One hundred years ago
MESSRS Triibner have just issued a new and illustrated edition of a book which probably delights schoolboys as much as any book that was ever written, and makes other people as profoundly melancholy — Baron Munchausen's travels.... They are sheer grotesque extravagances which it makes one very melancholy to read, because they do nothing in the world but stretch ordin- ary lies beyond all recognition. That may obviously have a certain exciting effect on raw imaginations which have never been methodically exerted at all; but a raw undeveloped imagination is the only sort of imagination which will not be at once repelled and surfeited by the invention of such sheer impossibili- ties, impossibilities which do not even remind one of the kind of boasts which vanity is apt to make. To an educated man, the reading of Baron Mun- chausen's stretches not of imagination properly so called, but of incoherences stitched together, is as pure a waste of attention, without even the reward of a smile, as is gazing at the grotesque figures which dance about on the field of a so-called comic magic-lantern. If Baron Munchausen's travels are litera- ture at all, they are but the awkward scrawling out on paper of a bold school- boy's dreams of wonderful adventure.
The Spectator, 30 March 1889
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