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 anæsthesia 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 Münchausen. 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 Münchausen 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 Münchausen; 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 Münchausen 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 Münchausen. For Münchausen, 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.