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It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or painted faces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist's sense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employed Burne-Jones to illustrate Martin Chuzzlewit.
What a descent from "Hamlet" to "Titus Andronicus," from "Othello" to "Cymbeline"! Miss Bronté writes "Jane Eyre," and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard. Bulwer delights us with "The Caxtons," and then sinks to the dulness of "The Strange Story." Dickens gives us "Oliver Twist," and then tries the patience of confiding readers in "Martin Chuzzlewit."
'I hired the fellow, retorted Mr Chuzzlewit, 'and I paid him. 'It's well you paid him, said his nephew, 'for it would be too late to do so now. He has given his receipt in full; or had it forced from him rather. The old man looked at him as if he were curious to know what he meant, but scorned to prolong the conversation.
Here's the Sewer, always on the lookout; the leading journal of the United States!" Such were the cries, according to the veracious account of Charles Dickens, who had paid his first visit to us a short time before, that greeted the ears of Martin Chuzzlewit upon his arrival in the gate city of the western world.
The slaves did not appear to be in any way down-hearted on the contrary, they seemed imbued with the philosophic jollity of the jolly servant of Martin Chuzzlewit. Were it not for their chains, it would have been difficult to discover master from slave; the physiognomic traits were alike the mild benignity with which we were regarded was equally visible on all faces.
The dread of losing the old man's favour almost as soon as they were reconciled, through the mere fact of having Jonas in the house; the impossibility of dismissing Jonas, or shutting him up, or tying him hand and foot and putting him in the coal-cellar, without offending him beyond recall; the horrible discordance prevailing in the establishment, and the impossibility of reducing it to decent harmony with Charity in loud hysterics, Mercy in the utmost disorder, Jonas in the parlour, and Martin Chuzzlewit and his young charge upon the very doorsteps; the total hopelessness of being able to disguise or feasibly explain this state of rampant confusion; the sudden accumulation over his devoted head of every complicated perplexity and entanglement for his extrication from which he had trusted to time, good fortune, chance, and his own plotting, so filled the entrapped architect with dismay, that if Tom could have been a Gorgon staring at Mr Pecksniff, and Mr Pecksniff could have been a Gorgon staring at Tom, they could not have horrified each other half so much as in their own bewildered persons.
The young ladies accordingly rose, and having taken leave of Mr Chuzzlewit with much sweetness, and of their father with much duty and of Mr Pinch with much condescension, retired to their bower.
A whimsical and delightful recollection comes back to the writer of these pages at the moment of inscribing as the title of this Reading the name of the preposterous old lady who is the real heroine of "Martin Chuzzlewit."
Then there was Mrs Spottletoe, who being much too slim for her years, and of a poetical constitution, was accustomed to inform her more intimate friends that the said whiskers were 'the lodestar of her existence; and who could now, by reason of her strong affection for her uncle Chuzzlewit, and the shock it gave her to be suspected of testamentary designs upon him, do nothing but cry except moan.
Now if Mr Pecksniff knew, from anything Martin Chuzzlewit had expressed in gestures, that he wanted to speak to him, he could only have found it out on some such principle as prevails in melodramas, and in virtue of which the elderly farmer with the comic son always knows what the dumb girl means when she takes refuge in his garden, and relates her personal memoirs in incomprehensible pantomime.
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