he 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 Baedeker