, Chevy Slime,
Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If _Martin Chuzzlewit_ makes America a
lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say
a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so
described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for
the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp or
Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in
absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own
peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the same
reason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only because
no other creature could have created them.

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if
they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the
characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are
a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even
appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a
story. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even
unfortunate example; for it is, among its author's other works, a rather
unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel
towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that
we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreigner
should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of
Pecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the
particular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men can
be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun
of America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already
pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and
exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more
amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply
it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We
can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee
traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine
example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely
British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller
to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the
refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained
Pic