Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

Thoughts on Tan

In my search for the curious, which I hope that nothing will ever satiate, I came recently upon this advertisement at the end of a not too respectable comic paper:—

Handsome Men are slightly sun-burnt. “Sunbronze” gives this tint. Harmless. Detection impossible. Makes men really handsome. Society Lady writes:—“Sunbronze is wonderful, charming, and genuine.” 1s. 1½d., etc.

When I read it first I laughed. Then I cut it out. Then I began not to laugh; and I am not sure now that one ought not to weep....

We were considering earlier in this volume a certain kind of fool’s paradise—the paradise which surrounds the collector-fool who genuinely believes his geese to be swans. That amiable simpleton deceived no one; he was merely soothingly and caressingly self-deceived to the top of his bent through a heaven-sent want of true taste. Compared with him the man who deliberately rubs a mixture on his face in order to induce his friends to believe that he has been much in the sun when he has not is complex indeed—for he is deceiving every one else without for an instant deceiving himself at all. For that is my reading of that advertisement. I do not accept its face value; I do not believe that it is bought by men in order to render themselves more attractive to the fair. My reading is that it is bought by men (and perhaps by women too: you observe the testimony of the Society Lady?) in order that it may lend colour to their assertion that they have been fashionably or expensively holiday-making when they have not.

But why pretend? you say. Ah! you are perhaps well-to-do. Nothing keeps you at home; or even if it did, it would not cause you shame. But can you not believe that there are others?...

We feel that we are greater than we know

—as Wordsworth says. That is an exalted mood. A commoner experience would perhaps be expressed thus:—

We hope you’ll think us greater than we are.

That aspiration, at any rate, is at the bottom of the success of such a lotion as this; and it is prevalent.

A full inquiry into this foible of poor human nature would need a volume; nor could I carry it out. Something of the minute scientific method of Professor Sully would be needed, with a considerable infusion of Thackeray added, and a leaven of pity, too.

Pity indeed. For though sheer brazen impudence and a determined lady-killing may resort to this strange bottle, this phial of mockery, yet I seem to see it being smuggled into simpler homes too. The poor clerk, for example, who is forced by sheer poverty to spend his week or fortnight in his London home, and by sheer shame to spend it almost perdu; reading the paper in bed, smoking his pipe in his back yard, helping with the children, playing pool at night over his glass in the public-house at the corner—how would he feel when he returned to work at the end of the period and had to confess that he had been nowhere? That is the point to consider, for few of us are great, and he is very small indeed. Amid triumphant stories of Margate and Southend, Yarmouth and Southsea, Brighton and even Guernsey, where would he be if he told the truth? Nowhere. And what fun is it not to be anywhere? Don’t you see? And so do you blame him if he spends 1s. 1½d., and anoints his countenance with a little of this delusive fluid on the morning of his return, and, strong in its testimony, talks vaguely but sufficiently of Herne Bay? Do you blame him? You must be a devil of a fellow if you do.

In a way he is entirely justified, for there is no doubt that he is gaining self-respect by losing it: that is to say, he would feel almost too paltry if he had to confess to the real squalid economy of his fortnight. And it is not good to feel too paltry.

But the wish to be thought more fashionable than one is, is not confined to the respectable poor—the poor, that is, who are forced to make something of a show: surely the least enviable class of all; the poor, in other words, who have to forego all the privileges of being poor. There is another class—Major Pendennis was at the head of it—who must intrigue a little too, if they are not to be too miserable. I remember a little man who had a room in Jermyn Street and lived in his Club; it was his habit to disappear for a fortnight or so every 11th of August, and reappear very brown and very vocal of the moors. His colour was genuine—no 1s. 1½d. bottle, but the Lord of Light himself had conferred it; yet not by beams that fell in Yorkshire or Scotland, but on Brighton’s pier. How, then, did his narrative of triumph in the butts carry conviction? What was his particular “Sunbronze”? He wore in the ribbon of his hat a little row of grouse feathers.

And that possibly is what one has to remember—that “Sunbronze” takes many forms—more than I know, or you know, or ever shall know, however extensive our knowledge may be at this moment. For we all “Sunbronze” a little; at least if not quite all, nearly all. We nearly all hope you’ll think us greater than we are.