Читать книгу The Book of the Sword онлайн

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Again, men of thought cannot ignore the intrinsic value of the Sword for stimulating physical qualities. Ce n’est pas assez de roidir l’âme, il faut aussi roidir les muscles, says Montaigne, who also remarks of fencing that it is the only exercise wherein l’esprit s’en exerce. The best of callisthenics, this energetic educator teaches the man to carry himself like a soldier. A compendium of gymnastics, it increases strength and activity, dexterity and rapidity of movement. Professors calculate that one hour of hard fencing wastes forty ounces by perspiration and respiration. The foil is still the best training tool for the consensus of eye and hand; for the judgment of distance and opportunity; and, in fact, for the practice of combat. And thus swordsmanship engenders moral confidence and self-reliance while it stimulates a habit of resource; and it is not without suggesting, even in the schools, that ‘curious, fantastic, very noble generosity proper to itself alone.’

And now when the vain glory of violence has passed away from the Sword with the customs of a past age, we can hardly ignore the fact that the manners of nations have changed, not for the best. As soon as the Sword ceased to be worn in France, a Frenchman said of his compatriots that the ‘politest people in Europe had suddenly become the rudest.’ That gallant and courteous bearing, which in England during the early nineteenth century so charmed the ‘fiery and fastidious Alfieri’ lingers only amongst a few. True the swash-buckler, the professional duellist, has disappeared. But courtesy and punctiliousness, the politeness of man to man, and respect and deference of man to woman—that Frauencultus, the very conception of the knightly character—have to a great extent been ‘improved off.’ The latter condition of society, indeed, seems to survive only in the most cultivated classes of Europe; and, popularly, amongst the citizens of the United States, a curious oasis of chivalry in a waste of bald utilitarianism—preserved not by the Sword but by the revolver. Our England has abolished the duello without substituting aught better for it: she has stopped the effect and left the cause.