I have always been interested in the subtleties of literary form. This
preoccupation with the outward husk, with the letter of literature, is,
I dare say, the sign of a fundamental spiritual impotence. Gigadibs, the
literary man, can understand the tricks of the trade; but when it is a
question, not of conjuring, but of miracles, he is no more effective
than Mr. Sludge. Still, conjuring is amusing to watch and to practise;
an interest in the machinery of the art requires no further
justification. I have dallied with many literary forms, taking pleasure
in their different intricacies, studying the means by which great
authors of the past have resolved the technical problems presented by
each. Sometimes I have even tried my hand at solving the problems
myself—delightful and salubrious exercise for the mind. And now I have
discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the
most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I
mean the advertisement.
Nobody who has not tried to write an advertisement has any idea of the
delights and difficulties presented by this form of literature—or shall
I say of “applied literature,” for the sake of those who still believe
in the romantic superiority of the pure, the disinterested, over the
immediately useful? The problem that confronts the writer of
advertisements is an immensely complicated one, and by reason of its
very arduousness immensely interesting. It is far easier to write ten
passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring
critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few
thousand of the uncritical buying public. The problem presented by the
Sonnet is child’s play compared with the problem of the advertisement.
In writing a Sonnet one need think only of oneself. If one’s readers
find one boring or obscure, so much the worse for them. But in writing
an advertisement one must think of other people. Advertisement writers
may not be lyrical, or obscure, or in any way esoteric. They must be
universally intelligible. A good advertisement has this in common with
drama and oratory, that it must be immediately comprehensible and
directly moving. But at the same time it must possess all the
succinctness of epigram.
The orator and the dramatist have “world enough and time” to produce
their effects by cumulative appeals; they can turn all round their
subject, they can repeat; between the heights of their eloquence they
can gracefully practise the art of sinking, knowing that a period of
flatness will only set off the splendour of their impassioned moments.
But the advertiser has no space to spare; he pays too dearly for every
inch. He must play upon the minds of his audience with a small and
limited instrument. He must persuade them to part with their money in a
speech that is no longer than many a lyric by Herrick. Could any problem
be more fascinatingly difficult? No one should be allowed to talk about
the _mot juste_ or the polishing of style who has not tried his hand at
writing an advertisement of something which the public does not want,
but which it must be persuaded into buying. Your _boniment_ must not
exceed a poor hundred and fifty or two hundred words. With what care you
must weigh every syllable! What infinite pains must be taken to fashion
every phrase into a barbed hook that shall stick in the reader’s mind
and draw from its hiding-place within his pocket the reluctant coin!
One’s style and ideas must be lucid and simple enough to be understood
by all; but at the same time, they must not be vulgar. Elegance and an
economical distinction are required; but any trace of literariness in an
advertisement is fatal to its success.
I do not know whether any one has yet written a history of advertising.
If the book does not already exist it will certainly have to be written.
The story of the development of advertising from its infancy in the
early nineteenth century to its luxuriant maturity in the twentieth is
an essential chapter in the history of democracy. Advertisement begins
abjectly, crawling on its belly like the serpent after the primal curse.
Its abjection is the oily humbleness of the shopkeeper in an
oligarchical society. Those nauseating references to the nobility and
clergy, which are the very staple of early advertisements, are only
possible in an age when the aristocracy and its established Church
effectively ruled the land. The custom of invoking these powers lingered
on long after they had ceased to hold sway. It is now, I fancy, almost
wholly extinct. It may be that certain old-fashioned girls’ schools
still provide education for the daughters of the nobility and clergy;
but I am inclined to doubt it. Advertisers still find it worth while to
parade the names and escutcheons of kings. But anything less than
royalty is, frankly, a “wash-out.”
The crawling style of advertisement with its mixture of humble appeals
to patrons and its hyperbolical laudation of the goods advertised, was
early varied by the pseudo-scientific style, a simple development of the
quack’s patter at the fair. Balzacians will remember the advertisement
composed by Finot and the Illustrious Gaudissard for César Birotteau’s
“Huile Céphalique.” The type is not yet dead; we still see
advertisements of substances “based on the principles established by the
Academy of Sciences,” substances known “to the ancients, the Romans, the
Greeks and the nations of the North,” but lost and only rediscovered by
the advertiser. The style and manner of these advertisements belonging
to the early and middle periods of the Age of Advertisement continue to
bear the imprint of the once despicable position of commerce. They are
written with the impossible and insincere unctuousness of tradesmen’s
letters. They are horribly uncultured; and when their writers aspire to
something more ambitious than the counting-house style, they fall at
once into the stilted verbiage of self-taught learning. Some of the
earlier efforts to raise the tone of advertisements are very curious.
One remembers those remarkable full-page advertisements of Eno’s Fruit
Salt, loaded with weighty apophthegms from Emerson, Epictetus, Zeno the
Eleatic, Pomponazzi, Slawkenbergius and other founts of human wisdom.
There was noble reading on these strange pages. But they shared with
sermons the defect of being a little dull.
The art of advertisement writing has flowered with democracy. The lords
of industry and commerce came gradually to understand that the right way
to appeal to the Free Peoples of the World was familiarly, in an honest
man-to-man style. They perceived that exaggeration and hyperbole do not
really pay, that charlatanry must at least have an air of sincerity.
They confided in the public, they appealed to its intelligence in every
kind of flattering way. The technique of the art became at once
immensely more difficult than it had ever been before, until now the
advertisement is, as I have already hinted, one of the most interesting
and difficult of modern literary forms. Its potentialities are not yet
half explored. Already the most interesting and, in some cases, the only
readable part of most American periodicals is the advertisement section.
What does the future hold in store?