--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.