The Sentiment of the Sword/Preface

by Theodore A. Cook

LIFE, as we know it, had scarcely crowned the travail of creation and produced a man when man rose up and slew his brother. That first killing must have been some uncfcanly business, wiili a boulder clenched in an angry fist. It must have taken very little time to discover that other men were better slain with some more elongated instrument. At first the flint that flaked so easily into a fatal shape was bound with deers' sinews to a wooden shaft. Then Earth gave up her secrets at the call of Death, and with bronze and iron the forge of Tubal Cain's descendants set to work at weapons. Leaves, or talL fronds of water plants, were instant models for the prehistoric sword. The falchion that Achilles wielded flashes its primeval origin. The strong blade of the Roman legionary warred down the world with trenchant edge and thirsting point until the hordes out of the ancient East swept over Europe better armed. Against the scimitar of the Moslems, the long, straight Norman sword hewed out its path to Palestine and reigned, in turn, as Death's best sceptre from Scandinavian fiords to the Sicilian seas. By war man smote his way to freedom,

Stripped aiul adust in a stubble of empire. Scything and binding the full sheaves of sovranty.

By the sword he held hi-* blood-stained fief until the age of chivalry was overpast, until the mailed knight vanished at the first whiff of Friar Bacon's villainous saltpetre, and gun- powder, which choked Don Quixote's dream, produced the art of fence. The days had passed when, in a clear air, hand to hand, the lines of warriors met and grappled; when every wound showed gaping red, and every hand that dealt it reddened ; when armoured cohorts, irresistiblle, charged by sheer weight through legions of the lesser sort, and trampled, hacked, and hewed them iuto lifeleseness. Now missiles came from far through murky tracts of smoke-stained mist, belched from some iron artifice, like blasts of Tophet, and in their path was death that no cuirass, no carapace of armour could withstand. So the one excuse for a complete protection of the body vanished, and from the crowd of ancient armour-cracking weapons, mace, hammer, flail, and such like, the sword rose paramount. More lightly clad, the horseman could ride swifter, move his limbs with greater freedom. The joints in his harness expanded into gaps. One by one his metal shields dropped off, and, as he thus gradually used his armour less and less, so did he become more vulnerable to the skilled swordsman, and so did the point begin -triumphant to assert its superiority over the edge.

One result was an immediate outpouring of volumes on the new science of fence from Perpignan, from Spain, from Italy, from Germany. Tho whole continent was agog with geometrical and mathematical theories, with complicated and encyclopaedic treatises, which overlaid the subject with so many extraneous trivialities that all sight was lost of the one deadly principle that simplicity is best, when killing is your game, and when the killer Ls a man of human passions, human errors, human short- comings. A fatal stroke is rarely made by one whose nerves are absolutely calm; it is never made, save in the foulest ways of murder, without the necessity for self-defence at the same moment. It is, therefore, best made as the easiest of simple and instinctive movements. But this was the last thing fencing masters realised. The discovery of the point had fairly dazzled them. Though for many years it did not involve anything like complete abandonment of the edge, yet that discovery alone gave the rest of Europe a temporary and marked superiority over England in the art of duelling, for your downright Englishman would at first have nothing to say to the new- fangled "foining" from across the Channel. A good heart and a strong blade was all he wanted. But time after time the ruffian who had learned to lunge in France was found to be more effective than the Briton who trusted to the edge alone. Slowly and cautiously the foreign fencing master was admitted ; for these islanders, who " were strong, but had no cunning," found themselves obliged to learn. At Westminster, upon a July 20, in the thirty-second year of his reign, Henry VIII. granted a definite commission to certain "Masters of the Science of Defence," and for this reason the Tudor rose is to-day the badge of English fencing teams in international tournaments, under the rules of the Amateur Fencing Association, whose patron was King Edward VII. and is now King George V. Under Elizabeth the " scholar " obtained his diploma of efficiency after a kind of examination calted "Playing his Prize," which consisted of bouts at certain weapons, supervised by the masters, and these were, no doubt, the origin of the " Prize Fights," which Pepys observed in the days of Charles II. ; but develop- ment moved very slowly still. Only by tedious degrees did the deadly form of fence which Agrippa invented for the weapons of his day spread throughout Europe, and become general, as swords- manship and fencing spread among all classes. Tlio rapier play perfected at the end of the sixteenth century kept a great deal of cutting with its use of the point, as the famous duel between Jarnac and Chataigncraic sufficiently shows ; it also kept a great deal of use of the left hand, cither with ;i dagger or with a cloak and sometimes unarmed, for many an Elizabethan duellist " with one hand held cold death aside, and with the other sent it back to Tybalt." The reason of this was that the rapier was a long and heavy weapon; its real size may be gathered from the old rule that " with the point at your toe the cross should reach as high as your hip bone." This meant that a weapon which nearly always resulted in severe wounds when used in attack was not handy enough alone to provide an efficient defence, and the left hand, with or without a dagger, had to be brought into play to protect the swordsman. This at once involved the disadvantage that adversaries, doubly weaponed, must perforce stand very square to one another, and would risk many chances of grappling and "in-fighting," at which the better fencer might be worsted by a muscular opponent ; science, in fact, made far less difference than it does at present. A more accurate and more complete system became a necessity. So the point by degrees superseded the edge entirely. One weapon was found sufficient both for attack and for defence ; for the point kept men at their distance, and the fencer, using one hand for balance, did all that was possible, by standing sideways, to efface the surface of his body open to attack.

It is, perhaps, significant that the era which produced the perfection of fencing, the crowning masterpiece of the riposte, was also the age when duelling with the sword went out of fashion in those countries where the national skill had not rendered it practically innocuous. The history of firearms pro- vides an example of a similar series of causations. When Gentlemen of the Guard fired first, and the officer's cane pressed down their musket barrels on a mark some fifty paces distant, the slaughter of the volley would have made modern humanitarians turn pale. But in these days of the- repeating rifle and the Mauser magazine, one army has hardly time to see the manly countenances of its foes throughout a whole campaign, and, relatively, very Kittle bad blood has been spilt when all is over. It has remained for the days of "scientific hygiene" to count more victims killed by disease than fell in action. So the sword was in danger of becoming a mere symbol, though always a brilliant symbol, for the martial poet,

Clanging imperious

Forth from Time's battlements

His ancient and triumphing song.

Perhaps this is why, both in France and England, the military authorities have shown a creditable anxiety to remove it from the vulgar sphere of practical utility, and the six-shooter has entirely replaced it in the United States, and meanwhile the subtle perfection of foil play steadily came more and more into favour. Emancipated from the bonds of too strenuous utilitarians, freed from the fetters of an encyclopaedic scholasticism, yet glowing, still, with the romance of all its glorious past, the sublimated spirit of good swordsmanship throughout the ages seemed to float over the fencing-rooms of the last decade of the nineteenth century; for here, even in England, the discovery of the French duelling sword '(or epee de combat) had given renewed zest to practice with its elder sister, the foil. Even the exquisite art and laudable enthusiasm of a Camille Prevost could not, however, recommend to the average militant male a pursuit which he regarded as a mere academic elegance, with very little reference to the serious issues of personal combat and no pretence to the employment of a serviceable weapon. Englishmen asked for something more practical, and in epee play they have found it. The late W. H. C. Staveley, whose recent and untimely loss all English fencers have so sincerely mourned, was first-rate with the foil before his epee and sabre play had reached international form, and he was as eager to preserve the qualities of the foil as he was to fight the foremost with the sword. Capt. Hutton, too, who died within a few days of his younger comrade, was a president of the Amateur Fencing Association whose place will be difficult to fill, for he guided modern developments with an experience of the past that was well-nigh unequalled, and the swordsmanship of the last thirty years owes much to his presence and example.

But though our amateur fencing championships, with foil, epee, and sabre, are now regularly carried out each year, it may be feared that the art of swordsmanship remains a mystery tp the larger part of the inhabitants of these isles, and that few of the great sporting public know the meaning of the little Tudor rose (commemorating Bluff King Hal, as aforesaid) which hangs at the watch-chain of those who have represented England in an International Tournament. Yet there was a time when Englishmen, sword in hand, could face the rest of Europe without fear, either in the fencing-room or on "the field of honour." They had at first been a long time learning Ibat the Continent had really got something to teach them; having at last learnt it, they proceeded to outdo their masters. But they gave up the game as soon as they dropped wearing swords. Practical danger appealed to them ; artistic recrea- tion left them cold. They had laughed duelling out of fashion, both with steel and pistol ; they forthwith gave up going to the fencing-room. Angelo's work seemed likely to be wholly forgotten within scarce two generations of his prime. A few men only Burton, Chapman, Hutton, Egerton Castle, the two Pollocks, perhaps a short half-dozen mnrp savod foil play from complete oblivion in Ixmdon. during Ihe long years of ccli}> < The following dialogue, of which the first publication began in the pages of the Field, is from the hand of Sir Richard Burton, that curious blend of the mystic and the athlete, of the explorer and the linguist, of the antiquary and the scholar. A man who felt as strongly as it has been ever felt the passion he calls "the wild and fiery joy which accompanies actual discovery," Burton equally delighted in the subtler expression of intellectual, tem- peramental, even psychical emotions; and was therefore very peculiarly qualified to describe "the Sentiment of the Sword." His sketch of " Shughtie," one of the characters in his con- versation, is probably intended as a portrait of the writer (or one side of him) by himself. Hie dialogue, which throws several curious sidelights on Mid-Victorian society (in velvet smoking caps and whiskers), is valuable not merely for its sound doctrines of swordsmanship, but for its revelations of his own character and personality. It has been edited by Mr Forbes Sieveking, a skilled upholder of the foil, to whom London owed, some dozen years ago, an exhibition of first-rate foil play in the Portman Rooms that was not surpassed either in excellence or in interest until the famous evening when the King saw Pini and his Italian champions vanquished in the Empress Rooms by Kirchhoffer, Merignac, and the flower of France. That was a typical encounter, for which those who had seen Camille Prevost's elegant classicalism on the former occasion were more than half prepared. The passing of the sceptre from Italy to France had been foreshadowed already. It may now be taken as an accomplished fact.

First-rate foil play has invariably been too delicate in its essence,, too ideal in its aim, too unpractical in its courteous fragility for the majority of Englishmen. It is the foundation of the knowledge of all weapon play, and your true foil player need never be at a loss in a scrimmage, even if he bears but that unromantic symbol of civic respectability the silk umbrella. But in itself the foil has always appealed to a very small minority of our countrymen. The scoring was compli- cated, restricted, and liable to much misconception, save by the rare and tyrannous expert. The somewhat artificial ceremonies attending it had too Continental a flavour for your insular athlete, who liked to know both when he hit his foe and when he had been hit himself. And so the whirligig of time has brought yet other 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.