THE DUEL RETURNS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21241, 23 January 1931, Page 14

THE DUEL RETURNS.

PARISIAN COMBAT. i PISTOLS AND MOTORS. That was an ingenious duel in Paris the other day. The heroes entered their motor cars, drove at each other at full speed, and as they met opened fire with revolvers. No hit was signalled, so they turned and ran another heat, and again “the glades of the Bois resounded to the roar of automobiles and the detonation of revolver shots.” As it then appeared that neither could hit, “ the seconds declared both men victors, and they shook hands,” writes H. C. Bailey, in the Daily Telegraph. I suppose that both were winners because both survived. It recalls the gentleman who was asked what he did in the Great Revolution and replied with simple dignity “that he kept alive.” Such duels can never be really popular. They are too dangerous to noncombatants. But the scheme is interesting as an endeavour to reduce the fight to pure chance. This I take to be the true chivalrous conception of a duel, and also, which is quite a different thing, the original principle of trial by combat. “ Not by might nor by power,” as the text has it, not by skill in arms does your ideal hero desire to overcome his enemy, but by the justice of his cause, the will of heaven. And he does so—in novels. You remember the last fight of Ivanhoe against the Templar, when sick man and tired horse went down, as was natural, before the competent villain, but it was the villain who died. There have been a good many copies of that impressive scene, but I don’t know that it has ever become very convincing. LEGAL PROCESS. The correct opinion, I believe, is that the primitive single combats, Achilles and Hector, Aeneas and Turnus, *nd the like, are not properly duels, but tribal or national contests. Compare the affair of David and Goliath. The mediaeval “wager of battle,” a man’s claim to prove his own virtue or somebody clse’s by fighting tete a tete, as in the Ivanhoe instance, is also not a duel, but a legal process. Both, however, were taken as appeals to fate or Providence, and there is a great deal of that about the duel. Dumas is the classic for duels, but though French history has the _ most famous, tragic, romantic and comic, we have done well enough both in fact and fiction. No novelist that I know has made anything of the most attractive, the meeting of Charles IPs Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Shrewsbury in a quarrel over Lady. Shrewsbury, when she was on the ground disguised as a page to hold Buckingham’s horse and sec him give her husband a death wound. Thackeray, who was always good with duels, did no more than glance at the historic Hamilton-Mohun-Macartney affair, a duel which may have been a murder, and a murder for party politics, a duel quite hors concours; but he made a classic of the other duel in “ Esmond ” between Mohun and Castlewood. That I take to be the best in English. ‘ OUT OF FAVOUR. The delight in duelling had alreadygone out before Queen Anne was dead. They discovered under Anna Regina that it “ had given Occasions to the very Refuse of Mankind who had neither Virtue nor common Sense to set up for Men of Honour.” So wrote Addison, in his best vein of moral indignation, and, which was much more dangerous, he poked very good fun at the duel. It is still not a hundred years since the last recorded duel in England. The Duke of Wellington fought after he was Prime Minister, though most people thought it an error. Peel was commonly understood to be ready to fight. One of the quaintest things of the last days of the English duel is the incarnation of Victorian common sense. Macaulay was “very near exchanging shots” with one of the authors he reviewed. I wonder if books and reviews would be better or worse if we revived the arbitrament of pistols. But there are ways of duelling without weapons.