A Novelist on Novels

by Walter Lionel George

In such scenes as these contests with bears, wolves, lions, crocodiles, the Baron is the chief actor, plays the part of comedian, but he is big enough to shed round himself a zone of comic light. The giant makes comedy as he walks; notably in St Petersburg, he runs from a mad dog, discarding his fur coat in his hurry, and that, so far as he is concerned, is the end of the adventure. But a comic fate pursues Münchausen, for his fur coat, bitten by the mad dog, develops hydrophobia, leaps at and destroys companion clothing, until its master arrives in time to see it 'falling upon a fine full-dress suit which he shook and tossed in an unmerciful manner.' That is an example of the comic zone in which Münchausen revolves; round him the inanimate breathes, is animated by his own life-lust until the 'it' of things vanishes into the magic 'he.'

It is a pity, from the purely comic point of view, that the Baron should so uniformly dominate circumstances. A victorious hero is seldom so mirth-making as is the ridiculous and ridiculed Tartarin; we find relief when Münchausen fails to throw a piece of ordnance across the Dardanelles, and when he shatters his chariot against the rock he thus decapitates and makes into Table Mountain. His failure, injurious to his gigantic quality, is essential to his comic quality, for the reader often cries out, in presence of his flaming victories: Accursed sun! Will you never set? But the sun of Münchausen will never set. For a moment it may be obscured by a passing cloud, while its powerful rays rebelliously glow through the clot of mist and maintain the outline of the Baron's wicked little eye, but set it cannot: is it not in its master's power to juggle with moons and arrest the steeds of Apollo?

Demigodly, the giant must see but not judge, for one cannot judge when one is so far away. Thus Münchausen has but few sneers for little mankind; he observes that the people of an island choose as governors a man and his wife who were 'plucking cucumbers on a tree' because they fell from the tree on the tyrant of the isle and destroyed him, but he does not seem to see anything singular in this method of government. Nor has he an express scoff for the College of Physicians because no deaths happened on earth while it was suspended in the air. The scoff is there, but it is not expressed by Münchausen; he takes the earth in his hand, remarks 'Odd machine, this,' and lays it down again. And it may be too much to say 'odd'; though Münchausen expresses astonishment from time to time it is not vacuous astonishment; it is reasonable, measured astonishment, that of a modern tourist in Baedekerland. Thus, in his view, politicians, rulers, pedagogues, apothecaries, explorers are not subjects for his sling: they are curiosities.

He stares at these curiosities with simple wonder. He does not see the world as a joke, but as an earnest and extraordinary thing. He is always ready to be mildly surprised and he is never sceptical; that is, he never doubts the possibility of the impossible when it happens to him: he gravely doubts it when it happens to anybody else. Thus it is clear that he does not think much of Mr Lemuel Gulliver, that his chief enemy is his old rival Baron de Tott. If he were not so polite Münchausen would call de Tott a plain liar; he refrains and merely outstrips the upstart, as a gentleman should do. Münchausen sees the world in terms of himself; he would have no faith in the marvellous escapes of von Trenck, Jack Sheppard, and Monte Cristo. 'I,' says Münchausen, and the rivals may withdraw. He does not even fear imitation, and if he were confronted with Dickens's story of the lunars in Household Words, or with his French imitator, M. de Crac, he would chivalrously say: 'Most creditable, but I....' Nothing in Münchausen is so colossal as his 'I.' Like the Gauls he fears naught, save that the sky will fall upon his head, and I am not sure that he fears even that: the accident might enable him to make interesting notes on heaven.

There is, perhaps, unjustified levity in this surmise of mine, for Münchausen is a pious man. When, in Russia, he covers an old man with his cloak, a voice from heaven calls to him: 'You will be rewarded, my son, for this in time.' It must have been the voice of St Hubert, the patron to whom Münchausen readily paid his homage, for Münchausen simply believed in him, liked to think that 'some passionate holy sportsman, or sporting abbot or bishop, may have shot, planted, and fixed the cross between the antlers of St Hubert's stag.' But his piety is personal; he believes that the voice is for him alone, that St Hubert is his own saint. Gigantic Münchausen shuts out his own view of the world. His shadow falls upon and obscures it. That is why he so continuously brags. The most resolute horseman shrinks from a wild young horse, but Münchausen tames him in half an hour and makes him dance on the tea-table without breaking a single cup; the Grand Seignior discards his own envoy and employs him on State business at Cairo; he makes a cannon off a cannon-ball, 'having long studied the art of gunnery'; he does away (in his third edition) with the French persecutors of Marie Antoinette. He, always he, is the actor; he is not the chief actor, he is the sole actor, and the rest of the world is the audience.

So simply and singly does he believe in himself that his gigantic quality is assured. He disdains to imitate; when confined in the belly of the great fish he does not wait like Sindbad, or wait and pray like Jonah: Baron Münchausen dances a hornpipe. He is quite sure that he will escape from the fish: the fish is large, but not large enough to contain the spirit of a Münchausen; and he is sure that the story is true. There is nothing in any adventure to show that the Baron doubted its accuracy, and we must not conclude from his threat in Chapter VIII.: 'If any gentleman will say he doubts the truth of this story, I will fine him a gallon of brandy and make him drink it at one draught,' that he knew himself for a liar. As a man of the world he recognised that his were wonderful stories, and he expected to encounter unbelief, but he did not encounter it within himself. No, Münchausen accepted his own enormity, gravely believed that he 'made it a rule always to speak within compass.' If he winked at the world as he told his tales it was not because he did not believe in them; he winked because he was gay and, mischievously enough, liked to keep the world on the tenterhooks of scepticism and gullibility. He did not even truckle to his audience, try to be in any way consistent; thus, when entangled with the eagle he rides in the branches of a tree, he dares not jump for fear of being killed ... while he has previously fallen with impunity some five miles, on his descent from the moon, with such violence as to dig a hole nine fathoms deep.

No, this precursor of Bill Adams, who saved Gibraltar for General Elliott, simply believed. Like Falstaff, like Tartarin, he suffered from mirage; though some of his adventures are dreams, monstrous pictures of facts so small that we cannot imagine them, others are but the distortions of absolutely historic affairs. No doubt Münchausen saw a lion fight a crocodile: it needed no gigantic flight for him to believe that he cut off the lion's head while it was still alive, if he actually cut it off 'to make sure' when it was dead; and though he did not tie his horse to a snow-surrounded steeple, he may have tied him to a post and found, in the morning, that the snow had so thawed as to leave the horse on a taut bridle; assuredly he did not kill seventy-three brace of wildfowl with one shot, but the killing of two brace was a feat noble enough to be magnified into the slaughter of a flight.

Münchausen lied, but he lied honestly, that is to himself before all men. For he was a gentleman, a gentleman of high lineage the like of whom rode and drove in numbers along the eighteenth century roads. His own career, or rather that of his historian, Raspe,[8] harmonises with his personal characteristics, reveals his Teutonic origin, and it matters little whether he was the German 'Münchausen' or the Dutch Westphalian 'Munnikhouson.' The first sentence of his first chapter tells of his beard; his family pride stares us everywhere in the face; Münchausen claims descent from the wife of Uriah (and he might have been innocent enough to accept Ananias as a forbear), and knows that noblesse oblige, for, says he to the Lady Fragantia when receiving from her a plume: 'I swear ... that no savage, tyrant, or enemy upon the face of the earth shall despoil me of this favour, while one drop of the blood of the Münchausens doth circulate in my veins!' Quixotic Münchausen, it is well that you should, in later adventures, meet and somewhat humiliate the Spanish Don. For you are a gentleman of no English and cold-blooded pattern, even though you buy your field-glasses at Dollonds's and doubtless your clothes at the top of St James's Street. Too free, too unrestrained to be English you maintain an air of fashion, you worship at the shrine of any Dulcinea.

Münchausen has no use for women, save as objects for worship; they must not serve, or co-operate; for him they are inspiration, beautiful things before whom he bows, whom he compliments in fulsome wise; he is preoccupied by woman whenever he is not in the field; he has chivalrous oaths for others than the Lady Fragantia; he makes the horse mount the tea-table for the ladies' pleasure; he receives gracefully the proposals of Catherine of Russia; he is the favourite of the Grand Seignior's favourite; he is haunted by the Lady Fragantia, who was 'like a summer's morning, all blushing and full of dew.'

Polite and gallant as any cavalier, Münchausen carries in him the soul of a professor; he is minute, he kills no two score beasts, but exactly forty-one; every little thing counts for him, as if he were a student: Montgolfier and his balloon, architecture, and the amazing etymology for which 'Vide Otrckocsus de Orig-Hung.' A swordsman and a scholar he recalls those reiters who fled from kings into monasteries, there to labour as Benedictines. And he has Teutonic appetites. Indeed nothing is so Germanic as the Baron's perpetual concern with food: he remembers how good was the cherry-sauce made from the cherries that grew out of the stag's forehead; he gloats over a continent of cheese and a sea of wine; even on eagleback he finds bladders of gin and good roast-beef-fruit; bread-fruit, plum-pudding-fruit (hot), Cape wine, Candian sugar, fricassee of pistols, pistol-bullets, gunpowder sauce, all these figure in his memoirs. And if, sometimes, he is a little gross, as when he stops a leak in a ship by sitting upon it, which he can do because he is of Dutch extraction, he confirms completely the impression we have of him: a gallant gentleman, brave in the field, lusty at the trencher, gay in the boudoir.