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 124advertisement 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 125enough 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. 126elegance 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.”
127the 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 128weighty 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?
