BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST.
Proverbs xx. 14.
Considering what goes to make up a proverb, it would be strange if, in the book of Proverbs, part though it be of holy writ, there should be no touches of the humorous, however restrained and dignified its manifestation. Shrewd insight into character, finding expression in phrases of homely vigour, or tranquil irony, or two-edged sarcasm,—without much of this, what were a book of proverbs? Assuredly the collected proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, are not careful to eschew a touch of humour when the subject invites, or allows of, not to say requires it. Such a subject we have, and such a touch of the jocose, in a verse which sets forth so tersely the tactics of traffickers and bargain-makers; how the bidder depreciates the wares he is bidding for, until they are his; and how he alters his tone then, and brags at once of their superior worth, and of his own superior skill in effecting a purchase. He haggles, and beats them down, and pooh-poohs them, as all but unsaleable, while yet they are on sale; but so soon as the bargain is struck, he goes on his way rejoicing, and perhaps calls his kinsfolk and acquaintance together, to rejoice with him, for he has bought dirt cheap what was worth its weight in gold. “It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”
The Paris of “Troilus and Cressida” compliments, or, as may be, upbraids a subtle Greek with his dexterity in this line of policy:—
“Fair Diomede, you do as chapmen do,
Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy.”
In measure with the intending buyer’s dispraise, is kept up by the would-be seller a song of praise. As Horace has it, Laudat venales qui vult extrudere merces; and the laudation is apt to be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic worth of his wares. Good wine may need no bush; but bad wine, on that showing, may need one as big as a tree; and the wine merchant is equal to the occasion.
A. K. H. B. has said of men in towns, aware of the value of time, that by long experience they are assured of the uselessness of trying to overreach a neighbour in a bargain, because he is so sharp that they will not succeed. But in agricultural districts such practical essayists in the art of overreaching are declared to be common enough and to spare; and it is one of the Recreations of the Country Parson aforenamed (initially at least) to mark out in detail the course which these bargain-makers are alleged invariably to follow. “If they wish to buy a cow or rent a field, they begin by declaring with frequency and vehemence that they don’t want the thing,—that in fact they would rather not have it,—that it would be inconvenient for them to become possessors of it. They then go on to say that still, if they can get it at a fair price, they may be induced to think of it. They next declare that the cow is the very worst that ever was seen, and that very few men would have such a creature in their possession.” And so on,—till the strenuous haggler, after wasting two hours, telling sixty-five lies, and stamping himself as a cheat, ends the negotiation, without taking anything at all by his petty trickery, so complicated and so clumsy withal in its convolutions.
It is in his estimate of the real merits of English horses, that Fuller discreetly observes, in meting out temperate but cordial praise of their good points, “And whilst the seller praiseth them too much, the buyer too little, the indifferent stander-by will give them their due commendation.” What was true of horseflesh and its breeders and purchasers, in old Fuller’s day holds good still. Type of a large class is that manœuvring major in a popular fiction, of whom, and of his, “bargains” in the stable—mostly sedate, elderly animals—we read, that certainly, if the animals could have spoken, they would have expressed their surprise at the difference in the language used by the major when a buyer and when a seller; for while, as a buyer, he made them out to be, like Gil Blas’ mule, all faults, as a seller he suddenly came round to believe in them as paragons of perfection.