ickens' novels. He crowds them
so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and
character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as
may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving. If the
incidents will do this for us we are satisfied. It is not necessary
that those incidents should be made to go through cunning evolutions
to a definite end. Each is admirable in itself, and admirably adapted
to its immediate purpose. That should more than suffice.

And Dickens sometimes succeeds in reaching a higher unity than that of
mere plot. He takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul of his
novel, animating and vivifying every part. That central idea in
"Martin Chuzzlewit" is the influence of selfishness. The Chuzzlewits
are a selfish race. Old Martin is selfish; and so, with many good
qualities and possibilities of better things, is his grandson, young
Martin. The other branch of the family, Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son
Jonas, are much worse. The latter especially is a horrible creature.
Brought up to think of nothing except his own interests and the main
chance, he is only saved by an accident from the crime of parricide,
and afterwards commits a murder and poisons himself. As his career is
one of terrible descent, so young Martin's is one of gradual
regeneration from his besetting weakness. He falls in love with his
cousin Mary--the only unselfish member of the family, by the bye--and
quarrels about this love affair with his grandfather, and so passes
into the hard school of adversity. There he learns much. Specially
valuable is the teaching which he gets as a settler in the swampy
backwoods of the United States in company with Mark Tapley, jolliest
and most helpful of men. On his return, he finds his grandfather
seemingly under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, the English
Tartuffe. But that, as I have already mentioned, is only a ruse. Old
Martin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time receives the reward of
his deeds, and all ends happily for those who deserve happiness. Such
is something like a bare outline of the story, with the beauty
eliminated. For what makes its interest, we must go further, to the
household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, Charity and Mercy, and
Tom Pinch, whose beautiful, unselfish character stands so in contrast
to that of the grasping self-seekers by whom he is surrounded; we must
study young Martin himself, whose character is admira