r of other great men in history
Baron Munchausen has suffered because he is not understood. I have
observed with wondering surprise the steady and constant growth of the
idea that Baron Munchausen was not a man of truth; that his statements
of fact were untrustworthy, and that as a realist he had no standing
whatsoever. Just how this misconception of the man's character has
arisen it would be difficult to say. Surely in his published writings
he shows that same lofty resolve to be true to life as he has seen it
that characterises the work of some of the high Apostles of Realism,
who are writing of the things that will teach future generations how
we of to-day ordered our goings-on. The note of veracity in Baron
Munchausen's early literary venturings rings as clear and as true
certainly as the similar note in the charming studies of Manx Realism
that have come to us of late years from the pen of Mr. Corridor
Walkingstick, of Gloomster Abbey and London. We all remember the glow
of satisfaction with which we read Mr. Walkingstick's great story of
the love of the clergyman, John Stress, for the charming little
heroine, Glory Partridge. Here was something at last that rang true.
The picture was painted in the boldest of colours, and, regardless of
consequences to himself, Mr. Walkingstick dared to be real when he
might have given rein to his imagination. Mr. Walkingstick was,
thereupon, lifted up by popular favour to the level of an
apostle--nay, he even admitted the soft impeachment--and now as a
moral teacher he is without a rival in the world of literature. Yet
the same age that accepts this man as a moral teacher, rejects Baron
Munchausen, who, in different manner perhaps, presented to the world
as true and life-like a picture of the conditions of his day as that
given to us by Mr. Walkingstick in his deservedly popular romance,
"Episcopalians I have Met." Of course, I do not claim that Baron
Munchausen's stories in bulk or in specified instances, have the
literary vigour that is so marked a quality of the latter-day writer,
but the point I do wish to urge is that to accept the one as a
veracious chronicler of his time and to reject the other as one who
indulges his pen in all sorts of grotesque vagaries, without proper
regard for the facts, is a great injustice to the man of other times.
The question arises, _why_ is this? How has this wrong upon the worthy
realist of the eighteenth century been perpetrated? Is it an
in