The conversation, you see, was getting on.
"Unfortunately," I continued, "most of the professors who have
committed themselves to paper have thought otherwise. They plunge into
interminable dissertations on the denomination of thrusts. They use
words which, it is true, may be found in the dictionary but which have
an unfamiliar appearance. For instance they talk about the hand _in
pronation_ or _in supination_, instead of simply saying the hand with
the nails turned up, or the hand with the nails turned down.
"Others have devoted their energy to working out combinations and
classifications of feints, parries, and ripostes, distinguishing
between them by the nicest shades of difference, and to devising
subtleties of terminology, even going so far as to compile and exhibit
with the pride of a collector a prodigious catalogue of twelve thousand
five hundred strokes.[1] What memory could possibly contain them?
"Now I, on the contrary, should have spared no pains to prove that it
is perfectly possible to learn the practical management of the sword
without a superhuman effort, and that sword-play is worth cultivating
as a delightful exercise and one of the finest kinds of sport.
"For unfortunately we have to remember that Latin, which one uses
so seldom, perhaps once or twice after leaving college, and Greek,
for which one has even less occasion, are considered useful and even
necessary parts of polite education, but that such things as swimming,
which may on an emergency be the means of saving your life, or fencing,
which is one of the most healthy of athletic exercises, the best
thing in the world for developing and bracing a feeble youngster,
and which enables you to defend yourself if you are challenged by a
bully or assaulted by a blackguard, are reckoned merely frivolous
accomplishments. And it is generally recognised of course that it is
not right to waste time on mere accomplishments.
"I mentioned Latin and Greek, which we all learnt more or less at
school. Well, do you suppose that the man who is going to make
learning his profession carries his studies no further than the rest
of us, however scholarly some of us may be? No, of course he must go
deeper and examine the remotest bearings of the particular branch of
knowledge, which he will presently have to teach.