“To my mind the only way to silence an opponent of this sort was to take sword in hand, and literally demonstrate to him that he was equally ignorant and incapable. This course, however, did not commend itself to others, who were content to fight this modern hydra, which reappeared every day in some new shape, with—contempt.
“The professors gnashed their teeth and swore, though a few of them kept their temper:—
‘Is our Art then,’ they declaimed, ‘a mere delusion, a fallen idol? Are we to prostitute and expose it to the barbarous excesses of a brutal and ignorant mob? Are we to join in an outlandish Babel, where every one claims to be heard in his own tongue, some jargon which no one can understand?’
“There certainly was something in this line of argument, however magisterially it might be stated. But at the same time it was impossible to deny that there was, wrapped up in these ungainly eccentricities, a real truth, which could not be entirely neglected. For among the noisy crowd, who would have liked to set their fads upon a pinnacle, one found fencers of experience, men who by long training and the use of scientific method had acquired sound judgment and thorough workmanship. These men, it is true, had the courage to trample on the ancient superstitions, and gladly welcomed the widening of the field, which would give ample room, and scope for every kind of bias.
“It was clearly a revolution, and declared itself by the unmistakable signs of all revolutions, by its aggressive attitude and by its onslaught on old ideas and traditions, which till then had been thought unassailable.
“Molière’s famous maxim,—‘Hit and don’t be hit back,’—asserted itself triumphantly. Truth and falsehood went hand in hand. The thing to be done was to winnow the chaff from the corn, and not reject the whole as worthless.
VII.
“Well, let us now see if we can sum up the real changes which the new school introduced.
“As a matter of fact it proposed absolutely none that was unreasonable. Its tenets amounted to this:—‘A fencer must be judged not so much by his graceful attitude and classical style, not so much by his masterly command of precise execution, as by his power of quickly conceiving and quickly delivering the right attack at the right moment.