Ebook Chrysal

The lot of the satirist is not a happy one, not more felicitous, as a rule, than the fate which he invokes upon his victims, George Meredith says of one of his characters, an industrious manufacturer of acidulated epigrams, 'He is not happy in his business; Colney suffered as heavily as he struck'. The more he thrives in his trade of public executioner, the surer he is of his wages, hatred from his contemporaries and posthumous oblivion. Of Charles Johnstone, author of one of the most telling satires in the English language, Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, it is stated in one of the few scraps of biography that have come down to us (if so much can be said of a faded page in an old Gentleman's Magazine), 'Conviviality, and a turn for satirical observations in time left him few friends'. Though his book had extraordinary success at the time, and went rapidly into many editions, Johnstone, in middle life, found himself a failure both in literature and in law, his nominal profession; and less than twenty years before his death took the drastic step of starting afresh in another hemisphere and a different career. In 1782 he went to India, and became a journalist at Calcutta. India in those days could hardly have been the most desirable haven for old age. But at any rate, Johnstone, having written his last satire the year before he set sail, made money on his newspaper, and for a few years before his death, for the first time in his life, was in affluence.

It might reasonably be argued that the durability of satire must needs be in inverse ratio to its effectiveness, since this depends on two ephemeral elements, the force of its personal application and the virulence of its hatred. Comedy endures, satire is forgotten. The reason is in the nature of the two things. Of both alike the social function is to make man better by laughing at his aberrations from common sense. But comedy does this gently and lovingly. Comedy, in short, laughs with, satire laughs at, humanity. The Comic Spirit, according to Mr Meredith, looks into the hearts of men, and reveals the causes of their folly.