“For my part, after reading and rereading, with the most scrupulous attention, everything that has been written on the subject, I remain convinced of this, that if I were writing a manual of fencing my first object would be to get rid of the alarming jargon of technical terms, which are supposed to be indispensable—a formidable array, quite enough, I freely admit, to give pause to the most resolute, and to blanch the cheek of the keenest aspirant.”
“Ah, you are quite right,” said my host with the air of a man who had made the experiment. “How much the art and the professors too would have gained, if they had only studied simplicity, and taken the trouble to make themselves intelligible.”
IV.
The conversation, you see, was getting on.
“Unfortunately,” I continued, “most of the professors who have committed themselves to paper have thought otherwise. They plunge into interminable dissertations on the denomination of thrusts. They use words which, it is true, may be found in the dictionary but which have an unfamiliar appearance. For instance they talk about the hand in pronation or in supination, instead of simply saying the hand with the nails turned up, or the hand with the nails turned down.
“Others have devoted their energy to working out combinations and classifications of feints, parries, and ripostes, distinguishing between them by the nicest shades of difference, and to devising subtleties of terminology, even going so far as to compile and exhibit with the pride of a collector a prodigious catalogue of twelve thousand five hundred strokes.[1] What memory could possibly contain them?
“Now I, on the contrary, should have spared no pains to prove that it is perfectly possible to learn the practical management of the sword without a superhuman effort, and that sword-play is worth cultivating as a delightful exercise and one of the finest kinds of sport.
“For unfortunately we have to remember that Latin, which one uses so seldom, perhaps once or twice after leaving college, and Greek, for which one has even less occasion, are considered useful and even necessary parts of polite education, but that such things as swimming, which may on an emergency be the means of saving your life, or fencing, which is one of the most healthy of athletic exercises, the best thing in the world for developing and bracing a feeble youngster, and which enables you to defend yourself if you are challenged by a bully or assaulted by a blackguard, are reckoned merely frivolous accomplishments. And it is generally recognised of course that it is not right to waste time on mere accomplishments.
“I mentioned Latin and Greek, which we all learnt more or less at school. Well, do you suppose that the man who is going to make learning his profession carries his studies no further than the rest of us, however scholarly some of us may be? No, of course he must go deeper and examine the remotest bearings of the particular branch of knowledge, which he will presently have to teach.