Produced by Emma Dudding; Dagny; John Bickers
THE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
By Rudolph Erich Raspe
Published in 1895.
INTRODUCTION
It is a curious fact that of that class of literature to whichMunchausen belongs, that namely of _Voyages Imaginaires_, the threegreat types should have all been created in England. Utopia, RobinsonCrusoe, and Gulliver, illustrating respectively the philosophical, theedifying, and the satirical type of fictitious travel, were all writtenin England, and at the end of the eighteenth century a fourth type,the fantastically mendacious, was evolved in this country. Of this typeMunchausen was the modern original, and remains the classical example.The adaptability of such a species of composition to local and topicaluses might well be considered prejudicial to its chances of obtaining apermanent place in literature. Yet Munchausen has undoubtedly achievedsuch a place. The Baron's notoriety is universal, his characterproverbial, and his name as familiar as that of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, orRobinson Crusoe, mariner, of York. Condemned by the learned, like someother masterpieces, as worthless, Munchausen's travels have obtainedsuch a world-wide fame, that the story of their origin possesses ageneral and historic interest apart from whatever of obscurity or ofcuriosity it may have to recommend it.
The work first appeared in London in the course of the year 1785. Nocopy of the first edition appears to be accessible; it seems, however,to have been issued some time in the autumn, and in the _CriticalReview_ for December 1785 there is the following notice: "BaronMunchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaignsin Russia. Small 8vo, IS. (Smith). This is a satirical productioncalculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of someparliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons,the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has neverbeen carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent." The reviewer hadprobably read the work through from one paper cover to the other. It wasin fact too short to bore the most blase of his kind, consisting ofbut forty-nine small octavo pages. The second edition, which is in theBritish Museum, bears the following title; "Baron Munchausen's Narrativeof his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia; humbly dedicated andrecommended to country gentlemen, and if they please to be repeated astheir own after a hunt, at horse races, in watering places, and othersuch polite assemblies; round the bottle and fireside. Smith. Printed atOxford. 1786." The fact that this little pamphlet again consists of butforty-nine small octavo pages, combined with the similarity of title(as far as that of the first edition is given in the _Critical Review_),publisher, and price, affords a strong presumption that it was identicalwith the first edition. This edition contains only chapters ii., iii.,iv., v., and vi. (pp. 10-44) of the present reprint. These chapters arethe best in the book and their substantial if peculiar merit can hardlybe denied, but the pamphlet appears to have met with little success,and early in 1786 Smith seems to have sold the property to anotherbookseller, Kearsley. Kearsley had it enlarged, but not, we areexpressly informed, in the preface to the seventh edition, by the handof the original author (who happened to be in Cornwall at the time). Healso had it illustrated and brought it out in the same year in bookform at the enhanced price of two shillings, under the title: "GulliverReviv'd: The Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages and SportingAdventures of Baron Munnikhouson commonly pronounced Munchausen; as herelates them over a bottle when surrounded by his friends. A new editionconsiderably enlarged with views from the Baron's drawings. London.1786." A well-informed _Critical Reviewer_ would have amended the titlethus: "Lucian reviv'd: or Gulliver Beat with his own Bow."
Four editions now succeeded each other with rapidity and withoutmodification. A German translation appeared in 1786 with the imprintLondon: it was, however, in reality printed by Dieterich at Goettingen.It was a free rendering of the fifth edition, the preface being a clumsycombination of that prefixed to the original edition with that whichKearsley had added to the third.
The fifth edition (which is, with the exception of trifling differenceson the title-page, identical with the third, fourth, and sixth) isalso that which has been followed in the present reprint down to theconclusion of chapter twenty, where it ends with the words "the greatquadrangle." The supplement treating of Munchausen's extraordinaryflight on the back of an eagle over France to Gibraltar, South and NorthAmerica, the Polar Regions, and back to England is derived from theseventh edition of 1793, which has a new sub-title:--"Gulliver reviv'd,or the Vice of Lying properly exposed." The preface to this enlargededition also informs the reader that the last four editions had met withextraordinary success, and that the supplementary chapters, all, thatis, with the exception of chapters ii., iii., iv., v., and vi., whichare ascribed to Baron Munchausen himself, were the production of anotherpen, written, however, in the Baron's manner. To the same ingeniousperson the public was indebted for the engravings with which the bookwas embellished. The seventh was the last edition by which the classictext of Munchausen was seriously modified. Even before this importantconsummation had been arrived at, a sequel, which was within a fractionas long as the original work (it occupies pp. 163-299 of this volume),had appeared under the title, "A Sequel to the Adventures of BaronMunchausen. . . . Humbly dedicated to Mr. Bruce the Abyssiniantraveller, as the Baron conceives that it may be some service to him,previous to his making another journey into Abyssinia. But if thisadvice does not delight Mr. Bruce, the Baron is willing to fight him onany terms he pleases." This work was issued separately. London, 1792,8vo.
Such is the history of the book during the first eight or constructiveyears of its existence, beyond which it is necessary to trace it, untilat least we have touched upon the long-vexed question of its authorship.
Munchausen's travels have in fact been ascribed to as many differenthands as those of Odysseus. But (as in most other respects) it differsfrom the more ancient fabulous narrative in that its authorship hasbeen the subject of but little controversy. Many people have entertainederroneous notions as to its authorship, which they have circulated withcomplete assurance; but they have not felt it incumbent upon them tosupport their own views or to combat those of other people. It has,moreover, been frequently stated with equal confidence and inaccuracythat the authorship has never been settled. An early and persistentversion of the genesis of the travels was that they took their originfrom the rivalry in fabulous tales of three accomplished students atGoettingen University, Buerger, Kaestner, and Lichtenberg; another ran thatGottfried August Buerger, the German poet and author of "Lenore," had ata later stage of his career met Baron Munchausen in Pyrmont and takendown the stories from his own lips. Percy in his anecdotes attributesthe Travels to a certain Mr. M. (Munchausen also began with an M.)who was imprisoned at Paris during the Reign of Terror. Southey in his"Omniana" conjectured, from the coincidences between two of the talesand two in a Portuguese periodical published in 1730, that the Englishfictions must have been derived from the Portuguese. William West thebookseller and numerous followers have stated that Munchausen owed itsfirst origin to Bruce's Travels, and was written for the purpose ofburlesquing that unfairly treated work. Pierer boldly stated that it wasa successful anonymous satire upon the English government of the day,while Meusel with equal temerity affirmed in his "Lexikon" that the bookwas a translation of the "well-known Munchausen lies" executed from a(non-existent) German original by Rudolph Erich Raspe. A writer in the_Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1856 calls the book the joint production ofBuerger and Raspe.
Of all the conjectures, of which these are but a selection, the mostaccurate from a German point of view is that the book was the work ofBuerger, who was the first t
o dress the Travels in a German garb, andwas for a long time almost universally credited with the soleproprietorship. Buerger himself appears neither to have claimed nordisclaimed the distinction. There is, however, no doubt whatever thatthe book first appeared in English in 1785, and that Buerger's Germanversion did not see the light until 1786. The first German edition(though in reality printed at Goettingen) bore the imprint London,and was stated to be derived from an English source; but this was,reasonably enough, held to be merely a measure of precaution in case theactual Baron Munchausen (who was a well-known personage in Goettingen)should be stupid enough to feel aggrieved at being made the butt of agross caricature. In this way the discrepancy of dates mentioned abovemight easily have been obscured, and Buerger might still have beencredited with a work which has proved a better protection againstoblivion than "Lenore," had it not been for the officious sensitivenessof his self-appointed biographer, Karl von Reinhard. Reinhard, in ananswer to an attack made upon his hero for bringing out Munchausen asa pot-boiler in German and English simultaneously, definitely stated inthe _Berlin Gesellschafters_ of November 1824, that the real author ofthe original work was that disreputable genius, Rudolph Erich Raspe, andthat the German work was merely a free translation made by Buerger fromthe fifth edition of the English work. Buerger, he stated, was well awareof, but was too high-minded to disclose the real authorship.
Taking Reinhard's solemn asseveration in conjunction with theascertained facts of Raspe's career, his undoubted acquaintance with theBaron Munchausen of real life and the first appearance of the work in1785, when Raspe was certainly in England, there seems to be littledifficulty in accepting his authorship as a positive fact. There is nodifficulty whatever, in crediting Raspe with a sufficient mastery ofEnglish idiom to have written the book without assistance, for as earlyas January 1780 (since which date Raspe had resided uninterruptedlyin this country) Walpole wrote to his friend Mason that "Raspe writesEnglish much above ill and speaks it as readily as French," and shortlyafterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." Inthe next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languagesencouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one ofLessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic,"Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may besaid, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing featureof the style of the original edition of "Munchausen."
Curious as is this long history of literary misappropriation, thechequered career of the rightful author, Rudolph Erich Raspe, offers achapter in biography which has quite as many points of singularity.
Born in Hanover in 1737, Raspe studied at the Universities of Goettingenand Leipsic. He is stated also to have rendered some assistance toa young nobleman in sowing his wild oats, a sequel to his universitycourse which may possibly help to explain his subsequent aberrations.The connection cannot have lasted long, as in 1762, having alreadyobtained reputation as a student of natural history and antiquities,he obtained a post as one of the clerks in the University Library atHanover.
No later than the following year contributions written in elegantLatin are to be found attached to his name in the Leipsic _Nova ActaEruditorum_. In 1764 he alluded gracefully to the connection betweenHanover and England in a piece upon the birthday of Queen Charlotte, andhaving been promoted secretary of the University Library at Goettingen,the young savant commenced a translation of Leibniz's philosophicalworks which was issued in Latin and French after the original MSS. inthe Royal Library at Hanover, with a preface by Raspe's old collegefriend Kaestner (Goettingen, 1765). At once a courtier, an antiquary,and a philosopher, Raspe next sought to display his vocation for politeletters, by publishing an ambitious allegorical poem of the age ofchivalry, entitled "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedinglywell reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequinand Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems ofOssian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with betterinspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques ofAncient Poetry," with metrical translations, being thus the first tocall the attention of Germany to these admirable poems, which wereafterwards so successfully ransacked by Buerger, Herder, and other earlyGerman romanticists.
In 1767 Raspe was again advanced by being appointed Professor at theCollegium Carolinum in Cassel, and keeper of the landgrave of Hesse'srich and curious collection of antique gems and medals. He was shortlyafterwards appointed Librarian in the same city, and in 1771 he married.He continued writing on natural history, mineralogy, and archaeology, andin 1769 a paper in the 59th volume of the Philosophical Transactions,on the bones and teeth of elephants and other animals found in NorthAmerica and various boreal regions of the world, procured his electionas an honorary member of the Royal Society of London. His conclusion inthis paper that large elephants or mammoths must have previously existedin boreal regions has, of course, been abundantly justified by laterinvestigations. When it is added that Raspe during this part of hislife also wrote papers on lithography and upon musical instruments, andtranslated Algarotti's Treatise on "Architecture, Painting, and OperaMusic," enough will have been said to make manifest his very remarkableand somewhat prolix versatility. In 1773 he made a tour in Westphalia inquest of MSS., and on his return, by way of completing his education,he turned journalist, and commenced a periodical called the _CasselSpectator_, with Mauvillon as his co-editor. In 1775 he was travellingin Italy on a commission to collect articles of vertu for the landgrave,and it was apparently soon after his return that he began appropriatingto his own use valuable coins abstracted from the cabinets entrustedto his care. He had no difficulty in finding a market for the antiqueswhich he wished to dispose of, and which, it has been charitablysuggested, he had every intention of replacing whenever opportunityshould serve. His consequent procedure was, it is true, scarcely that ofa hardened criminal. Having obtained the permission of the landgrave tovisit Berlin, he sent the keys of his cabinet back to the authoritiesat Cassel--and disappeared. His thefts, to the amount of two thousandrixdollars, were promptly discovered, and advertisements were issuedfor the arrest of the Councillor Raspe, described without suspicion offlattery as a long-faced man, with small eyes, crooked nose, red hairunder a stumpy periwig, and a jerky gait. The necessities that promptedhim to commit a felony are possibly indicated by the addition that heusually appeared in a scarlet dress embroidered with gold, but sometimesin black, blue, or grey clothes. He was seized when he had got nofarther than Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, but he lost no time inescaping from the clutches of the police, and made his way to England.He never again set foot on the continent.
He was already an excellent English scholar, so that when he reachedLondon it was not unnatural that he should look to authorship forsupport. Without loss of time, he published in London in 1776 a volumeon some German Volcanoes and their productions; in 1777 he translatedthe then highly esteemed mineralogical travels of Ferber in Italy andHungary. In 1780 we have an interesting account of him from HoraceWalpole, who wrote to his friend, the Rev. William Mason: "There is aDutch scavant come over who is author of several pieces so learned thatI do not even know their titles: but he has made a discovery in myway which you may be sure I believe, for it proves what I expected andhinted in my 'Anecdotes of Painting,' that the use of oil colours wasknown long before Van Eyck." Raspe, he went on to say, had discovereda MS. of Theophilus, a German monk in the fourth century, who gavereceipts for preparing the colours, and had thereby convicted Vasari oferror. "Raspe is poor, and I shall try and get subscriptions to enablehim to print his work, which is sensible, clear, and unpretending."Three months later it was, "Poor Raspe is arrested by his _tailor_. Ihave sent him a little money, and he hopes to recover his liberty, but Iquestion whether he will be able to struggle on here." His "Essay on theOrigin of Oil Painting" was actually published through Walpole's goodservice in April 1781. He seems to have had plans of going to Americaand of excavating antiquities in Egypt, wh
ere he might have done goodservice, but the bad name that he had earned dogged him to London. TheRoyal Society struck him off its rolls, and in revenge he is said tohave threatened to publish a travesty of their transactions. He wasdoubtless often hard put to it for a living, but the variety of hisattainments served him in good stead. He possessed or gained somereputation as a mining expert, and making his way down into Cornwall,he seems for some years subsequent to 1782 to have been assay-master andstorekeeper of some mines at Dolcoath. While still at Dolcoath, it isvery probable that he put together the little pamphlet which appearedin London at the close of 1785, with the title "Baron Munchausen'sNarrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia," and havinggiven his _jeu d'esprit_ to the world, and possibly earned a few guineasby it, it is not likely that he gave much further thought to the matter.In the course of 1785 or 1786, he entered upon a task of much greatermagnitude and immediate importance, namely, a descriptive catalogue ofthe Collection of Pastes and Impressions from Ancient and Modern Gems,formed by James Tassie, the eminent connoisseur. Tassie engaged Raspein 1785 to take charge of his cabinets, and to commence describingtheir contents: he can hardly have been ignorant of his employe'sdelinquencies in the past, but he probably estimated that mere casts ofgems would not offer sufficient temptation to a man of Raspe's eclectictastes to make the experiment a dangerous one. Early in 1786, Raspeproduced a brief but well-executed conspectus of the arrangement andclassification of the collection, and this was followed in 1791 by "ADescriptive Catalogue," in which over fifteen thousand casts of ancientand modern engraved gems, cameos, and intaglios from the most renownedcabinets in Europe were enumerated and described in French and English.The two quarto volumes are a monument of patient and highly skilledindustry, and they still fetch high prices. The elaborate introductionprefixed to the work was dated from Edinburgh, April 16, 1790.
This laborious task completed, Raspe lost no time in applying himselfwith renewed energy to mineralogical work. It was announced in the_Scots Magazine_ for October 1791 that he had discovered in the extremenorth of Scotland, where he had been invited to search for minerals,copper, lead, iron, manganese, and other valuable products of a similarcharacter. From Sutherland he brought specimens of the finest clay, andreported a fine vein of heavy spar and "every symptom of coal." But inCaithness lay the loadstone which had brought Raspe to Scotland. Thiswas no other than Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, a benevolent gentlemanof an ingenious and inquiring disposition, who was anxious to exploitthe supposed mineral wealth of his barren Scottish possessions. Withhim Raspe took up his abode for a considerable time at his spray-beatencastle on the Pentland Firth, and there is a tradition, among membersof the family, of Sir John's unfailing appreciation of the wideintelligence and facetious humour of Raspe's conversation. Sinclair hadsome years previously discovered a small vein of yellow mundick on themoor of Skinnet, four miles from Thurso. The Cornish miners he consultedtold him that the mundick was itself of no value, but a good sign ofthe proximity of other valuable minerals. Mundick, said they, was agood horseman, and always rode on a good load. He now employed Raspe toexamine the ground, not designing to mine it himself, but to let it outto other capitalists in return for a royalty, should the investigationjustify his hopes. The necessary funds were put at Raspe's disposal,and masses of bright, heavy material were brought to Thurso Castle as aforetaste of what was coming. But when the time came for the fruitionof this golden promise, Raspe disappeared, and subsequent inquiriesrevealed the deplorable fact that these opulent ores had been carefullyimported by the mining expert from Cornwall, and planted in the placeswhere they were found. Sir Walter Scott must have had the incident(though not Raspe) in his mind when he created the Dousterswivel of his"Antiquary." As for Raspe, he betook himself to a remote part of theUnited Kingdom, and had commenced some mining operations in countryDonegal, when he was carried off by scarlet fever at Muckross in 1794.Such in brief outline was the career of Rudolph Erich Raspe, scholar,swindler, and undoubted creator of Baron Munchausen.
The merit of Munchausen, as the adult reader will readily perceive, doesnot reside in its literary style, for Raspe is no exception to the rulethat a man never has a style worthy of the name in a language that hedid not prattle in. But it is equally obvious that the real and originalMunchausen, as Raspe conceived and doubtless intended at one time todevelop him, was a delightful personage whom it would be the height ofabsurdity to designate a mere liar. Unfortunately the task was takenout of his hand and a good character spoiled, like many another, by meresequel-mongers. Raspe was an impudent scoundrel, and fortunately so; hisimpudence relieves us of any difficulty in resolving the question,--towhom (if any one) did he owe the original conception of the characterwhose fame is now so universal.
When Raspe was resident in Goettingen he obtained, in all probabilitythrough Gerlach Adolph von Munchausen, the great patron of arts andletters and of Goettingen University, an introduction to HieronynimusKarl Friedrich von Munchausen, at whose hospitable mansion atBodenwerder he became an occasional visitor. Hieronynimus, who was bornat Bodenwerder on May 11, 1720, was a cadet of what was known as theblack line of the house of Rinteln Bodenwerder, and in his youth servedas a page in the service of Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick. When quitea stripling he obtained a cornetcy in the "Brunswick Regiment" in theRussian service, and on November 27, 1740, he was created a lieutenantby letters patent of the Empress Anna, and served two arduous campaignsagainst the Turks during the following years. In 1750 he was promoted tobe a captain of cuirassiers by the Empress Elizabeth, and about 1760 heretired from the Russian service to live upon his patrimonial estate atBodenwerder in the congenial society of his wife and his paragon amonghuntsmen, Roesemeyer, for whose particular benefit he maintained a finepack of hounds. He kept open house, and loved to divert his guests withstories, not in the braggart vein of Dugald Dalgetty, but so embellishedwith palpably extravagant lies as to crack with a humour that was alltheir own. The manner has been appropriated by Artemus Ward and MarkTwain, but it was invented by Munchausen. Now the stories mainly relateto sporting adventures, and it has been asserted by one contemporaryof the baron that Munchausen contracted the habit of drawing sucha long-bow as a measure of self-defence against his invaluable butloquacious henchman, the worthy Roesemeyer. But it is more probable, asis hinted in the first preface, that Munchausen, being a shrewd man,found the practice a sovereign specific against bores and all otherkinds of serious or irrelevant people, while it naturally endeared himto the friends of whom he had no small number.
He told his stories with imperturbable _sang froid_, in a dry manner,and with perfect naturalness and simplicity. He spoke as a man of theworld, without circumlocution; his adventures were numerous and perhapssingular, but only such as might have been expected to happen to a manof so much experience. A smile never traversed his face as he relatedthe least credible of his tales, which the less intimate of hisacquaintance began in time to think he meant to be taken seriously.In short, so strangely entertaining were both manner and matter of hisnarratives, that "Munchausen's Stories" became a by-word among a host ofappreciative acquaintance. Among these was Raspe, who years afterwards,when he was starving in London, bethought himself of the incomparablebaron. He half remembered some of his sporting stories, and supplementedthese by gleanings from his own commonplace book. The result is acurious medley, which testifies clearly to learning and wit, and alsoto the turning over of musty old books of _facetiae_ written in execrableLatin.
The story of the Baron's horse being cut in two by the descendingportcullis of a besieged town, and the horseman's innocence of the factuntil, upon reaching a fountain in the midst of the city, the insatiatethirst of the animal betrayed his deficiency in hind quarters, wasprobably derived by Raspe from the _Facetiae Bebelianae_ of HeinrichBebel, first published at Strassburgh in 1508.
There it is given as follows: "De Insigni Mendacio. Faber claviculariusquem superius fabrum mendaciorum dixi, narravit se tempore belli,credens suos se subsecuturos
equitando ad cujusdam oppidi portaspenetrasse: et cum ad portas venisset cataractam turre demissam, equumsuum post ephippium discidisse, dimidiatumque reliquisse, atque semedia parte equi ad forum usque oppidi equitasse, et caedem non modicamperegisse. Sed cum retrocedere vellet multitudine hostium obrutus, tumdemum equum cecidisse seque captum fuisse."
The drinking at the fountain was probably an embellishment of Raspe'sown. Many of Bebel's jests were repeated in J. P. Lange's _DelicioeAcademicoe_ (Heilbronn, 1665), a section of which was expressly devotedto "Mendacia Ridicula"; but the yarn itself is probably much older thaneither. Similarly, the quaint legend of the thawing of the horn was toldby Castiglione in his _Cortegiano_, first published in 1528. This ishow Castiglione tells it: A merchant of Lucca had travelled to Polandin order to buy furs; but as there was at that time a war with Muscovy,from which country the furs were procured, the Lucchese merchantwas directed to the confines of the two countries. On reaching theBorysthenes, which divided Poland and Muscovy, he found that theMuscovite traders remained on their own side of the river from distrust,on account of the state of hostilities. The Muscovites, desirous ofbeing heard across the river announced the prices of their furs in aloud voice; but the cold was so intense that their words were frozen inthe air before they could reach the opposite side. Hereupon the Poleslighted a fire in the middle of the river, which was frozen into a solidmass; and in the course of an hour the words which had been frozenup were melted, and fell gently upon the further bank, although theMuscovite traders had already gone away. The prices demanded were,however, so high that the Lucchese merchant returned without making anypurchase. A similar idea is utilised by Rabelais in _Pantagruel_, and bySteele in one of his _Tatlers_. The story of the cherry tree growing outof the stag's head, again, is given in Lange's book, and the fact thatall three tales are of great antiquity is proved by the appearance ofcounterparts to them in Lady Guest's edition of the _Mabinogion_. Agreat number of _nugoe canoroe_ of a perfectly similar type are narratedin the sixteenth century "Travels of the Finkenritter" attributed toLorenz von Lauterbach.
To humorous waifs of this description, without fixed origin orbirthplace, did Raspe give a classical setting amongst embroideredversions of the baron's sporting jokes. The unscrupulous manner in whichhe affixed Munchausen's own name to the completed _jeu d'esprit_ is,ethically speaking, the least pardonable of his crimes; for when Raspe'slittle book was first transformed and enlarged, and then translated intoGerman, the genial old baron found himself the victim of an unmercifulcaricature, and without a rag of concealment. It is consequently notsurprising to hear that he became soured and reticent before his deathat Bodenwerder in 1797.
Strangers had already begun to come down to the place in the hope ofgetting a glimpse of the eccentric nobleman, and foolish stories weretold of his thundering out his lies with apoplectic visage, his eyesstarting out of his head, and perspiration beading his forehead. Thefountain of his reminiscences was in reality quite dried up, and itmust be admitted that this excellent old man had only too good reason toconsider himself an injured person.
In this way, then, came to be written the first delightful chapters ofBaron Munchausen's "Narrative of his Travels and Campaigns in Russia."It was not primarily intended as a satire, nor was it specially designedto take of the extravagant flights of contemporary travellers. Itwas rather a literary frivolity, thrown off at one effort by atatterdemalion genius in sore need of a few guineas.
The remainder of the book is a melancholy example of the fallacyof enlargements and of sequels. Neither Raspe nor the baron can beseriously held responsible for a single word of it. It must have beenwritten by a bookseller's hack, whom it is now quite impossible toidentify, but who was evidently of native origin; and the book is acharacteristically English product, full of personal and politicalsatire, with just a twang of edification. The first continuation(chapters one and seven, to twenty, inclusive), which was supplied withthe third edition, is merely a modern _rechauffe_, with "up to date"allusions, of Lucian's _Vera Historia_. Prototypes of the majority ofthe stories may either be found in Lucian or in the twenty volumes of_Voyages Imaginaires_, published at Paris in 1787. In case, however, anyreader should be sceptical as to the accuracy of this statement he willhave no very great difficulty in supposing, as Dr. Johnson supposedof Ossian, that anybody could write a great amount of such stuff if hewould only consent to abandon his mind to the task.
With the supplementary chapters commence topical allusions to therecently issued memoirs of Baron de Tott, an enterprising Frenchman whohad served the Great Turk against the Russians in the Crimea (an Englishtranslation of his book had appeared in 1785). The satire upon thisgallant soldier's veracity appears to be quite undeserved, thoughone can hardly read portions of his adventures without being forciblyreminded of the Baron's laconic style. It is needless to add that theamazing account of De Tott's origin is grossly libellous. The amount ofpublic interest excited by the aeronautical exploits of Montgolfier andBlanchard was also playfully satirised. Their first imitator in England,Vincenzo Lunardi, had made a successful ascent from Moorfields asrecently as 1784, while in the following year Blanchard crossed thechannel in a balloon and earned the sobriquet _Don Quixote de laManche_. His grotesque appropriation of the motto "_Sic itur ad astra_"made him, at least, a fit object for Munchausen's gibes. In the Baron'svisit to Gibraltar we have evidence that the anonymous writer, in commonwith the rest of the reading public, had been studying John Drinkwater's"History of the Siege of Gibraltar" (completed in 1783), which hadwith extreme rapidity established its reputation as a military classic.Similarly, in the Polar adventures, the "Voyage towards the North Pole,"1774, of Constantine John Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, is gentlyridiculed, and so also some incidents from Patrick Brydone's "Tourthrough Sicily and Malta" (1773), are, for no obvious reason,contemptuously dragged in. The exploitation of absurd and libellouschap-book lives of Pope Clement XIV., the famous Ganganelli, can onlybe described as a low bid for vulgar applause. A French translationof Baron Friedrich von Trenck's celebrated Memoirs appeared at Metz in1787, and it would certainly seem that in overlooking them the compilerof Munchausen was guilty of a grave omission. He may, however, haveregarded Trenck's adventures less as material for ridicule than as aseries of _hableries_ which threatened to rival his own.
The Seventh Edition, published in 1793, with the supplement (pp. 142-161), was, with the abominable proclivity to edification which markedthe publisher of the period (that of "Goody Two-Shoes" and "Sandfordand Merton"), styled "Gulliver Reviv'd: _or the Vice of Lying ProperlyExposed_." The previous year had witnessed the first appearance of thesequel, of which the full title has already been given, "with twentycapital copperplates, including the baron's portrait." The merit ofMunchausen as a mouthpiece for ridiculing traveller's tall-talk, orindeed anything that shocked the incredulity of the age, was by thistime widely recognised. And hence with some little ingenuity the popularcharacter was pressed into the service of the vulgar clamour againstJames Bruce, whose "Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile" hadappeared in 1790. In particular Bruce's description of the Abyssiniancustom of feeding upon "live bulls and kava" provoked a chorus ofincredulity. The traveller was ridiculed upon the stage as Macfable, andin a cloud of ephemeral productions; nor is the following allusion inPeter Pindar obscure:--
"Nor have I been where men (what loss alas!) Kill half a cow, then send the rest to grass."
The way in which Bruce resented the popular scepticism is illustratedby the following anecdote told by Sir Francis Head, his biographer. Agentleman once observed, at a country house where Bruce was staying,that it was not possible that the natives of Abyssinia could eat rawmeat! "Bruce said not a word, but leaving the room, shortly returnedfrom the kitchen with a piece of raw beef-steak, peppered and salted inthe Abyssinian fashion. 'You will eat that, sir, or fight me,' he said.When the gentleman had eaten up the raw flesh (most willingly would hehave eaten his words instead), Bruce calmly observed, 'Now, sir, youwi
ll never again say it is _impossible_.'" In reality, Bruce seems tohave been treated with much the same injustice as Herodotus. The truthof the bulk of his narrative has been fully established, although apassion for the picturesque may certainly have led him to embellish manyof the minor particulars. And it must be remembered, that his book wasnot dictated until twelve years after the events narrated.
Apart from Bruce, however, the sequel, like the previous continuation,contains a great variety of political, literary, and other allusions ofthe most purely topical character--Dr. Johnson's Tour in the Hebrides,Mr. Pitt, Burke's famous pamphlet upon the French Revolution, CaptainCook, Tippoo Sahib (who had been brought to bay by Lord Cornwallisbetween 1790 and 1792). The revolutionary pandemonium in Paris, andthe royal flight to Varennes in June 1791, and the loss of the "RoyalGeorge" in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and thereare many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral asthose of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque.
Nevertheless the accretions have proved powerless to spoil "Munchausen."The nucleus supplied by Raspe was instinct with so much energy that ithas succeeded in vitalising the whole mass of extraneous extravagance.
Although, like "Gulliver's Travels," "Munchausen" might at first sightappear to be ill-suited, in more than one respect, for the nursery,yet it has proved the delight of children of all ages; and there areprobably few, in the background of whose childish imagination theastonishing Munchausen has not at one time or another, together withRobinson Crusoe, Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and the Pied Piper of Hamelyn,assumed proportions at once gigantic and seductively picturesque.
The work, as has been shown, assumed its final form before the close ofthe eighteenth century; with the nineteenth it commenced itstriumphant progress over the civilised world. Some of the subsequenttransformations and migrations of the book are worthy of brief record.
A voluminous German continuation was published at Stendhal in threevolumes between 1794 and 1800. There was also a continuation comprisingexploits at Walcheren, the Dardanelles, Talavera, Cintra, and elsewhere,published in London in 1811. An elaborate French translation, withembellishments in the French manner, appeared at Paris in 1862.Immerman's celebrated novel entitled "Munchausen" was published in fourvolumes at Dusseldorf in 1841, and a very free rendering of the Baron'sexploits, styled "Munchausen's Lugenabenteuer," at Leipsic in 1846.The work has also been translated into Dutch, Danish, Magyar (_Bard deManx_), Russian, Portuguese, Spanish (_El Conde de las Maravillas_), andmany other tongues, and an estimate that over one hundred editions haveappeared in England, Germany, and America alone, is probably ratherunder than above the mark.
The book has, moreover, at the same time provided illustrations towriters and orators, and the richest and most ample material forillustrations to artists. The original rough woodcuts are anonymous,but the possibilities of the work were discovered as early as 1809, byThomas Rowlandson, who illustrated the edition published in that year.The edition of 1859 owed embellishments to Crowquill, while Cruikshanksupplied some characteristic woodcuts to that of 1869. Coloured designsfor the travels were executed by a French artist Richard in 1878, andillustrations were undertaken independently for the German editionsby Riepenhausen and Hosemann respectively. The German artist AdolphSchroedter has also painted a celebrated picture representing the Baronsurrounded by his listeners. But of all the illustrations yet invented,the general verdict has hitherto declared in favour of those suppliedto Theophile Gautier's French edition of 1862 by Gustave Dore, who fullymaintained by them the reputation he had gained for work of a similar_genre_ in his drawings for Balzac's _Contes Drolatiques_. When,however, the public has had an opportunity of appreciating the admirablyfantastic drawings made by Mr. William Strang and Mr. J. B. Clark forthe present edition, they will probably admit that Baron Munchausen'sindebtedness to his illustrations, already very great, has been morethan doubled.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen Page 1
