‘Yes, yes,’ said Gumbril, nodding.
Mr Boldero cleared his throat. ‘We shall begin,’ he said, ‘by making the most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; that to wear them is to avoid pain. A few striking slogans about comfort – that’s all we want. Very simple indeed. It doesn’t take much to persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. But while we’re on the subject of hard seats we shall have to glide off subtly at a tangent to make a flank attack on the social instincts.’ And joining the tip of his forefinger to the tip of his thumb, Mr Boldero moved his hand delicately sideways, as though he were sliding it along a smooth brass rail. ‘We shall have to speak about the glories and the trials of sedentary labour. We must exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical discomforts. “The seat of honour”, don’t you know. We could talk about that. “The Seats of the Mighty.” “The seat that rules the office rocks the world.”
All those lines might be made something of. And then we could have little historical chats about thrones; how dignified, but how uncomfortable they’ve been. We must make the bank clerk and the civil servant feel proud of being what they are and at the same time feel ashamed that, being such splendid people, they should have to submit to the indignity of having blistered hind-quarters. In modern advertising you must flatter your public – not in the oily, abject, tradesman-like style of the old advertisers, crawling before clients who were their social superiors; that’s all over now. It’s we who are the social superiors – because we’ve got more money than the bank clerks and the civil servants. Our modern flattery must be manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal for equal – all the more flattering as we aren’t equals.’ Mr Boldero laid a finger to his nose. ‘They’re dirt and we’re capitalists . . .’ He laughed.
Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating.
‘We flatter them,’ went on Mr Boldero. ‘We say that honest work is glorious and ennobling – which it isn’t; it’s merely dull and cretinizing. And then we go on to suggest that it would be finer still, more ennobling, because less uncomfortable, if they wore Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes. You see the line?’
Gumbril saw the line.
‘After that,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘we get on to the medical side of the matter. The medical side, Mr Gumbril – that’s most important. Nobody feels really well nowadays – at any rate, nobody who lives in a big town and does the kind of loathsome work that the people we’re catering for does. Keeping this fact before our eyes, we have to make it clear that only those can expect to be healthy who wear pneumatic trousers.’
‘That will be a little difficult won’t it?’ questioned Gumbril.
‘Not a bit of it!’ Mr Boldero laughed with an infectious confidence. ‘All we have to do is to talk about the great nerve-centre of the spine: the shocks they get when they sit down too hard; the wearing exhaustion to which long-protracted sitting on unpadded seats subjects them. We’ll have to talk very scientifically about the great lumbar ganglia – if there are such things, which I really don’t pretend to know. We’ll even talk amost mystically about the ganglia. You know that sort of ganglion philosophy?’
Mr Boldero went on parenthetically. ‘Very interesting it is, sometimes, I think. We could put in a lot about the dark, powerful sense-life, sex-life, instinct-life which is controlled by the lumbar ganglion. How important it is that that shouldn’t be damaged. That already our modern conditions of civilization tend unduly to develop the intellect and the thoracic ganglia controlling the higher emotions. That we’re wearing out, growing feeble, losing our balance in consequence. And that the only cure – if we are to continue our present mode of civilized life – is to be found in Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’ Mr Boldero brought his hand with an emphatic smack on to the table as he spoke, as he fairly shouted these last words.
‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, with genuine admiration.
‘This sort of medical and philosophical dope,’ Mr Boldero went on, ‘is always very effective, if it’s properly used. The public to whom we are making our appeal is, of course, almost absolutely ignorant on these, or, indeed, on almost all other subjects. It is therefore very much impressed by the unfamiliar words; particularly if they have such a good juicy sound as the word “ganglia”.’
‘There was a young man of East Anglia, whose loins were a tangle of ganglia,’ murmured Gumbril, improvvisatore.
‘Precisely,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘Precisely. You see how juicy it is? Well, as I say, they’re impressed. And they’re also grateful. They’re grateful to us for having given them a piece of abstruse, unlikely information which they can pass on to their wives, or to such friends as they know don’t read the paper in which our advertisement appears – can pass on airily, don’t you know, with easy erudition, as though they’d known all about ganglia from their childhood. And they’ll feel such a flow of superiority as they hand on the metaphysics and the pathology, that they’ll always think of us with affection. They’ll buy our breeks and they’ll get other people to buy. That’s why,’ Mr Boldero went off again on an instructive tangent, ‘that’s why the day of secret patent medicines is really over.
It’s no good saying you have rediscovered some secret known only, in the past, to the Egyptians. People don’t know anything about Egyptology; but they have an inkling that such a science exists. And that if it does exist, it’s unlikely that patent-medicine makers should have found out facts unknown to the professors at the universities. And it’s much the same even with secrets that don’t come from Egypt. People know there’s such a thing as medical science and they again feel it’s improbable that manufacturers should know things ignored by the doctors. The modern democratic advertiser is entirely above-board. He tells you all about it. He explains that the digestive juices acting on bismuth give rise to a disinfectant acid. He points out that lactic ferment gets destroyed before it reaches the large intestine, so that Metchnikoff’s cure generally won’t work. And he goes on to explain that the only way of getting the ferment there is to mix it with starch and paraffin: starch to feed the ferment on, paraffin to prevent the starch being digested before it gets to the intestine.
And, in consequence, he convinces you that a mixture of starch, paraffin and ferment is the only thing that’s any good at all. Consequently you buy it; which you would never have done without the explanation. In the same way, Mr Gumbril, we mustn’t ask people to take our trousers on trust. We must explain scientifically why these trousers will be good for their health. And by means of the ganglia, as I’ve pointed out, we can even show that the trousers will be good for their souls and the whole human race at large. And as you probably know, Mr Gumbril, there’s nothing like a spiritual message to make things go. Combine spirituality with practicality and you’ve fairly got them. Got them, I may say, on toast. And that’s what we can do with our trousers; we can put a message into them, a big, spiritual message. Decidedly,’ he concluded, ‘we shall have to work those ganglia all we can.’
‘I’ll undertake to do that,’ said Gumbril, who felt buoyant and self-assured. Mr Boldero’s hydrogenous conversation had blown him up like a balloon.
‘And I’m sure you’ll do it well,’ said Mr Boldero encouragingly. ‘There is no better training for modern commerce than a literary education. As a practical business man, I always uphold the ancient universities, especially in their teaching of the Humanities.’
Gumbril was much flattered. At the moment, it seemed supremely satisfying to be told that he was likely to make a good business man. The business man took on a radiance, began to glow, as it were, with a phosphorescent splendour.
‘Then it’s very important,’ continued Mr Boldero, ‘to play on their snobbism; to exploit that painful sense of inferiority which the ignorant and ingenuous always feel in the presence of the knowing. We’ve got to make our trousers the Thing – socially right as well as merely personally comfortable. We’ve got to imply somehow that it’s bad form not to wear them. We’ve got to make those who don’t wear them feel rather uncomfortable. Like that film of Charlie Chaplin’s, where he’s the absent-minded young man about town who dresses for dinner immaculately, from the waist up – white waistcoat, tail coat, stiff shirt, top-hat – and only discovered, when he gets down into the hall of the hotel, that he’s forgotten to put on his trousers. We’ve got to make them feel like that. That’s always very successful. You know those excellent American advertisements about young ladies whose engagements are broken off because they perspire too freely or have an unpleasant breath? How horribly uncomfortable those make you feel! We’ve got to do something of the same sort for our trousers. Or more immediately applicable would be those tailor’s advertisements about correct clothes. “Good clothes make you feel good.” You know the
