The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen

R >> Rudolph Erich Raspe >> The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen

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 which
Munchausen belongs, that namely of _Voyages Imaginaires_, the three
great types should have all been created in England. Utopia, Robinson
Crusoe, and Gulliver, illustrating respectively the philosophical, the
edifying, and the satirical type of fictitious travel, were all written
in England, and at the end of the eighteenth century a fourth type,
the fantastically mendacious, was evolved in this country. Of this type
Munchausen was the modern original, and remains the classical example.
The adaptability of such a species of composition to local and topical
uses might well be considered prejudicial to its chances of obtaining a
permanent place in literature. Yet Munchausen has undoubtedly achieved
such a place. The Baron's notoriety is universal, his character
proverbial, and his name as familiar as that of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, or
Robinson Crusoe, mariner, of York. Condemned by the learned, like some
other masterpieces, as worthless, Munchausen's travels have obtained
such a world-wide fame, that the story of their origin possesses a
general and historic interest apart from whatever of obscurity or of
curiosity it may have to recommend it.

The work first appeared in London in the course of the year 1785. No
copy of the first edition appears to be accessible; it seems, however,
to have been issued some time in the autumn, and in the _Critical
Review_ for December 1785 there is the following notice: "Baron
Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns
in Russia. Small 8vo, IS. (Smith). This is a satirical production
calculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of some
parliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons,
the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has never
been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent." The reviewer had
probably read the work through from one paper cover to the other. It was
in fact too short to bore the most blase of his kind, consisting of
but forty-nine small octavo pages. The second edition, which is in the
British Museum, bears the following title; "Baron Munchausen's Narrative
of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia; humbly dedicated and
recommended to country gentlemen, and if they please to be repeated as
their own after a hunt, at horse races, in watering places, and other
such polite assemblies; round the bottle and fireside. Smith. Printed at
Oxford. 1786." The fact that this little pamphlet again consists of but
forty-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 identical
with the first edition. This edition contains only chapters ii., iii.,
iv., v., and vi. (pp. 10-44) of the present reprint. These chapters are
the best in the book and their substantial if peculiar merit can hardly
be denied, but the pamphlet appears to have met with little success,
and early in 1786 Smith seems to have sold the property to another
bookseller, Kearsley. Kearsley had it enlarged, but not, we are
expressly informed, in the preface to the seventh edition, by the hand
of the original author (who happened to be in Cornwall at the time). He
also had it illustrated and brought it out in the same year in book
form at the enhanced price of two shillings, under the title: "Gulliver
Reviv'd: The Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages and Sporting
Adventures of Baron Munnikhouson commonly pronounced Munchausen; as he
relates them over a bottle when surrounded by his friends. A new edition
considerably enlarged with views from the Baron's drawings. London.
1786." A well-informed _Critical Reviewer_ would have amended the title
thus: "Lucian reviv'd: or Gulliver Beat with his own Bow."

Four editions now succeeded each other with rapidity and without
modification. A German translation appeared in 1786 with the imprint
London: it was, however, in reality printed by Dieterich at Goettingen.
It was a free rendering of the fifth edition, the preface being a clumsy
combination of that prefixed to the original edition with that which
Kearsley had added to the third.

The fifth edition (which is, with the exception of trifling differences
on the title-page, identical with the third, fourth, and sixth) is
also that which has been followed in the present reprint down to the
conclusion of chapter twenty, where it ends with the words "the great
quadrangle." The supplement treating of Munchausen's extraordinary
flight on the back of an eagle over France to Gibraltar, South and North
America, the Polar Regions, and back to England is derived from the
seventh edition of 1793, which has a new sub-title:--"Gulliver reviv'd,
or the Vice of Lying properly exposed." The preface to this enlarged
edition also informs the reader that the last four editions had met with
extraordinary success, and that the supplementary chapters, all, that
is, with the exception of chapters ii., iii., iv., v., and vi., which
are ascribed to Baron Munchausen himself, were the production of another
pen, written, however, in the Baron's manner. To the same ingenious
person the public was indebted for the engravings with which the book
was embellished. The seventh was the last edition by which the classic
text of Munchausen was seriously modified. Even before this important
consummation had been arrived at, a sequel, which was within a fraction
as long as the original work (it occupies pp. 163-299 of this volume),
had appeared under the title, "A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron
Munchausen. . . . Humbly dedicated to Mr. Bruce the Abyssinian
traveller, as the Baron conceives that it may be some service to him,
previous to his making another journey into Abyssinia. But if this
advice does not delight Mr. Bruce, the Baron is willing to fight him on
any terms he pleases." This work was issued separately. London, 1792,
8vo.

Such is the history of the book during the first eight or constructive
years of its existence, beyond which it is necessary to trace it, until
at least we have touched upon the long-vexed question of its authorship.

Munchausen's travels have in fact been ascribed to as many different
hands as those of Odysseus. But (as in most other respects) it differs
from the more ancient fabulous narrative in that its authorship has
been the subject of but little controversy. Many people have entertained
erroneous notions as to its authorship, which they have circulated with
complete assurance; but they have not felt it incumbent upon them to
support their own views or to combat those of other people. It has,
moreover, been frequently stated with equal confidence and inaccuracy
that the authorship has never been settled. An early and persistent
version of the genesis of the travels was that they took their origin
from the rivalry in fabulous tales of three accomplished students at
Goettingen University, Buerger, Kaestner, and Lichtenberg; another ran that
Gottfried August Buerger, the German poet and author of "Lenore," had at
a later stage of his career met Baron Munchausen in Pyrmont and taken
down the stories from his own lips. Percy in his anecdotes attributes
the 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 tales
and two in a Portuguese periodical published in 1730, that the English
fictions must have been derived from the Portuguese. William West the
bookseller and numerous followers have stated that Munchausen owed its
first origin to Bruce's Travels, and was written for the purpose of
burlesquing that unfairly treated work. Pierer boldly stated that it was
a successful anonymous satire upon the English government of the day,
while Meusel with equal temerity affirmed in his "Lexikon" that the book
was 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 of
Buerger and Raspe.

Of all the conjectures, of which these are but a selection, the most
accurate from a German point of view is that the book was the work of
Buerger, who was the first to dress the Travels in a German garb, and
was for a long time almost universally credited with the sole
proprietorship. Buerger himself appears neither to have claimed nor
disclaimed the distinction. There is, however, no doubt whatever that
the book first appeared in English in 1785, and that Buerger's German
version 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 the
actual Baron Munchausen (who was a well-known personage in Goettingen)
should be stupid enough to feel aggrieved at being made the butt of a
gross caricature. In this way the discrepancy of dates mentioned above
might easily have been obscured, and Buerger might still have been
credited with a work which has proved a better protection against
oblivion than "Lenore," had it not been for the officious sensitiveness
of his self-appointed biographer, Karl von Reinhard. Reinhard, in an
answer to an attack made upon his hero for bringing out Munchausen as
a pot-boiler in German and English simultaneously, definitely stated in
the _Berlin Gesellschafters_ of November 1824, that the real author of
the original work was that disreputable genius, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and
that the German work was merely a free translation made by Buerger from
the fifth edition of the English work. Buerger, he stated, was well aware
of, but was too high-minded to disclose the real authorship.

Taking Reinhard's solemn asseveration in conjunction with the
ascertained facts of Raspe's career, his undoubted acquaintance with the
Baron Munchausen of real life and the first appearance of the work in
1785, when Raspe was certainly in England, there seems to be little
difficulty in accepting his authorship as a positive fact. There is no
difficulty whatever, in crediting Raspe with a sufficient mastery of
English idiom to have written the book without assistance, for as early
as January 1780 (since which date Raspe had resided uninterruptedly
in this country) Walpole wrote to his friend Mason that "Raspe writes
English much above ill and speaks it as readily as French," and shortly
afterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In
the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages
encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of
Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic,
"Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be
said, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing feature
of the style of the original edition of "Munchausen."

Curious as is this long history of literary misappropriation, the
chequered career of the rightful author, Rudolph Erich Raspe, offers a
chapter in biography which has quite as many points of singularity.

Born in Hanover in 1737, Raspe studied at the Universities of Goettingen
and Leipsic. He is stated also to have rendered some assistance to
a young nobleman in sowing his wild oats, a sequel to his university
course which may possibly help to explain his subsequent aberrations.
The connection cannot have lasted long, as in 1762, having already
obtained reputation as a student of natural history and antiquities,
he obtained a post as one of the clerks in the University Library at
Hanover.

No later than the following year contributions written in elegant
Latin are to be found attached to his name in the Leipsic _Nova Acta
Eruditorum_. In 1764 he alluded gracefully to the connection between
Hanover and England in a piece upon the birthday of Queen Charlotte, and
having been promoted secretary of the University Library at Goettingen,
the young savant commenced a translation of Leibniz's philosophical
works which was issued in Latin and French after the original MSS. in
the Royal Library at Hanover, with a preface by Raspe's old college
friend Kaestner (Goettingen, 1765). At once a courtier, an antiquary,
and a philosopher, Raspe next sought to display his vocation for polite
letters, by publishing an ambitious allegorical poem of the age of
chivalry, entitled "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedingly
well reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequin
and Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems of
Ossian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with better
inspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques of
Ancient Poetry," with metrical translations, being thus the first to
call the attention of Germany to these admirable poems, which were
afterwards so successfully ransacked by Buerger, Herder, and other early
German romanticists.

In 1767 Raspe was again advanced by being appointed Professor at the
Collegium Carolinum in Cassel, and keeper of the landgrave of Hesse's
rich and curious collection of antique gems and medals. He was shortly
afterwards appointed Librarian in the same city, and in 1771 he married.
He continued writing on natural history, mineralogy, and archaeology, and
in 1769 a paper in the 59th volume of the Philosophical Transactions,
on the bones and teeth of elephants and other animals found in North
America and various boreal regions of the world, procured his election
as an honorary member of the Royal Society of London. His conclusion in
this paper that large elephants or mammoths must have previously existed
in boreal regions has, of course, been abundantly justified by later
investigations. When it is added that Raspe during this part of his
life also wrote papers on lithography and upon musical instruments, and
translated Algarotti's Treatise on "Architecture, Painting, and Opera
Music," enough will have been said to make manifest his very remarkable
and somewhat prolix versatility. In 1773 he made a tour in Westphalia in
quest of MSS., and on his return, by way of completing his education,
he turned journalist, and commenced a periodical called the _Cassel
Spectator_, with Mauvillon as his co-editor. In 1775 he was travelling
in Italy on a commission to collect articles of vertu for the landgrave,
and it was apparently soon after his return that he began appropriating
to his own use valuable coins abstracted from the cabinets entrusted
to his care. He had no difficulty in finding a market for the antiques
which he wished to dispose of, and which, it has been charitably
suggested, he had every intention of replacing whenever opportunity
should serve. His consequent procedure was, it is true, scarcely that of
a hardened criminal. Having obtained the permission of the landgrave to
visit Berlin, he sent the keys of his cabinet back to the authorities
at Cassel--and disappeared. His thefts, to the amount of two thousand
rixdollars, were promptly discovered, and advertisements were issued
for the arrest of the Councillor Raspe, described without suspicion of
flattery as a long-faced man, with small eyes, crooked nose, red hair
under a stumpy periwig, and a jerky gait. The necessities that prompted
him to commit a felony are possibly indicated by the addition that he
usually appeared in a scarlet dress embroidered with gold, but sometimes
in black, blue, or grey clothes. He was seized when he had got no
farther than Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, but he lost no time in
escaping 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 reached
London it was not unnatural that he should look to authorship for
support. Without loss of time, he published in London in 1776 a volume
on some German Volcanoes and their productions; in 1777 he translated
the then highly esteemed mineralogical travels of Ferber in Italy and
Hungary. In 1780 we have an interesting account of him from Horace
Walpole, who wrote to his friend, the Rev. William Mason: "There is a
Dutch scavant come over who is author of several pieces so learned that
I do not even know their titles: but he has made a discovery in my
way which you may be sure I believe, for it proves what I expected and
hinted in my 'Anecdotes of Painting,' that the use of oil colours was
known long before Van Eyck." Raspe, he went on to say, had discovered
a MS. of Theophilus, a German monk in the fourth century, who gave
receipts for preparing the colours, and had thereby convicted Vasari of
error. "Raspe is poor, and I shall try and get subscriptions to enable
him to print his work, which is sensible, clear, and unpretending."
Three months later it was, "Poor Raspe is arrested by his _tailor_. I
have sent him a little money, and he hopes to recover his liberty, but I
question whether he will be able to struggle on here." His "Essay on the
Origin of Oil Painting" was actually published through Walpole's good
service in April 1781. He seems to have had plans of going to America
and of excavating antiquities in Egypt, where he might have done good
service, but the bad name that he had earned dogged him to London. The
Royal Society struck him off its rolls, and in revenge he is said to
have threatened to publish a travesty of their transactions. He was
doubtless often hard put to it for a living, but the variety of his
attainments served him in good stead. He possessed or gained some
reputation as a mining expert, and making his way down into Cornwall,
he seems for some years subsequent to 1782 to have been assay-master and
storekeeper of some mines at Dolcoath. While still at Dolcoath, it is
very probable that he put together the little pamphlet which appeared
in London at the close of 1785, with the title "Baron Munchausen's
Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia," and having
given his _jeu d'esprit_ to the world, and possibly earned a few guineas
by 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 greater
magnitude and immediate importance, namely, a descriptive catalogue of
the Collection of Pastes and Impressions from Ancient and Modern Gems,
formed by James Tassie, the eminent connoisseur. Tassie engaged Raspe
in 1785 to take charge of his cabinets, and to commence describing
their contents: he can hardly have been ignorant of his employe's
delinquencies in the past, but he probably estimated that mere casts of
gems would not offer sufficient temptation to a man of Raspe's eclectic
tastes to make the experiment a dangerous one. Early in 1786, Raspe
produced a brief but well-executed conspectus of the arrangement and
classification of the collection, and this was followed in 1791 by "A
Descriptive Catalogue," in which over fifteen thousand casts of ancient
and modern engraved gems, cameos, and intaglios from the most renowned
cabinets in Europe were enumerated and described in French and English.
The two quarto volumes are a monument of patient and highly skilled
industry, and they still fetch high prices. The elaborate introduction
prefixed to the work was dated from Edinburgh, April 16, 1790.

This laborious task completed, Raspe lost no time in applying himself
with renewed energy to mineralogical work. It was announced in the
_Scots Magazine_ for October 1791 that he had discovered in the extreme
north of Scotland, where he had been invited to search for minerals,
copper, lead, iron, manganese, and other valuable products of a similar
character. From Sutherland he brought specimens of the finest clay, and
reported a fine vein of heavy spar and "every symptom of coal." But in
Caithness lay the loadstone which had brought Raspe to Scotland. This
was no other than Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, a benevolent gentleman
of an ingenious and inquiring disposition, who was anxious to exploit
the supposed mineral wealth of his barren Scottish possessions. With
him Raspe took up his abode for a considerable time at his spray-beaten
castle on the Pentland Firth, and there is a tradition, among members
of the family, of Sir John's unfailing appreciation of the wide
intelligence and facetious humour of Raspe's conversation. Sinclair had
some years previously discovered a small vein of yellow mundick on the
moor of Skinnet, four miles from Thurso. The Cornish miners he consulted
told him that the mundick was itself of no value, but a good sign of
the proximity of other valuable minerals. Mundick, said they, was a
good horseman, and always rode on a good load. He now employed Raspe to
examine the ground, not designing to mine it himself, but to let it out
to other capitalists in return for a royalty, should the investigation
justify his hopes. The necessary funds were put at Raspe's disposal,
and masses of bright, heavy material were brought to Thurso Castle as a
foretaste of what was coming. But when the time came for the fruition
of this golden promise, Raspe disappeared, and subsequent inquiries
revealed the deplorable fact that these opulent ores had been carefully
imported by the mining expert from Cornwall, and planted in the places
where 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 the
United Kingdom, and had commenced some mining operations in country
Donegal, 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, does
not reside in its literary style, for Raspe is no exception to the rule
that a man never has a style worthy of the name in a language that he
did not prattle in. But it is equally obvious that the real and original
Munchausen, as Raspe conceived and doubtless intended at one time to
develop him, was a delightful personage whom it would be the height of
absurdity to designate a mere liar. Unfortunately the task was taken
out of his hand and a good character spoiled, like many another, by mere
sequel-mongers. Raspe was an impudent scoundrel, and fortunately so; his
impudence relieves us of any difficulty in resolving the question,--to
whom (if any one) did he owe the original conception of the character
whose fame is now so universal.

When Raspe was resident in Goettingen he obtained, in all probability
through Gerlach Adolph von Munchausen, the great patron of arts and
letters and of Goettingen University, an introduction to Hieronynimus
Karl Friedrich von Munchausen, at whose hospitable mansion at
Bodenwerder he became an occasional visitor. Hieronynimus, who was born
at Bodenwerder on May 11, 1720, was a cadet of what was known as the
black line of the house of Rinteln Bodenwerder, and in his youth served
as a page in the service of Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick. When quite
a stripling he obtained a cornetcy in the "Brunswick Regiment" in the
Russian service, and on November 27, 1740, he was created a lieutenant
by letters patent of the Empress Anna, and served two arduous campaigns
against the Turks during the following years. In 1750 he was promoted to
be a captain of cuirassiers by the Empress Elizabeth, and about 1760 he
retired from the Russian service to live upon his patrimonial estate at
Bodenwerder in the congenial society of his wife and his paragon among
huntsmen, Roesemeyer, for whose particular benefit he maintained a fine
pack of hounds. He kept open house, and loved to divert his guests with
stories, not in the braggart vein of Dugald Dalgetty, but so embellished
with palpably extravagant lies as to crack with a humour that was all
their own. The manner has been appropriated by Artemus Ward and Mark
Twain, but it was invented by Munchausen. Now the stories mainly relate
to sporting adventures, and it has been asserted by one contemporary
of the baron that Munchausen contracted the habit of drawing such
a long-bow as a measure of self-defence against his invaluable but
loquacious henchman, the worthy Roesemeyer. But it is more probable, as
is hinted in the first preface, that Munchausen, being a shrewd man,
found the practice a sovereign specific against bores and all other
kinds of serious or irrelevant people, while it naturally endeared him
to 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 the
world, without circumlocution; his adventures were numerous and perhaps
singular, but only such as might have been expected to happen to a man
of so much experience. A smile never traversed his face as he related
the least credible of his tales, which the less intimate of his
acquaintance began in time to think he meant to be taken seriously.
In short, so strangely entertaining were both manner and matter of his
narratives, that "Munchausen's Stories" became a by-word among a host of
appreciative acquaintance. Among these was Raspe, who years afterwards,
when he was starving in London, bethought himself of the incomparable
baron. He half remembered some of his sporting stories, and supplemented
these by gleanings from his own commonplace book. The result is a
curious medley, which testifies clearly to learning and wit, and also
to the turning over of musty old books of _facetiae_ written in execrable
Latin.