The advertisements which proclaim that all successful men carry a
certain make of cigarette-lighter fail to arouse in me the suspension of disbelief. They have indeed an opposite and slightly irritant effect, causing me to run pettishly over in my mind all the successful men I can think of who are strangers to the contraption. But I suppose there must be people who are convinced by this sweeping claim and who see nothing ironical about the photograph with which it is normally illustrated. This shows a Successful Man—alert, steady-eyed, self-confident, anonymous: he is, of course, about to light a cigarette with his incomparable machine. We do not know who he is or what he does. In fact (when you come to think of it), the only thing we do know about him is that—since he finds it desirable to supple- ment his earnings by posing for an advertising agency—he is not what is generally understood by a successful man.
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