Secrets of the Sword. César Lecat de Bazancourt

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      IV

      “You will tell me that my comment is too grave for my text, but you know as well as I do that small things and great are linked together by bonds, which may be invisible but are none the less real.”

      “Every age,” remarked one of my friends, “has its own manners and customs. We no longer live in the days when every gentleman carried a sword at his side and as a matter of course knew how to use it. The taste for fencing is not so universal that we are all impatient to be initiated into its inmost mysteries. Some of us may not have sufficient leisure or sufficient inclination; we are too busy or too lazy. I believe that what most men think about it can be put in a very few words: – ‘We don’t want to fight but– if we must, we should like to be able to show our teeth and fight like gentlemen,’ that is all that the average man wants with fencing.”

      “Quite right,” chimed in the Vicomte de G. with a laugh, “we only want just so much of it as will serve our private ends.”

      “All that you say,” I continued, “is true, but it is not the whole truth, as you would readily admit if you paid a visit to one of the fencing rooms of Paris. If you happened, for instance, to drop in on my friend and esteemed master, M. Pons, you would find a gathering of amateurs, who are devoted to the practice of arms, who keep up the traditions with taste and culture, and understand thoroughly well how a sword ought to be used.

      “But, to be quite fair, I must hasten to add that the prowess and prestige of these brilliant players would not suffer by the simplification of sword-play. The point I wish to make is that a treatise on fencing for the use of gentlemen, who have so little time to spare and so much to waste, is a book to be written, a book of real utility and importance, and indeed almost indispensable. I have put my finger on a felt want, and if you will allow me I will briefly explain how I think such a book ought to be written, and what it ought to teach. I know, of course, that I shall be violently contradicted, but after all – I know that I am on the right track.

      V

      “I have told you that we are asked to make an absolute distinction between two schools of fencing. Obviously it is the new school that is wrong, and, as I happen to belong to that school, you must give me leave to defend it, or, at all events, to explain its tendencies logically, theoretically, and practically.”

      “Take care, Sir,” a voice was heard to remark, “those three words are decidedly appalling.”

      “Don’t be afraid,” I answered, “they are not so formidable as they seem at first sight. You will find that if we thresh out the general principles, what I have to say presently will be much simplified and easier to follow.

      “You often hear men say: ‘There is no pretty fencing nowadays. It has relapsed into its primitive brutality.’

      “Not at all,” I should answer, “it has come back to its proper object. For consider, – an exercise, an art which starts with the fundamental idea of a fight between two men who are thirsting for each other’s blood, cannot be regarded as a mere amusement, or as an academical study in civility and good manners. One might argue with some effect, that to sacrifice the first essential principle of the art to superior refinements, which were really too exclusive, was a risky game to play, and that, sooner or later, the players were sure to discover that fact to their cost. Now I should maintain that the revolution, which has been brought about, is a clear advance, and only brutal, if you will have it so, because it is the assertion of the brutal truth.

      “With the exception of the few who have the ambition to make themselves accomplished swordsmen, men you meet in the fencing room do not as a rule come there to sit at the feet of the professor, and imbibe the mystic lore of scientific theory which he expounds, but rather to be drilled and disciplined in the practical use of the sword which he holds in his hand.

      “As a young man I was passionately fond of fencing; I worked at it with enthusiasm; my diligence and devotion were untiring. Among my contemporaries were several very strong amateurs, really skilful swordsmen, experts worthy of the best days and most glorious traditions of the sword. I am thinking of such men as Ambert, Caccia, Choquet, Lord Seymour, the Marquis de l’Angle and others, a group of amateurs well able to hold their own with the most skilful masters. I believe that at that time, and I give you this as my sincere conviction, fencing reached as high a level as at any period in its history.

      VI

      “It was the opening of a new era. Hitherto the art had advanced along a narrow track. Now the old ways suddenly broadened out. Old methods were superseded. Fencing was no longer treated as an academical accomplishment, a graceful exercise in courtly skill and bearing, from which originality was barred. It had become something more than the glib repetition of set phrases, that had been got by heart from a book and carefully rehearsed. The new movement, as it may well be called, though it abandoned the perfect manner, which had grown too perfect, brought our elusive art back to regions less celestial, I readily admit, but at the same time brought it face to face with other than imaginary difficulties.

      “The art received a new impetus. ‘Natural fighters,’ men equipped with abundant energy and assurance, who were convinced that all that was necessary for self-defence was a general athletic training such as they possessed, called the fencer’s skill in question. Regarded as fencing their style may have been faulty, not to say atrocious, but they confronted the fencer with this logical dilemma: – ‘You are a master of the sword or an accomplished amateur, I, on the other hand, know nothing about it. Hit me and do not let me hit you. That is all I ask. I shall fight by the light of nature and do what I can; you will be strictly scientific and keep to your rules.’

      “To my mind the only way to silence an opponent of this sort was to take sword in hand, and literally demonstrate to him that he was equally ignorant and incapable. This course, however, did not commend itself to others, who were content to fight this modern hydra, which reappeared every day in some new shape, with – contempt.

      “The professors gnashed their teeth and swore, though a few of them kept their temper: —

      ‘Is our Art then,’ they declaimed, ‘a mere delusion, a fallen idol? Are we to prostitute and expose it to the barbarous excesses of a brutal and ignorant mob? Are we to join in an outlandish Babel, where every one claims to be heard in his own tongue, some jargon which no one can understand?’

      “There certainly was something in this line of argument, however magisterially it might be stated. But at the same time it was impossible to deny that there was, wrapped up in these ungainly eccentricities, a real truth, which could not be entirely neglected. For among the noisy crowd, who would have liked to set their fads upon a pinnacle, one found fencers of experience, men who by long training and the use of scientific method had acquired sound judgment and thorough workmanship. These men, it is true, had the courage to trample on the ancient superstitions, and gladly welcomed the widening of the field, which would give ample room, and scope for every kind of bias.

      “It was clearly a revolution, and declared itself by the unmistakable signs of all revolutions, by its aggressive attitude and by its onslaught on old ideas and traditions, which till then had been thought unassailable.

      “Molière’s famous maxim, – ‘Hit and don’t be hit back,’ – asserted itself triumphantly. Truth and falsehood went hand in hand. The thing to be done was to winnow the chaff from the corn, and not reject the whole as worthless.

      VII

      “Well, let us now see if we can sum up the real changes which the new school introduced.

      “As СКАЧАТЬ