, 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.

Good Muenchausen, you strut large about the Kingdom of Loggerheads,
debonair, tolerant, confident; you believe in yourself, because so large
that you cannot overlook yourself; you believe in yourself because you
tower and thus amaze humanity; and you believe in yourself because you
are as enormously credulous as you would have us be. Thus, because you
believe in yourself, you are: you need no Berkeley to demonstrate you.

The Esperanto of Art

It is established and accepted to-day that a painter may not like music,
that a writer may yawn in a picture-gallery: though we proclaim that art
is universal, it certainly is not universal for the universe. This
should not surprise us who know that van Gogh wrote: 'To paint and to
love women is incompatible'; van Gogh was right for himself, which does
not mean that he was right for everybody, and I will not draw from his
dictum the probably incorrect conclusion that 'To paint and to love
literature is incompatible.' But van Gogh, who had not read Bergson, was
indicating clearly enough that he knew he must canalise his powers,
therefore exclude from his emotional purview all things which did not
appertain directly to his own form of art.

Form of art! Those three words hold the difficulty of mutual
understanding among artists. While sympathising with van Gogh in his
xenophobia, I cannot accept that