tly: there never was a man
so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was
a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus,
when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as
devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they
could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that
they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could
not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them
as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not
to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that
he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously
were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like
books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One
might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the
world; that is he loved all the men whom he was able to recognise as
men; the rest he turned into griffins and chimeras without any serious
semblance to humanity. Even in his books he never hates a human being.
If he wishes to hate him he adopts the simple expedient of making him an
inhuman being. Now of these two strands almost the whole of Dickens is
made up; they are not only different strands, they are even antagonistic
strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of
satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is
quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of
sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On
the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of
Dickens's success in a novel. And by the consideration of them we can
probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma
of the novel called _Martin Chuzzlewit_.

_Martin Chuzzlewit_ is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader,
vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more
even than in _Oliver Twist_, there is a predominance of the harsh and
hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd
to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature. But
this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is always
at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he reall