This story is from Saki is a spoof on modern advertising. A businessman who had invested all his money into a failed breakfast food requests help from an impoverished artist who wants to marry his daughter. The artist gives the product an unappetising name and promotes it with a poster of celebrities in Hell clamouring for the unpalatable dish “they cannot buy now”. Sales take off, and the businessman sells the company and marries his daughter to someone a “vast deal higher” than the hapless artist. Themes include despair, the power of advertising, branding (appeal to duty/guilt), social class, ingratitude/betrayal.
The story comes from Saki’s book Chronicles of Clovis which follows the exploits of a spoiled, upper-class young man as he causes mischief among Edwardian high society. In the last line, after listening to his friend telling how he won and lost the woman he loved by helping her father become very rich, Clovis comments “’tis not in mortals to countermand success”. This is a variation of a line from Joseph Addison’s play Cato, which implies that once success is achieved, it cannot be overturned by man. I am not sure this would hold true if the truth behind Filboid Studge were to come out.