The Sentiment of the Sword/Foreword
THE MANUSCRIPT of the following Dialogue was entrusted to me by the late Lady Burton some time after Sir Richard Burton's death in 1890, together with the notes ajid memoranda he left for the continuation of his Book of the Sword. It will, I hope, be of interest as the work of one of the greatest travellers, finest sportsmen, and strongest personali- ties of the Victorian era; but it will appeal more especially to lovers of the sword and foil, who have increased so vastly in numbers since Burton wrote. For it contains the matured opinions upon the art and methods of offence and defence in England and on the Continent of one who was throughout his life an ardent student of the theory, and an acknowledged master of the practice, of the art of swordsmanship.
We have Burton's own statement (Life, Vol. I., p. 134) that he began his long practice with the sword seriously at the age of twelve, sometimes taking three lessons a day, and he never missed an opportunity of studying the fencing or fighting methods of whatever country he was in, savage or civilised. In 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, he was devoting himself to fencing at Boulogne. " To this day," writes his widow, " the Burton une-deux, and notably the manchette (the upward slash disabling the sword arm and saving life in affairs of honour), are remembered; they earned him his brevet de pointe for the excellence of his swordsmanship, and he became a maitre d'armes." This diploma he placed after his name upon the title page of his Book of the Sword. In 1853 he published A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise, which, at first pigeonholed at tho War Office, was subsequently adopted in the army.
Burton's original title for his work was " The Secrets of the Sword," suggested by the Baron de Bazancourt's volume Les Secrets de VEpee, published in Paris in 1862, from which he quotes freely in the following pages, and so well known in England by Mr C. Felix Clay's fine translation (illustrated by Mr F. H. Townsend), which has forestalled this title here. The one chosen in its place, " The Sentiment of the Sword," perhaps suggests even better to non-fencers Burton's intimate sympathy with and affection for the weapon and its correspondence with his own nature, while to swordsmen and fencers it brings home le sentiment flu fer invented by our "sweet enemy France" for that inner feeling of the foil, that magnetism of the blade, that sense of touch or " tact " which no other expression in any language so happily conveys.
I have ventured to omit a few passages from Burton's work which time has rendered of less lively interest, and have allowed myself the liberty of a few notes where the text seemed to require it, or the title of an early fencing work has been given in full
- A. FOEBES SIEVEKING
- 12, Seymour Street, W., December, 1910.