Читать книгу The Book of the Sword онлайн

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The difficulty of treating the Sword is enhanced by the peculiar individuality which characterises it, evidenced by an immense variety of physique, and resulting as much from unconscious selection as from deep design. One of the characteristics of indigenous art is that no two articles, especially no two weapons, are exactly alike; and yet they vary only within narrow and measurable limits. The minute differentiæ of the Sword are endless. Even in the present day, swordsmen will order some shape, size, or weight which they hold—often unwisely enough—to be improvements on the general. One man, wishing to strengthen his arm, devises a weapon fit for a Titan and finds it worse than useless. A tale is told of a Sheffield cutler who, having received from Maroccan Mogador a wooden model to be copied in steel, made several hundred blades on the same pattern and failed to find a single purchaser. Their general resemblance to the prevailing type was marred by peculiarities which unsuited them for general use; they were adapted only to individual requirement, each man priding himself upon his own pattern having some almost imperceptible difference. Such variations are intelligible enough in the Sword, which must be modified for every personality, because it becomes to the swordsman a prolongation of his own person, a lengthening of the arm. The natural results are the protean shapes of the weapon and the difficulty of reducing these shapes to orderly description. I cannot, therefore, agree with a President of the Anthropological Institute (‘Journal,’ October 1876) when he states: ‘Certainly the same forms of Sword might be found in different countries, but not of so peculiar a nature (as the Gaboon weapon) unless the form had been communicated.’ Shapes apparently identical start up spontaneously, because types are limited and man’s preferences easily traverse the whole range of his invention.