The Sentiment of the Sword. Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ changes. Fencing has experienced a miraculous Renaissance in this country owing to the introduc- tion of the pool system and the epee dc combat, the triangularly fluted rapier of the French duellist, with its semicircular cup hilt, its light, blade, and foil handle, its grim simplicity of method, its virtual reproduction of the conditions of the duel, its strictly businesslike and obvious scoring. The first pool ever held here in public with this weapon was in the Steinway Hall in 1900. By 1903 the first English fencing team that ever crossed the Channel competed in Paris in the International Tourna- ment. Much to the surprise of their compatriots they were not last, for a victory over the Belgians served as an anticipatory atonement for lost Grand Challenge Cups at later Henleys.

      In 1906, only three years afterwards, the English team fought France to a dead heat in the final at Athens for the first time in any open international event. It is not too much to hope for even greater honours in the future. The popularity of the new sport for new it is, in its first decade etill would have fairly astonished Richard Burton, and, we may safely add, have thoroughly delighted him, for he knew all about the possibilities of the epee, ae did a few other Englishmen in the latter half of the nineteenth century ; but it never became really popular till after 1900, and now we hear so great an authority as J. Joseph- Renaud, across the Channel, saying that " foil play is dead." We do not believe that the foil will ever die while swordsman- ship remains alive ; but it is a fact that the epee has given an impulse to English fencing of which the foil has never in its whole history been capable. Non cuivis contingit adire Corinthum; not all may wear the Tudor rose of English swords- manship, but scores more than ever cared to perfect themselves with a foil may now learn, something of the joys of swordsman- ship, may feel the fine thrill of that sentiment du fer when your blade seems like a nerve outstretched from the eager point of it to your own heart and brain, when your opponent's steel bewrays him as it palpitates with the tremor of his struggling will and adverse energy. In any weather, indoors or out of doors, at any hour, at any age, this game of games is at your service. To begin it without foil play as an introduction were as futile as learning slides before fixed seats in rowing, but once the preliminaries are mastered an epee pool becomes the true combat of personalities, the keen revealer of temperaments, the merciless arbitrament of skill. It changes with every pair who stand ujp man to man. It can be twenty minutes of the hardest bodily exercise ever known, and it may be either a series of single matches or a combined team fight in sets of four or six. The days of Angelo have come back again, with a difference: the tragic comedians of the duel have silently vanished into limbo, and one of the best sports in modern Europe sounds in the ring of glittering steel.

      THEODORE ANDREA COOK.January, 1911.

      THE MANUSCRIPT of the following Dialogue was entrusted to me by the late Lady Burton some time after Sir Richard Burton's death in 1890, together with the notes ajid memoranda he left for the continuation of his Book of the Sword. It will, I hope, be of interest as the work of one of the greatest travellers, finest sportsmen, and strongest personali- ties of the Victorian era; but it will appeal more especially to lovers of the sword and foil, who have increased so vastly in numbers since Burton wrote. For it contains the matured opinions upon the art and methods of offence and defence in England and on the Continent of one who was throughout his life an ardent student of the theory, and an acknowledged master of the practice, of the art of swordsmanship.

      We have Burton's own statement (Life, Vol. I., p. 134) that he began his long practice with the sword seriously at the age of twelve, sometimes taking three lessons a day, and he never missed an opportunity of studying the fencing or fighting methods of whatever country he was in, savage or civilised. In 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, he was devoting himself to fencing at Boulogne. " To this day," writes his widow, " the Burton une-deux, and notably the manchette (the upward slash disabling the sword arm and saving life in affairs of honour), are remembered; they earned him his brevet de pointe for the excellence of his swordsmanship, and he became a maitre d'armes." This diploma he placed after his name upon the title page of his Book of the Sword. In 1853 he published A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise, which, at first pigeonholed at tho War Office, was subsequently adopted in the army.

      Burton's original title for his work was " The Secrets of the Sword," suggested by the Baron de Bazancourt's volume Les Secrets de VEpee, published in Paris in 1862, from which he quotes freely in the following pages, and so well known in England by Mr C. Felix Clay's fine translation (illustrated by Mr F. H. Townsend), which has forestalled this title here. The one chosen in its place, " The Sentiment of the Sword," perhaps suggests even better to non-fencers Burton's intimate sympathy with and affection for the weapon and its correspondence with his own nature, while to swordsmen and fencers it brings home le sentiment flu fer invented by our "sweet enemy France" for that inner feeling of the foil, that magnetism of the blade, that sense of touch or " tact " which no other expression in any language so happily conveys.

      I have ventured to omit a few passages from Burton's work which time has rendered of less lively interest, and have allowed myself the liberty of a few notes where the text seemed to require it, or the title of an early fencing work has been given in full

      A. FOEBES SIEVEKING12, Seymour Street, W., December, 1910.

THE FIRST EVENING

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      Ne, che poco io vi dia da imputar sono, Che quanto io passo dur, tutto vi dono. ARIOSTO.

I. Introduction

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      IN the long world journey of the traveller, who is something of an explorer, there are two lights. The greater is that wild and fiery joy which accompanies actual discovery; the lesser light is the mild and tranquil enjoyment snatched from rude life and spent amid the radiance and fragrance of civilisation.

II. Point and Edge amongst Ancients and Primitive Peoples

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      One evening, many strangers being in the smoking-room, our talk happened to touch upon the sword. Seaton was certain that the English would never be a fencing nation, that the Pointe wae the invention of modern Continental Europe, that the French school is the only system worth learning, and so forth the usual commonplaces of swordsmen.

I differed with him upon sundry details. It is hard to say what a nation cannot do; two centuries ago England could teach mueic to that all-claiming German race why should she not teach it again? The Greeks and Romans used the point, although their weapons were rather knives than " long knives," and the Turkish yataghan, the Malay kris, the Afghan "charay"^[1] the Kabyle flissa^[2], and the Algerian dagger, from which the Due D'Aumale borrowed the French sword-bayonet, are made for " thrust " as well as for "cut." We must not go beyond the assertion that only the exclusively pointed weapon, a revival of the old " stocco," that with which General Lamoriciere proposed to arm the French cavalry, is the invention of comparatively modern times. As regards the Italian schools, the old and the new, I supported their prowess in the field, and the aristocracy of the family from which they claim descent.

      The discussion became animated enough to impress the general ear, despite the protestations of the schoolman and the objections of the cosmopolite. The many present who had never touched a foil were impressed with the halo of feelings which I threw round my favourite pursuit. They began to understand that mind or brain force enters, as well as muscle, into the use of the sword; that character displays itself even more than in the " bumps " of the phrenologists, or the lines of the physiognomist; and that every assault between СКАЧАТЬ