“I have read in the books which deal with this subject of ‘the danger of premature loose play.’ ‘You run the risk,’ say some, ‘of spoiling a promising pupil, and of arresting his future progress, just when he is beginning to form good habits.’ Others go further and declare that: ‘The instructor who allows his pupil to commence loose play too soon sacrifices by an act of fatal indulgence the whole future of fencing.’
“I do not agree with this view. I cannot even see that it logically applies to those who mean to devote all their time to the study of sword-play, and who are prepared to make a determined effort to reach the topmost summit of this difficult art. Much less, then, to my mind, is it applicable to the generality of men, who have no ambition to become such learned fencers, as we were saying the other evening. The professors wilfully refuse to see this.
“And yet of all arts, the art of fencing may be considered from the most widely different standpoints, and particularly may be approached with very varied degrees of knowledge and application. Is it so very certain that ‘premature loose play,’ as the professors love to call it, is so pernicious as they think,—the bad seed that cannot fail to produce an evil crop of vices? Right or wrong, I can only say once more that I am of quite the contrary opinion.
“I fail to see that it is dangerous for a pupil to attempt the assault, when he has learnt by taking lessons for a month,—more or less, according to the progress made and his natural capacity,—to understand the various strokes I have described, and can already execute them with some degree of liveliness and control.
IV.
“Of course I am quite ready to admit that his first assaults, like all first attempts that require a trained habit of mind, cannot be free from mistakes, exaggerations, faults of all sorts. But is not the master there to correct these errors with his lesson, and to bring his pupil, who is inclined to go astray, back to the right path? Cannot the leading strings be readjusted?
“The very fact that the master has had an opportunity of observing the mistakes, to which his pupil is most liable, when left to himself, enables him to devote all his care to overcome and correct them by both practice and precept. More important still, he has also had an opportunity of observing his pupil’s bias; he notices the strokes which come naturally to his hand, the parries he most affects, the natural promptings of his impulse, impetuous or cautious as the case may be. He makes a study of his artless scholar, who is clumsily feeling his feet, reads him like a book, catches him in the act so to speak, and detects the working of his character, and thenceforward he knows the way in which his studies may be most profitably directed to give full play to his individual temperament.
“The assault teaches the novice what no amount of lunging at the master’s pad can drill into him. It enters him to the sudden emergencies, which in one shape or another arise at every moment, to the movement and exertion and keen emulation of real fighting. The assault is in fact a lesson subsidiary to the formal lesson, and you may rest assured that the instruction it conveys is equally salutary.”