180 FENCING AS AN ART 



there used, in my youth, to be a story of a Briton who 

 was fed pretty constantly in America on that questionable 

 confection yclept Washington pie. Being of a quiet and 

 unresentf ul habit, he protested not ; but one day, after an 

 undue and perhaps underdone infliction of the entremet* 

 he is said to have quietly remarked that " doubtless Gen- 

 eral Washington was a great and good man, but d^ 

 his pie !" 



So with the Browning man. We admire his taste, but 

 do not always agree as to his discretion. 



Now, a man who is hunting or playing polo cannot pos- 

 sibly utilize or preserve a Brow r ning, i.e., too fine a mouth ; 

 he needs a newspaper-mouth. Both these sports originate 

 in the rough-and-tumble instincts of our nature, though 

 now grown somewhat beyond the crudely physical. Nei- 

 ther belongs to the same category as school-riding. They 

 are arts in their way, but not arts in the way poetry or 

 painting or music is an art, while school-riding is just this. 

 How many men fence to-day ? I do not mean the broad- 

 sword (though there are few enough of these), or that vig- 

 orous if crude imitation of it, single -stick; I mean the 

 foils. It is too delicate, too difficult an art to please most 

 people. We can learn to spar, if we have strength and 

 courage, "in six easy lessons." But the small sword, of 

 which foils are the practice-weapon, is the study of years 

 and years, and yet years. And it is of that nature, like 

 all true arts, that it is not necessarily lost by age. None 

 of the finer arts depend upon brute strength. When a 

 man grows less able physically, he must yield the palm to 

 the younger men in the coarser arts ; but not so in fen- 

 cing. The crack fencers are almost always middle-aged 

 men, whom study of their weapon has made perfect, not 

 muscle. It demands patience to study fencing, not mere 

 vigor. So with high-school riding. It is not a sport like 



