e logic. The
satirist is the man who carries men's enthusiasm further than they carry
it themselves. He outstrips the most extravagant fanatic. He is years
ahead of the most audacious prophet. He sees where men's detached
intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the
place--which is generally hell.

Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great
example in this book. Even _Gulliver's Travels_ is hardly more
reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit's travels in the incredible land of
the Americans. Before considering the humour of this description in its
more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be first remarked that in
this American part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens quite specially
sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There
are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the
nature of pamphleteering, of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of
pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs
to the pure art of controversy as distinct not only from the pure art of
fiction but even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to
think (to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily) that Dickens was
never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part
of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. There are places where he was more inspired,
almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as, for instance, in the
Micawber feasts of _David Copperfield_; there are places where he wrote
more carefully and cunningly, as, for instance, in the mystery of _The
Mystery of Edwin Drood_; there are places where he wrote very much more
humanly, more close to the ground and to growing things, as in the whole
of that admirable book _Great Expectations_. But I do not think that his
mere abstract acuteness and rapidity of thought were ever exercised with
such startling exactitude as they are in this place in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_. It is to be noted, for instance, that his American
experience had actually worked him up to a heat and habit of argument. A
slave-owner in the Southern States tells Dickens that slave-owners do
not ill-treat their slaves, that it is not to the interest of
slave-owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens flashes back that it is
not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but he does get drunk. This
pugnacious atmosphere of parry and riposte must first of all be allowed
for and understood in all the satiric