AThe Buffalo Times Buffalo, New York Sunday, March 26, 1911 - Page 28 — Just One Paul Morphy. — After beating the American chess champion, Marshall, and vanquishing many of the cleverest chess-players in the country, a young Cuban, Capablanca, has won the first place in the international chess tournament at San Sebastian, Spain. They are calling Capablanca a second Paul Morphy. They called Harry Pillsbury that, when he won the Hastings tournament sixteen years ago. They called Marshall that too. There has scarcely been a brilliant chess player in the last fifty years whom admirers have not dubbed “another Morphy.” To nickname a man “Paul Morphy” is, from a chess player's standpoint, the highest compliment that can be paid him.
In 1857, '58 and '59, Paul Morphy set the chess world in a furore never equaled before or since Morphy was a youthful Louisianian of good family, excellent education and charming manners. He regarded chess as a recreation, was never a grubbing student of books on the game, and was not a professional chess-player. But he bowled over the strongest chess experts in America and Europe like nine-pins. To describe the career of this meteoric phenomenon would be to recount a series of chess victories the like of which was never beheld on this planet. From that day to this, the chess fraternity have cherished the hope that sometime a new Paul Morphy would illuminate the chess horizon. But every time this hope has been dashed. And here is the most singular fact of the business: Paul Morphy, the chess-player, was probably the closest approximation to undisputed supreme genius in a given line that the world has ever seen. True, his specialty was only a game. But Shakespeare was not so assuredly the greatest poet, Raphael not so definitely the noblest of painters, Beethoven not so indubitably the divinity of musicians. Newton not so certainly the first of scientists, Phidias no so surely the chief of sculptors, Napoleon not so undoubtedly the mightiest of soldiers, as Paul Morphy was the greatest of chess players.
The universal opinion about Morphy was bluntly expressed in a letter of a New York chess veteran, written about world chess-champion Steinitz when he was at the height of his fame: “I don't think Steinitz could stand up before Morphy.”
So when the uninitiated read in the newspapers that Capablanca is a second Paul Morphy, they will do well not to believe it, for the writer himself doesn't believe it, neither does Capablanca. It is just a pleasant conventionality—a graceful compliment—that is all.
Chess has developed many intellectual wonders, and Capablanca is one of them. But it has only had one Paul Morphy!
Just One Paul Morphy 26 Mar 1911, Sun The Buffalo Times (Buffalo, New York) Newspapers.com
Just One Paul Morphy 26 Mar 1911, Sun The Buffalo Times (Buffalo, New York) Newspapers.com
