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Ruskin’s interest in, and enthusiasm for chess is well documented - see for example the letters and comments cited at Works, 6.85 [n/a]; Works, 34.xlv [n/a]; Works, 34.573 [n/a]; Works, 37.81 [n/a]; Works, 37.572ff [n/a].
Professor Ruskin, like Lord Tennyson, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Sir Robert Peel, was listed as a Vice President of the British Chess Association. He is said to have played with ‘rapidity and brilliancy’ (Works, 34.xlv [n/a]). In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton dated 15th February 1874 (Works, 37.81 [n/a]) Ruskin reported a visit to Crystal Palace to play the ‘automaton’. He wrote that it took an hour and a half for five games, three played by him against the ‘automaton’ and two he watched played with ‘it’ by other people. The letter seems to confirm the rapidity of his play, though oddly neither he, nor Cook and Wedderburn who comment on the letter, show any awareness of the deception involved in the performances of a mid-nineteenth-century ‘automaton’ emulating a twenty-first century computer. This lack of awareness is strange since the point about the nature of the mind was made by Robert Willis, 1821, An attempt to analyse the atomaton chess player of Mr De Kempelen, London: J.Booth. W.K.Wimsatt in ‘Poe and the Chess Automaton’ in American Literature, Vol. 11 No. 2 (May 1939) pp 138 - 151 points out that Willis’s paper had been heavily used by Sir David Brewster in 1832, and by Edgar Allan Poe (plagiarised is the word used by D.N.B. in the article on Willis) in 1836.
In June 1884 in a letter to the Daily Telegraph Ruskin referred to his intention to publish a book of games by ‘old chess-players of real genius and imagination, as opposed to the stupidity called chess-playing in modern days ... in which the opponents sit calculating and analysing for twelve hours’ (Works, 34.572 [n/a]).
He defended that position in a letter to Chess Monthly in July 1884: ‘In painting and poetry the workers scorn analysis, and the best work defies it; and so far as chess is capable of analysis it is neither art nor play.’ It is a position inconsistent with the agenda Ruskin set himself in Dijon on 6th March October 1849 to define the ‘conditions, or laws of beauty in the most refined work’ (see Notebook M2 p.3back, and compare Works, 9.56), and to do that by means of many pages of detailed measurement and analysis, the result of many hours of calculation recorded in the Venetian Notebooks. It is though close to view he recorded in Bourges Cathedral in April 1850 (see Notebook M2 p.172 and Sheet No. 188) that ‘it is utterly futile to criticise because it is not in this rule or that’. Ruskin never claimed consistency as a virtue.
There seems to be a degree of affectation in Ruskin’s letter, copied at Works, 37.539 [n/a], to James Mortimer, winner of the British Chess Association tournament of 1885: “Though I have no claims whatever to be ranked among chessplayers any more than among painters properly so called, I enjoy chess as I do drawing, within my limits - and if, indeed, some time you condescended to beat me a game by correspondence it would be a great delight to me.” If Ruskin is saying that his chess by the same standards as his drawing, then he is, whatever the apparent modesty, making a very considerable claim for it. It is not clear that such a claim can be justified.
Ruskin’s note at House Book 1.Back pastedown does not claim to be any more than a trivial and careless doodle. It is of interest though - in the same way that any other doodle can be of interest - in the light it might shed on Ruskin’s thinking about chess, and the relationships he sees between chess and art, play and rational calculation. Throughout the Notebooks he set himself extraordinarily high standards in the measurement and analysis of the art works in which he was interested. The same does not seem to be true of his approach to chess.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]