Exaggeration is a subtle weapon and it must be handled subtly. Handled
without skill it is a boomerang, recoils upon the one who uses it and
makes of him a common liar; under the sway of a master it is a long bow
with which splendid shafts may be driven into human conceit and human
folly. There have been many exaggerators in history and fiction since
the days of Sindbad, and they have not all been successful; some were
too small, dared not stake their reputation upon a large lie; some were
too serious and did not know how to wink at humanity, put it in good
temper and thus earn its tolerance; and some did not believe their own
stories, which was fatal.
For it is one thing to exaggerate and another to exaggerate enough. A
lie must be writ so large as to become invisible; it must stand as the
name of a country upon a map, so much larger than its surroundings as to
escape detection. One may almost in the cause of invention, parallel the
saying of Machiavelli, 'If you make war, spare not your enemy,' and say
'If you lie, let it not be by halves'; let the lie be terrific,
incredible, for it will then cause local anaesthesia of the brain, compel
unreasoning acceptance in the stunned victim. If the exaggerator shrinks
from this course his lie will not pass; it might have passed, and I
venture a paradox, if it had been gigantic enough. The gigantic quality
in lies needs definition; evidently the little 'white' lie is beyond
count, while the lie with a view to a profit, the self-protective lie,
the patriotic lie and the hysterical, vicious lie follow it into
obscurity. One lie alone remains, the splendid, purposeless lie, born of
the joy of life. That is the lie of braggadocio, a shouting, rich thing,
the mischievous, arch thing beloved of Muenchausen. The Baron hardly lied
to impress his friends; he lied to amuse them and amuse himself. To him
a lie was a hurrah and a loud, resonant hurrah, because it was big
enough.
In the bigness of the lie is the gigantic quality of the liar. If, for
instance, we assume that no athlete has ever leapt higher than seven
feet, it is a lie to say that one has leapt eight. But it is not a
gigantic lie: it is a mean, stupid lie. The giant must not stoop so
low; he must leap, not eight feet, but eight score, eight hundred. He
must leap from nebula to nebula. If he does not claim to have achieved
the incredible he is incredible in the gigantic sense. Likewise he is
not comic unless he can shock our imagination by his very enormity. We
do not laugh at the pigmy who claims an eight-foot leap; we sneer.
Humour has many roots, and exaggeration is one of them, for it embodies
the essential incongruous; thus we need the incongruity of contrast
between the little strutting man and the enormous feat he claims to have
achieved.
If Muenchausen is comic it is because he is not afraid; his godfather,
the _Critical Review_,[7] rightly claimed that 'the marvellous had never
been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent.' Because he was
not afraid, we say 'Absurd person,' and laugh, not at but with him. We
must laugh at the mental picture of the Lithuanian horse who so bravely
carried his master while he fought the Turk outside Oczakow, only to be
cut in two by the portcullis ... and then greedily drank at a fountain,
drank and drank until the fountain nearly ran dry because the water
spouted from his severed (but still indomitable) trunk! The impossible
is the comedy of Muenchausen; when he approaches the possible his mantle
seems to fall from him. For instance, in a contest with a bear, or
rather one of the contests, for Muenchausen seemed to encounter bears
wherever he went, he throws a bladder of spirits into the brute's face,
so that, blinded by the liquor, it rushes away and falls over a
precipice. This is a blemish; a mortal hunter might thus have saved
himself with his whisky-flask; this is not worthy of Muenchausen. For
Muenchausen, to be comic, must do what we cannot do, thrust his hand into
the jaws of a wolf, push on, seize him by the tail and turn him inside
out. Then he can leave us with this vision before our eyes of the
writhing animal nimbly treated as an old glove.
[Footnote 7: December, 1785.]
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
Muenchausen, 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen; 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen
would call de Tott a plain liar; he refrains and merely outstrips the
upstart, as a gentleman should do. Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen, 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 Muenchausen 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
Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen readily paid his homage, for Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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
Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen; 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, Muenchausen 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 Muenchausen 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.
Muenchausen 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 'Muenchausen' 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;
Muenchausen 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 Muenchausens doth circulate in my veins!' Quixotic
Muenchausen, 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.
[Footnote 8: See Mr Thomas Seccombe's brilliant introduction to the
Lawrence and Bullen edition, 1895.]
Muenchausen 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, Muenchausen 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.
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.