AERIAL ADVERTISEMENTS.
IT would appear from a letter addressed to the Times, that advertising agents and manufacturers, having exhausted every available foot of apace afforded by walls and hoardings, are now hanging their advertisements sky- high, weaving like spiders from house-top to house-top great webs of deception for the capture of customers, and, though light and air may yet pass free, seriously blocking the view of anything but their assertions as to the superiority of their special wares. The complainant in this case states that the view of St. Paul's from Fleet Street is shut out by an aerial structure proclaiming the virtue of somebody's goods, and that to his mind St. Paul's was a more pleasant object to look upon than this interloper. We entirely agree with him as to the hideous horror of these "sky-signs," as he terms them ; but it is rather a difficult question as to how they may be prevented. A man may not rob his neighbour of light or air ; but as to view, it would be very hard to define what would constitute a right in the sur- rounding prospect. If every man that built a house acquired thereby a light to a view of everything that could be seen from the windows, housebuilding in London would soon come to a standstill. Probably as long as he respects the air and light that are due to his neighbours, and does not endanger the lives of passers-by, another man has the right to erect any abomination that he pleases upon his roof. Advertisers and others have given a new meaning to the old proverb, Aide-toi, et le del t'aidera,—to wit, "Help yourself to a slice of the sky, and the sky will help you." Not only do their walls proclaim their works, but the very sky above them is filled with their praise. It is a pleasing prospect. Already this industry of self-laudation has filled our streets with pictorial designs more or less horrible in character. One cannot walk anywhere without being confronted with a ghastly murder or two, without meeting the roving eye of a young lady whose degagi attitude and mocking smile betoken her triumph over her recent detractors, or wondering why another lady should share her bath with a crocodile and a sea-serpent. One cannot ride in an omnibus without being familiarly greeted by one kind of :soap, or being begged to consider the claims of its rival. The -advertiser even burrows underground, and papers the walls of a metropolitan railway with his productions, so that the passenger is rendered giddy with the frequent repetition of -the same name as he is whirled past them. All this we have long known and borne ; but let us not be robbed of our sky also—at least let us have the privilege of looking upwards -without being reminded that Jones's shilling champagne is the best. Or is it really inevitable that the exigencies of trade, that go so far to render our life uncomfortable on earth, must also obscure our view of the heavens P It is quite bad enough to have a network of telegraph and telephone wires stretched across the sky-line, without the addition of gilt letters, a yard 'high, that make untruthful and perfectly uninteresting state- ments.
We are reminded of one very sad case of an aerial advertise- ment; sad, because it was the cause of the commission of -crime by one who had till then been innocent,—by one, indeed, whose duty it was to prosecute the crimes of others. He was .a lawyer, whose neighbour on the other side of a narrow -street was a toy-maker,.--a maker of india-rubber dolls and beasts. The two neighbours might have lived, if not in harmony, at least in ignorance of each other, had not the toy- maker hung from his upper window, by way of advertising his wares, an elephant. The beast was even larger than life, -constructed of bladders, and of a pleasing yellow colour, save for a saddle of vivid green that had been painted on its back. Tethered to the end of a long pole, it hung jauntily half-way across the street, and danced with extra- ordinary lightness, treading an airy measure upon nothing, In response to every passing wind. Not even Sir William Harcourt in his most sprightly mood could display such airy levitycombined with an appearance of such ponderous strength. But the elephant looked in at the lawyer's windows ; and the lawyer could not look out of his windows without seeing the -elephant, and nothing but the elephant. Not only was it no light matter to be overlooked by an animal of such proportions, but the utter frivolity, the empty gaiety of the beast, were almost maddening. It distracted the attention of the lawyer himself, bewildered his clients, and diverted his clerks. He appealed to the owner to remove it ; but the owner refused unless it was bought and paid for. Now, no sane man, much less a lawyer, would buy a life-sized elephant stuffed with air. He threatened legal proceedings, but the toy-maker smiled, and the elephant continued dancing. He waited for a storm to carry it away ; but when the wind rose high, the giant 'elephant only leapt with more delirious bounds, and danced more madly than ever. He despaired—and yielded to a -criminal impulse. There is no need to repeat the sad story, ',except to say that it was connected with a rook-rifle, a lawyer's -clerk, and half-a-sovereign. On one dark night the deed was -done ; the life fled out of the huge beast with a long-drawn sigh of escaping wind; on the next morning there hung sadly from the pole only the shrunken remnant of a shrivelled skin. 'The elephant danced no more, no longer advertised its master's goods, nor vexed the legal mind ; but not even the lawyer himself could have defended the action that pat an end to its -existence.
It would be absurd to pretend that every aerial advertise- ment would be equally provocative and productive of crime ; the above true tale has been told merely to illustrate how great may be the irritation that is caused by them. But, _seriously, our manufacturers and traders do protest and advertise themselves too much and in too many places. Nothing seems to be sacred to the advertising agent. He spares neither the venerable age of the ruined castle, nor the _untouched simplicity of rustic beauty ; he placards crumbling :walls with announcements of circuses and summer sales, and :spans the most beautiful valley in the world with an advertise- ment of cheap boots. His ways are not yet, perhaps, quite so evil as those of his American colleague, but he bids fair to rival the latter soon. The American has no reverence. Niagara has no meaning for him except as a convenient place to advertise his bitters or his patent pain-killer:
if only he were allowed to do so, he would write the names of American drugs on every step of the Great Pyramid, and make the walls of the Colosseum witness to their greatness. We know what Mr. Ruskin had to say on the subject when he found the walla of his beloved Venice defaced and defiled with a literature that had no connection with its past. But it was generally the misfortune of Mr. Ruskin to say too much, and when he attacked advertise- ments at home, and denounced the harmless sandwich-man as carrying a lie before and behind him, he only weakened a good. cause. Indeed, it is well for him that he avoids the streets of London to-day ; for a passage through them would else be to him one prolonged shudder of agony. The sandwich-man walks in beauty compared to the hoardings that he passes by. Never before has this art of advertisement been more monstrous, more appalling in its creations. But it is an age of advertisements, of egregious frauds, of monstrous assertions, and of most lamentable credulity. Hardly anything stands on its own merits, but has to be bolstered up by lying and boastful representations in order to gain the public favour. And strange are the means employed. The artist and the soap-boiler join forces in pursuit of mutual advertise- ment; the preacher advertises the actor, and the actor applauds the preacher; the politician plays the fool, and the fool attempts to play the politician,—anything to attract the attention of the world. When one considers what the prizes of successful advertisement are, one cannot be surprised. The judicious composition of a pill out of such harmless in- gredients as bread-crumbs, is neither a very notable discovery nor a very difficult operation ; and yet it only requires the invention of such a pill, combined with frequent and persistent statements as to its efficacy, to make a man rich by millions. Nothing else is needed. The pill should at least be harmless, and the inventor must repeat everywhere, in every paper, on every hill-top, that it will cure every disease, from a toothache to a galloping consumption. His own bare word is quite sufficient, though, if he likes to invent witnesses as well as pills, there is nothing to prevent him. A fortune counted by millions, and gained by advertisement ! One can only wonder that the number of quacks is not greater than it is; for the ignorant credulity of a world that believes in them and buys their nostrums is beyond all powers of wonder.
The quack-doctor and the general impostor naturally live by advertisement, that being, virtually speaking, their only stock-in-trade ; but it is a sad state of things when the genuine manufacturer and trader cannot live without it. If only the producers of one article would make a mutual agreement among themselves not to advertise—if only, for instance, the makers of soaps would agree for the future to let their several soaps stand on their own merits—it would be a considerable saving of expense to them, and we should probably not only get that article cheaper, but also be spared from being reminded of it at every hour of the day. That, however, is past praying for. Let us be content for the present with begging them at least to leave a vacant spot here and there upon the house-tops, so that we may still enjoy an occasional glimpse of our public buildings and monuments. It is not much to ask : and, moreover, we might add that we should never think the better of anybody's dyes, or dog-biscuits, because they happened to come between us and what we wanted to look at.
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