort to obtain it, calls the mind into agreeable activity. Proofs of
superiority, even in trivial efforts, is gratifying. Juvenile
recreations illustrate this phenomenon of mind. For the most part they are
such as afford scope for contest, and for the trial of superiority. "Almost
every game," observes Dr. Thomas Brown, in his lecture on the love of power,
"which, in the days of our childhood, amuses or occupies us, is a trial of
our strength, agility, or skill, or some of those qualities in which
power consists; and we run or wrestle with those, with whom we are,
perhaps, in combats of a very different kind—to dispute, in other years, the
prize of distinction in the various duties and dignities of life."
Can the powerful interest which card-playing produces, be
resolved into this feeling? May the love of power, which forms a
constant element in the pleasure of youthful recreations, and which enters
into the graver pleasures of "children of a larger growth," be considered
the passion to which cards are indebted for their power to engage and to
please? The opponent conceives an insuperable obstacle in the way to this
conclusion; for cards, he maintains do not afford sufficient scope for the
exercise of this feeling. The trial of mental superiority is scarcely
furnished by the amusement. Efforts of skill only are capable of
supplying the description of gratification to which reference is made.
The pleasure of success is produced by the
consciousness of discovered superiority; that success, therefore, must not
be the gift of fortune—but the reward of merit. The stimulus
is lacking, when the result of the contest is beyond the control of the
competitor; and that triumph is worthless, which chance, rather than
skill, commands.
It is remarkable how soon games of chance fail to
interest children, and how early they are abandoned for those which involve
the trial of personal skill and prowess. If all the games of cards do not
exclude skill altogether, they demand it only in a very limited degree. The
most admired, and most rational game, requires talent of a very humble
order, of which the novice only will be often found destitute. To conceive,
therefore, of the card-table as affording, even to the most trivial mind,
the kind of gratification, which is found in the display of personal
superiority, is scarcely possible. The pleasures of success, on this
score, must be less than juvenile; the contest is of a nature which a child
learns to despise.
This explanation, therefore, of the nature of the
amusement, would involve at once an error in analysis, and a severe
reflection on its advocates, many of whom, it must be supposed, are
prepared, both by education and taste, for the highest orders of
intellectual gratification. Hence it would appear, that cards, from their
very nature, are incapable in themselves of producing any part of the
interest which they possess, and that the gratification they secure must be
sought in some attendant of the amusement. What is it? If cards were
the sort of convenient instrument, which, like the harp, dexterously plied
by the fair hand, served just so much to occupy the mind, as to relieve it
from the unpleasant consciousness of being unemployed, and to leave more
familiar and unrestrained the interchange of thought and communion of
soul—if they served to draw more closely the spiritual bonds of the social
circle, and to give facility to thought, freedom to expression, and vivacity
to feeling—if the card-table were the happy and enviable scene where social
pleasure reigned, where harmless wit, and innocent gaiety presided; where
the glow of sentiment is kindled, and the sweet toned chords of hearts in
unison awakened their music; where the furnished intellect might throw open
its stores of intelligence and feeling, and where, in "the feast of reason
and the flow of soul," the mind would receive instruction and pleasure, and
the heart sensibility and polish; then however insignificant, or even
contemptible the amusement itself might be—its advocate would be furnished
with powerful, if not irresistible arguments for its support.
The fact, however, has already appeared, that
card-playing cannot plead these advantages. Trivial as is the amusement, it
requires the closest attention, and most entire abstraction of mind. Every
step in the progress of the game demands the utmost vigilance; and the
slightest degree of inattention might endanger success. An ignorant
spectator of the card-table might be led to imagine, that the interest
excited is similar to that which the mathematician derives from a beautiful
but difficult problem of Euclid, and he would probably find it not easy to
persuade himself, that "a trifle light as air," is all that occupies and
amuses the interesting group which he beholds; where all is gravity,
attention, and silence, scarcely relieved by a single sally of wit, a smile
of gaiety, or a glance of kindred and tender thought; where the fascinations
of taste, of grace, and of beauty, cease to be felt—where fair brows are
shaded by somber thought, and bright eyes are chilled by cold abstraction,
and where all that is beautiful, and lovely, and mirthful, is bound, as by
the spell of some unholy enchantment, in sadness and silence, in coldness
and lifelessness.
What, then, is the attendant circumstance, which gives to
this amusement its singular attraction? Is it the financial
considerations which the game involves? It must be admitted, that
card-playing is capable of supplying a channel for the flow of mercenary
feeling. Money is almost invariably staked at the card-table, and every
candid votary of the pleasure will acknowledge, that, without this
attendant, the amusement would, with most people, lose entirely its power to
interest. The advocate of the card-table ascribes this circumstance to
custom, whose influence is so powerful, as well in our recreations as in the
more serious occupations of life. This explanation, however, is by no means
satisfactory to his opponent; for if the use of money in the game were a
mere arbitrary appendage, which custom had affixed, surely, in some
instances at least, an effort would be made for its removal; since the fact
is generally admitted, that this concomitant is an evil. The uniformity of
the practice, its universality, in fact, from the highest to the lowest
classes of society, in opposition to the obvious and acknowledged evils both
numerous and weighty, of which it is productive, even when ample allowance
is made for the tyranny of fashion, afford at least strong
presumptive proof, that mercenary considerations constitute an element of
the amusement, the removal of which would not only abridge—but entirely
destroy the influence it possesses over its admirers.
So strong, indeed, is this presumption, that the objector
to the amusement, appealing to the honest convictions of his intelligent and
candid opponent, may with safety challenge a denial. Nor does the trifling
nature of the sums which are generally staked at the card-table, in any
degree invalidate this position. At first sight, indeed, it might appear,
that the mercenary feeling, if any is produced, must, under this
circumstance, be too feeble to secure the interest to which the objector
refers the amusement. It must be remembered, however, that gradations of
sums of money are deposited at the game, proportioned to the circumstances
of those who partake of the amusement. It is impossible to determine what
amounts are too inconsiderable to provoke avarice, or what prospect of gain
is too slight to stimulate mercenary feeling, and gratify a covetous
propensity. The love of gain is all-devouring, and it seizes with
avidity the slightest degree of gratification. It resembles the trunk of an
elephant, which, together with its great strength, and gigantic grasp,
possesses the most delicate sensibility, and a perception of the minutest
objects, and appropriates the smallest portions of food which are offered to
supply its prodigious appetite.
The very habit of such a pursuit is sufficient to
engender avaricious desire. The man who devotes himself to money
transactions, and acquires his wealth by a multitude of trifling gains,
forms insensibly the habit of fixing his attention on the smallest degree of
financial profit; he will display an industry to obtain it, and derive a
gratification from success, apparently very disproportionate to the
intrinsic value of the sum obtained. This common characteristic of a
tradesman is solely the result of the habits which he acquires in his
business. Let the votary of the card-table accurately mark the history of
his feelings connected with his favorite amusement, and he will doubtless be
able to trace a similar process.
If these remarks are correct, considerable importance is
unquestionably due to the objections advanced against the amusement. It
appears to fall short of the end for which all amusements ought to be
appointed, namely, that of supplying rational and harmless
recreation. Card-playing is not a rational amusement. It partakes of extreme
frivolity. By the wise and the good it has ever been esteemed contemptible.
It is somewhere recorded, that Cobilon, the Lacedemonian, being sent to
Corinth with a commission, to conclude a treaty of friendship and alliance,
when he saw the captains and senators of that city playing at dice, returned
home without doing anything, saying, that he would not so much sully the
glory of the Spartans, as that it should be said they had made a league with
gamesters. Hence it would seem, that this honest Heathen took every man
addicted to gaming—for a fool or a knave; and therefore resolved not to have
any dealings with such, as neither of these characters could he depended on.
It is, moreover, too exciting, too engrossing, too
absorbing. It consumes a considerable portion of time, without securing any
corresponding advantages. It is too laborious to be purely recreative, while
it is unproductive of benefit, either to mind or body; and amid the powerful
fascination which it possesses, it leaves unimproved, both the intellect and
the feelings, the temper and the taste. The tendency of the amusement is
deeply mischievous. Covetousness is the parent of the gratification, and a
tribe of hateful passions its progeny. "The love of money is the root of all
evil," and the card-table furnishes ample comment on the sacred assertion.
Pride may dissemble and disown this truth—but too many evidences prove, that
selfish delight and sordid triumph on the one hand, and pride and envy on
the other—are the evil spirits of mischief, which commonly preside at the
engagements of the card-table.
The perniciousness of gambling was so well understood by
the grand imposter Mahomet, that he thought it necessary to prohibit it
expressly in the Koran, not as "a thing in itself naturally evil—but only
morally so, as it is a step to the greatest vices; for while we captivate
ourselves to chance, we lose our authority over our passions, being incited
to immoderate desire, excessive hope, joy, and grief. We stand or fall at
the uncertain cast of the dice, or the turning up of a card. We are slaves
to the feeblest wishes, which, if they succeed not, we grow furious, and
banish all prudence, temperance, and justice."
To young people especially, the amusement is injurious.
All their recreations should subserve the purposes of intellectual and moral
improvement, and while so many amusements, combining this advantage, are at
hand, it is a reflection, both on taste and feeling—to prefer to them the
frivolous pleasures of card-playing,
"Contrived—
To fill the void of an unfurnished brain,
To palliate dullness—and give time a shove!"
The reason has been demanded, why chess, as well
as cards, should not be prohibited by the objectors to fashionable
amusements. The reply is at once easy and satisfactory. The two amusements,
both in their nature and tendency, are essentially different. The game of
cards is frivolous in itself, and injurious in its effects. This cannot be
said of chess. It is a game of science, and the mental effort it demands is,
in a high degree, manly. It combines many of the advantages of mathematical
study, tending to discipline the mind, by accustoming it to efforts of
abstraction, and severe processes of thought. Without hesitation, it may be
said, that some results to the female gender, of a valuable kind might be
anticipated, could young ladies be induced to forsake the card-table, and
devote some portion of the time, which they are accustomed to occupy in the
idle amusement of cards—to the highly intellectual and deeply interesting
pleasures of the chess-board. Chess, moreover, unless by confirmed gamblers,
is never played at for money. To win the game is ever deemed a sufficient
remuneration for the toil of contest, and the successful competitor is never
reduced to the degrading task of gathering up the miserable pittances, which
have been produced from the pockets of others.
On the score of temper, also, the game of chess is
infinitely preferable. "No man can lose a game of chess without perceiving
the wrong move or moves, which led to that termination; his loss is the
effect of his own misconduct, which might have been avoided, had he adopted
a different course, and which he was at full liberty to have done; he can
blame no one but himself; he feels no angry, envious, or malicious passion
excited; he cannot embroil himself in any quarrel with his friend, because
at starting they possessed equal advantages; and it would be the most absurd
thing in the world to quarrel with another because he has made a better use
than his neighbor, of the opportunities equally afforded to each.
But in other games the case is greatly altered; it is a
chance whether the players are in any degree placed under equal
advantages; one becomes liable to the feelings of envy, the other to those
of triumph. And as the effects are in a great degree, if not wholly, "by
chance", the passions of hope, fear, distrust, anxiety, and various others,
are continually excited, and torment the mind.
I am now speaking where no stake or only a trifling one
is played for. If large sums are betted, all these evils are awfully
magnified, and financial ruin may attend one of the parties. If I am in any
degree a correct reasoner, whatever tends to provoke anger, to inflame our
corrupt passions, to encourage selfishness, and steel the heart against
feeling for the disappointments, losses, and distresses of others, must be
wrong.
Numerous and plausible, therefore, as may be the
arguments in support of this popular amusement, it nevertheless appears to
be indulged in at the expense of what is far more important to character and
happiness, than the trifling evils which it is designed to avoid. The
card-table may secure the social party against the miseries of insipidity,
and the horrors of boredom; it may preserve pride from mortification, and
maintain the punctilios of artificial politeness; but these benefits are
produced at an expense far exceeding their value. The mind is reduced
to an idle and useless employment; and the heart is subjected to a
severe and dangerous test of its best and most amiable feelings.
When money, moreover, is staked at the card-table, the
charge of direct criminality is alleged against the amusement. The argument
is constructed upon the same ground on which gambling in general is
sinful—there is an improper employment of money.
Wealth is an important instrument of our own and
others' good; its possession, therefore, involves a moral responsibility. It
is a valuable talent committed to our trust, for the employment of which we
are amenable to Him who has placed it in our hands. It must be disbursed
under the direction of the judgment, and with the conscientious design of
procuring either our own or others' good. We may probably feel ourselves at
liberty to purchase an article of luxury; our conscientious scruples are
removed by the consideration that the article is the product of some
industrious hand, which needs the money we expend. Let this remark be
applied to the subject under consideration.
At the card-table money is placed under the control of
the contingencies which accompany the game. The person who deposits the
money, either needs it for his own use, or he does not. In the former case,
he cannot lose it without inconvenience; in the latter, he possesses a
superfluity, which he is bound to appropriate to such a purpose as may
render it the probable instrument of benefit to another. If he loses the
sum, he parts with it criminally; if he gains to it an additional sum, he is
guilty of a species of robbery, inasmuch as he returns for it no suitable
equivalent. Everyone will immediately recognize the validity of this
reasoning as applied to the practice of gambling, when conducted on an
extensive scale. The vice is then universally censured; but when trifling
amounts of money only are involved, the same act undergoes, it would appear,
a change of moral character, and loses the features which in the former
instance are viewed with disapprobation and disgust.
A gross error, however, is here committed. What is
inherently wrong in the greater, cannot be right in the lesser; the
obnoxious elements, which exist in an extensive system of gambling, pervade,
in a proportionate degree, every modification of the practice, and convey a
corresponding measure of criminality. If gambling is immoral in all its
gradations, it must be in card-playing, which is one.