Sir Richard Francis Burton

“ And now when the vain glory of violence has passed away from the Sword with the customs of a past age, we can hardly ignore the fact that the manners of nations have changed, not for the best. As soon as the Sword ceased to be worn in France, a Frenchman said of his compatriots that the ‘politest people in Europe had suddenly become the rudest.’ That gallant and courteous bearing, which in England during the early nineteenth century so charmed the ‘fiery and fastidious Alfieri’ lingers only amongst a few. True the swash-buckler, the professional duellist, has disappeared. ”

“ At this time the Sword was not only the Queen of Weapons, but the weapon paramount between man and man. Then, advancing by slow, stealthy, and stumbling steps, the age of gunpowder, of ‘villanous saltpetre,’ appeared upon the scene of life. Gradually the bayonet, a modern modification of the pike, which again derives from the savage spear, one of the earliest forms of the arme blanche, ousted the Sword amongst infantry because the former could be combined with the fire-piece. ”

“ His minor delight was gossip, euphuistically expressed by ‘hearing new things.’ Hellas soon learned that her forte lay in literature, poetry, oratory, and philosophy, in engineering, and in the fine arts. She excelled the world in the exquisite rules of proportion; in the breadth of idea, and in the clearness and perfection of the literary form: these arts she bequeathed as a heritage to mankind, who have nowhere and never surpassed her. ”

“ She diffused everywhere the bright lights and splendid benefits of war and conquest, whose functions are all important in the formative and progressive processes. It is no paradox to assert La guerre a enfanté le droit: without War there would be no Right. The cost of life, says Emerson, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Law reconstructing and uplifting society; it breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider view. ”

“ It became an axiom that in a cavalry charge the spur, not the Sword, gains the day. By no means a unique, nor even a singular process of progress, is this return towards the past, this falling back upon the instincts of primitive invention, this recurrence to childhood: when the science of war reverted to ballistics it practically revived the practice of the first ages, and the characteristic attack of the savage and the barbarian who, as a rule, throw their weapons. ”

“ And they will too often find that the index of an English book which gives copious references to glass or sugar utterly ignores the Sword. At times they must labour in the dark, for men who write seem wholly unconscious of the subject’s importance. For instance, much has been said about art in Japan; but our knowledge of her metallurgy especially of her iron and steel works, is elementary, while that of her peculiar and admirable cutlery is strangely superficial. And travellers and collectors treat the Sword much as they do objects of natural history. ”

“ Travellers refuse to believe that ‘Aryanism’ was born on the bald, bleak highlands of Central Asia, or that ‘Semitism’ derives from the dreary, fiery deserts of Arabia. We do not believe India to be ‘the country which even more than Greece or Rome was the cradle of grammar and philology.’ I cannot but hold that England has, of late years, been greatly misled by the ‘Aryan heresy’ ”

“ Painting and sculpture were the few simple lines drawn and cut upon the tomahawk or other rude weapon-tool. ‘As men think and live so they build,’ said Herder; and architecture, which presently came to embrace all the other arts, dawned when the Savage attempted to defend and to adorn his roost among the tree branches or the entrance to his cave-den. ”

“ The Englishman and, for that matter, the German and the Scandinavian, adopted with a protest, and right unwillingly, swordsmanship proper—that is, rapier and point, the peculiar and especial weapon, offensive and defensive, of Southern Europe, Spain, Italy, and France. During the most flourishing age of the Sword it is rare to find a blade bearing the name of an English maker, and English inscriptions seldom date earlier than the eighteenth century. ”

“ But courtesy and punctiliousness, the politeness of man to man, and respect and deference of man to woman—that Frauencultus, the very conception of the knightly character—have to a great extent been ‘improved off.’ The latter condition of society, indeed, seems to survive only in the most cultivated classes of Europe; and, popularly, amongst the citizens of the United States, a curious oasis of chivalry in a waste of bald utilitarianism—preserved not by the Sword but by the revolver. ”

“ This revival of the proto-historic celt and headman’s instrument is a plain, heavy wedge of steel, fixed on a light, tough wooden helve or heft, thus concentrating all the force in the head that strikes the blow. Here there is no uncertainty about the use; and, were it not necessary in swordsmanship to ‘recover guard’ and to save self as well as disable the assailant, it would be the best, as it is one of the oldest, weapons derived from the club. But the cutting Sword, which in the short curved form is its congener, has a long blade that allows a choice of cut—a good choice and a bad choice. ”

“ These Proto-Phrygians and Phrygo-Europeans, of whom several tribes returned to Asia, were the prehistoric metal-workers. The smith (from smitan, to strike) was sacred in the dawn of history; and the Sword-maker was not inferior to him. Those who have witnessed the awe and reverence with which savages and barbarians regard a European mechanic at his forge will see exemplified the emotional feeling which led to the human becoming the superhuman. ”

“ As the mathematic is the basis of all exact science, so Sword-play teaches the soldier to handle every other weapon. This is well known to Continental armies, in which each regiment has its own fencing establishment and its salle d’armes.
Again, men of thought cannot ignore the intrinsic value of the Sword for stimulating physical qualities. Ce n’est pas assez de roidir l’âme, il faut aussi roidir les muscles, says Montaigne, who also remarks of fencing that it is the only exercise wherein l’esprit s’en exerce. ”

“ The modern Irish, who in historical falsification certainly rival, if they do not excel, the Hindús, claim for their ancestry an exalted grade of culture. They found their pretensions upon illuminated manuscripts and similar works of high art; but it is far easier to account for these triumphs as the exceptional labours of students who wandered to the classic regions about the Mediterranean. If ancient Ireland ever was anything but savage, where, let us ask, are the ruins that show any sign of civilisation? ”

“ He holds that Man, once master of metallurgy, ‘would be better able to deal with the much more easily manipulated bones, stones, or wood.’ He supposes all the metals, noble and ignoble, as well as gems and precious stones, to have become familiar amongst Eastern races, ‘whether they be Semitic, Aryan, Hamitic, Sporadic, or Allophyllian, by virtue of a civilisation due to a natural innate insight.’ Hence he declares Egypt an enigma to those who accept the dictum of ‘man’s gradual evolution from the condition of a savage, an ignoramus,’ and he opines that this grim being is simply a retrograde. ”

“ It will hardly be said that a monograph of the Sword is not wanted. Students who would learn her origin, genealogy, and history, find no single publication ready to hand. They must ransack catalogues and books on ‘arms and armour’ that are numbered by the score. They must hunt up fugitive pamphlets; papers consigned to the literary store-rooms called magazines; and stray notices deep buried in the ponderous tomes of Recueils and general works on Hoplology. ”

“ Hobbism, after all, is partly right: ‘Men were by nature equal, and their only social relation was a state of war.’ Like the children of our modern day, helpless and speechless, primæval Homo possessed, in common with his fellow-creatures, only the instincts necessary for self-support under conditions the most facile. Uncultivated thought is not rich in the productive faculty; the brain does not create ideas: it only combines them and evolves the novelty of deduction, and the development of what is found existing. ”

“ The friends retire and leave the two in the middle space, ‘more after the manner of a theatrical show than according to the law of combat.’ The enormous Northerner, like a huge mass threatening to crush what was beneath it, stretched forth his shield with his left hand and planted an ineffectual cut of the Sword with loud noise upon the armour of the advancing foe. ”

“ India’s two great epics (‘Mahabhárat’ and ‘Ramáyana’) and fifteen Puranas are mere depositories of legendary and imaginative myths, containing few of the golden grains of truth hid in tons of rubbish. All the anthropology we learn from them is that India had a primitive (Turanian?) race, called in contempt Rakshasas or demons. It was mastered by Brahminical attacks, typified in later days by Rama and other heroes, probably during the exodes of Hyksos and Hebrews from Egypt; and long subsequently arose Buddhism, to be followed by the rule of the Moslems and Europeans. ”

“ I was shown, in the museum of Aquileja, a ‘Roman sword’ which was a basket-hilted Venetian, hardly two hundred years old. It is only an exact chronology, made to frame the Geographical and the Formal pictures of the weapon, that can secure scientific distribution.
In dealing with a subject which, like the Sword, ranges through the world-history, and which concerns the human race in general, it would, I venture to opine, be unwise to adopt a single system. ”

“ Remains now to consider the Sword as a weapon for point, a use to which, as its various shapes show, it was applied in the earliest ages instinctively, as it were, before Science taught the superiority of the thrust to the cut. We learn from such hand-thrusting instruments—the awl, gimlet, needle, and dinner-fork—that the straight weapon may be considered a very acute wedge with a method of progression mostly oblique. It is easy to prove that the proper shape for a thrusting-blade is pre-eminently the straight. ”

“ The power of steam, as a whirling toy and a copper vessel prove, was familiar to the old Egyptians, and perhaps to the Greeks and Romans under the name of æolipylæ αἰόλου πύλαι. But only at the end of the last century its motive force attracted general attention; it became a necessary of civilised life, and at once superseded the sailer and the stage coach. And by aid of the Past we may project the Future. Man will bungle over the balloon, but he will never fly straight till railways and steamers become too slow for him: when ‘levitation,’ in fact, shall become a necessity. ”

“ Thus the Age of Copper would be simply provisional in certain localities, separating the periods of horn and bone, teeth and wood, from that of alloys; even as the latter led, in the due line of development, to the general adoption of iron and steel for Swords and other weapons. But we have no need for dividing the epochs with the perverse subtilties of certain naturalists, who use and abuse every pretext for creating new species. If there be any sequence, it would be copper, bronze, and brass. ”

“ The next step would be to fashion the ragged staff with fire, with friction, and with flint knives, shells or other scrapers, into a cutting as well as a crushing instrument; and here we have one of the many origins of the Sword and of its diminutives, the dagger and the knife. Pointed at the end, it would become the lance and spear, the spud, spade, and palstave, the pilum, the dart, the javelin, and the assagai.
Not a few authorities contend that the earliest weapons, the most constant in all ages and continuous in all countries, were the spear and the axe. ”

“ Of the same kind are the ‘sword-grass’ and the ‘bamboo-grass.’ Many races, especially the Andamanese and the Polynesian Islanders, make useful blades of the split and sharpened bamboo: they are fashioned from the green plant, and are dried and charred to sharpen the edge. Turning to the animal world, the cassowary tears with a forward cut, and the wounded coot scratches like a cat. The ‘old man kangaroo,’ with the long nail of the powerful hind leg, has opened the stomach of many a staunch hound. The wild boar attacks with a thrust, followed by a rip, cutting scientifically from below upwards. ”

“ We have seen its several stages of youth and growth to bone and stone, to copper and bronze, to iron and steel. When it had sufficiently developed itself Egypt gave it a name, SFET; and this name, at least fifty centuries old, still clings to it and will cling to it. In the hands of the old Nilotes the Sword spread culture and civilisation throughout adjoining Africa and Western Asia. The Phœnicians carried it wide and side over the world then known to man. The Greeks won with it their liberty and developed with it their citizenship. ”