Читать книгу Secrets of the Sword - César Lecat de Bazancourt - Страница 8

“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 Old methods were superseded.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.