IX
ADVERTISEMENT
The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We passed through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed them—U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, ad infinitum on the top of a board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet powder; of cod-fish without bones—"the kind you have always bought"; of bacon packed in glass jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease, sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood, and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits this obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing, with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.
Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One God Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-ship, will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of man, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body; that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that you are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhœa, diabetes, dysmenorrhœa, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, hæmorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that nothing matters—nothing in the whole universe—except the maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket. This—did it ever occur to you—is the real public education every country is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, to its citizens of every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?
But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! It is the life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit, beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individual advertisement is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in illustration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly said, the cereal advertisements in the magazines are far more interesting than the serial stories." This latter statement I can easily believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window, a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend attached, "Cascarella—it works while you sleep."
The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as illustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree of development which has now been attained by what is at once the art and the science of advertisement. "The study of advertisement," it begins, "seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardly a month passes but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of this modern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature of advertisement is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subject is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumes have been compiled on the art of writing advertisements. Commercial schools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed the corner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an elective upon 'Window-dressing.'" That you may be under no misapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what is admittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers; and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the American, advertisement is a serious, important, and elevating department of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavour to base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One of these gentlemen has expounded, in a book which has a wide circulation, the whole philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book "Imagination in Business";[4] and I remark incidentally that the use of the word "imagination," like that of "art," in this connection, shows where the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on this continent, of the æsthetic spirit. "The imaginative man," says the writer, "sends his thought through all the instincts, passions, and prejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knows every human weakness and its sure decoy." It is this latter clause that is relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas, they celebrated the strength and nobility of men; but the poet of the modern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind." Of these the chief is "the inability to throw away an element of value, even though it cannot be utilised." On this great principle is constructed the whole art and science of advertisement. And my author proceeds to give a series of illustrations, "each of which is an actual fact, either in my experience, or of which I have been cognisant." Space and copyright forbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source. Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theory and practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taught in schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, I suppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But, really, does anyone—does any man of business—think it a better education than Greek?
Footnotes:
[4] Imagination in Business (Harper & Brothers).