"Perhaps you think that by continually presenting this question to
you in a new light I am detaining you too long on one part of my
subject. My intention is to bring home to your minds the conviction I
so strongly feel myself. If you only knew how many striking examples I
have witnessed of the truth of my assertion!
"You may see one of these pupils taking his lesson. He is a magnificent
spectacle; his hand perfectly correct, a grand lunge, his action smooth
and free; he follows his master's blade through a cunning series of
feints and false attacks, ripostes and counter-ripostes, his parry
is never beaten; not a fault, not a single mistake; he is an animated
illustration of his master's treatise, which the author with pardonable
pride displays before you.
"Now in the assault pupils of this type are far from maintaining their
superiority. Their mechanical agility is paralysed, when it is no
longer set in motion by the accustomed spring. They know too little and
at the same time they know too much. They find out that the assault
is not the same thing as the lesson. Their opponent's blade does not
accommodate itself to theirs with the precision to which they are
accustomed; the touch of the steel no longer conveys those delicate
hints, to which they formerly responded with such alacrity, and of
course they lose their bearings. They have not acquired the sort of
defence which is ready for anything, alike for well directed thrusts
and for more eccentric methods of attack, and they look in vain for a
succession of passes strictly correlated in a systematic order.
"Instead of marching with a swing along the broad highway to which
they are accustomed, they find themselves lost in a wild and difficult
country without a guide and without confidence. Habit will perhaps
enable them to maintain some smartness of appearance, but they make
few hits, and in spite of their science and the skill, which they
undoubtedly possess up to a certain point, they are continually beaten
by fencers, who are less scholarly perhaps, but who have been better
entered than they to the actual combat, the manifold emergencies of
practical fighting, and who have learnt that strange language, by which
the sword contrives to reveal the most delicate shades of meaning.
"I have seen this happen so often, that I have taken some trouble to
study the question, and I am convinced that if these same pupils had
been at less pains to make themselves pedantically perfect in the
peaceful and philosophic practice of the lesson, and had been made
familiar at an early stage with the changing incidents of the assault,
they would have been equally well disciplined, and at the same time
really dangerous fencers. Of course I freely admit that exceptions may
sometimes be found, but they are the exceptions which prove the rule.