Having attained this average, we can entrust our lives to the point of
the frail but formidable sword. It is the magician that at once
establishes new relations between two forces which none would have
dreamt of comparing. It allows the pigmy who is in the right to confront
the colossus who is in the wrong. It gracefully leads enormous violence,
horned like the bull, to lighter and brighter summits; and behold, the
primitive animal is obliged to stand still before a power that has
nothing left in common with the mean, shapeless, tyrannical virtues of
earth: I mean weight, mass, quantity, the stupid cohesion of matter.
Between the sword and the fist lie the breadth of a universe, an ocean
of centuries and almost as great a distance as separates beast from man.
The sword is iron and wit, steel and intelligence. It makes the muscles
subservient to thought and compels thought to respect the muscles that
serve it. It is ideal and practical, chimerical and full of good sense.
It is dazzling and clear as lightning, insinuating, elusive and
multiform as a ray of the sun or moon. It is faithful and capricious,
nobly guileful, loyally false. It decks rancour and hatred with a smile.
It transfigures brutality. Thanks to the sword, reason, courage,
rightful assurance, patience, contempt of danger, man's sacrifice to
love, to an idea, a whole moral world, in short, as by a fairy bridge
swung over the abyss of darkness, enters as the master into the original
chaos, reduces and organizes it. The sword is man's pre-eminent weapon,
that weapon which, were all the others tried and itself unknown, would
have to be invented, because it best serves his most various, his most
purely human faculties and because it is the most direct, the most
tractable and the most loyal instrument of his defensive intelligence,
strength and justice.