“The lesson can explain the logic and theory of fencing, it can assign reasons and exhibit the mechanical process, but it cannot deal with the great Unknown, the tricksy spirit, which suddenly starts out on the fencer under every shape and form, always assuming some new disguise and upsetting in a moment the most perfect theories and the most scientific combinations.
“The young fencer who undertakes his first assault is like the heroic youth of the fairy tales, who leaves his humble cottage and goes out into the wide world to seek his fortune. Like him he will meet with many strange adventures, which will try his mettle, put his character to the touch, and call into play all the resources of his intelligence.
VII.
“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.