The Sentiment of the Sword. Richard Francis Burton

IV

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       THE EIGHTH EVENING.

       I

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       VII

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       X

       THE NINTH AND LAST EVENING

       I. Means of Attack and Defence Youth and Age

       II. Length of Arm

       III. Degrees of Proficiency in Arms

       IV. Neophyte's Preparation for Duel

       V. Phrenology and Character

       VI. Lunge to the Rear

       VIII. Analysis of Process Mastering Opponent's Sword

       IX. The Man of Sanguine Temperament

       X. Where Both Combatants Equally Skilled Distrust Your Adversary

       Conclusion

       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