of these
opinions may at some time or other have been uttered. I do not deny
that there are such opinions. But I do deny that there are such people.
Elijah Pogram had some other business in life besides defending
defaulting postmasters; he must have been a son or a father or a husband
or at least (admirable thought) a lover. Mr. Chollop had some moments in
his existence when he was not threatening his fellow-creatures with his
sword-stick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American
types Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest
that the bully Chollop had even such coarse good-humour as bullies
almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pogram
had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost invariably have. He
is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings; he is
studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state
of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he
is not describing characters, he is satirising fads. To put it more
exactly, he is not describing characters; he is persecuting heresies.
There is one thing really to be said against his American satire; it is
a serious thing to be said: it is an argument, and it is true. This can
be said of Martin's wanderings in America, that from the time he lands
in America to the time he sets sail from it he never meets a living man.
He has travelled in the land of Laputa. All the people he has met have
been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of Dickens in such
passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted in finding an
opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it two legs to
stand on.

So much may be allowed; it may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense
the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by
themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackeray would not
have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least
tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth
may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may
easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much
enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the
other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of
his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over
intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shor