Leigh Hunt records as his experience of the Italians at home, that to cheat you through thick and thin was the universal endeavour—so that a perpetual warfare was inevitable, in which you were obliged to fight in self-defence. “If you paid anybody what he asked you, it never entered into his imagination that you did it from anything but folly. You were pronounced a minchione (a ninny), one of their greatest terms of reproach. On the other hand, if you battled well through the bargain, a perversion of the natural principle of self-defence led to a feeling of respect for you.” Dispute might increase, it is added; the man might grin, stare, threaten; might pour out torrents of argument and of “injured innocence,” as they always do; but be firm, and he went away equally angry and admiring. “Did anybody condescend to take them in, the admiration as well as the anger was still in proportion, like that of the gallant knights of old when they were beaten in single combat.” Such chaffering, or “prigging,” as Burns calls it (in his satiric touch at town councillors waddling down the street, in all the pomp of ignorant conceit,—
“Men wha grew wise prigging owre hops and raisins),”
such haggling, and stickling, and demurring, and deferring, are too truly said to distinguish the British system of arranging settlements—in which, embodying completely the Oriental theory of marriage, a woman is dealt with “as a valuable security, to be exchanged for due consideration.” A marriage conducted according to the approved principles is therefore “a matter of sharp, close bargaining. No sooner is the romantic part of it over, than it is surrendered to the lawyers, who proceed to chaffer over it and cheapen their adversary’s claim, as they might do if they were purchasing a cow.” A self-styled Oriental student of the modern Syrians, in a book bearing that title, graphically sketches a representative bargaining scene in a café at Damascus, between a Christian indigo-dealer, in Beyrout costume, and a Jewish dyer; the former pretending to feel insulted at being offered so low a price, and the latter pretending to get into a passion at having his time taken up with a fruitless negotiation. Captain Marryat’s Travels in North America supply a plurality of parallel passages; now of two misses “swopping” bonnets, with an assumed indifference and a suppressed ardour almost ridiculous enough to verge on the sublime; and now of a couple of Down-Easters, whittling all the while they are bargaining, and doing both with all their might and main. Fiction-writers who make a study of character and manners are fond of introducing scenes of this kind. Scott’s Antiquary chuckles over his feats in cheapening old curiosities, and delights to tell how often he has stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer’s first price, he should be led to suspect the value Mr. Oldbuck sets upon the article: “And then, Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure!” The bargaining match with Maggie, the Fairport fishwife, is one of the gems of the story. Mr. Charles Reade offers a racy pendant in his trafficking encounter between Christie Johnstone, the pride of Newhaven, and the four Irish merchants who have agreed to work together, and to make a show of competition, the better to keep the price down within bounds, but who are no match for woman’s wit and woman’s tongue, as exercised by Christie. The author of “Doctor Jacob” depicts in Herr Schmidt a rosy, round man, with eyes that were never in tune with his mouth; the former being sharp, Jewish, and speculative; the latter, supine, commercial, and conservative: “He made use of his eyes when he bought, and of his mouth when he sold, giving his customers to understand that he was the easiest going man in the world, only desirous of small profits, and by no means miserable if a gold watch or any other article went for half its value.” Canon Kingsley enlivens the adventures of “Hereward” with a certain Dick Hammerhand, the richest man in Walcheren, who tries to overreach the hero, and fails to his cost; one stage of the transaction taking this turn: “The less anxious the stranger seemed to buy, the more anxious grew Dick to sell; but he concealed his anxiety, and let the stranger turn away, thanking him for his drink,” but anon renewing the treaty with as much semblance of disregard as he could put on. The author of “The Gayworthys” works up a clever bit of homely chaffering between Mrs. Vorse and Widow Horke the strawberry-dealer. And we find ourselves between a couple of horse-dealers again in “Silas Marner:” “Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse, and Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied ironically, [to the other’s boast of a recent high bid,] ‘I wonder at that now, I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard of a man who didn’t want to sell his horse, getting a bid of half as much again as the horse was worth,’” etc. Trust Bryce to boast of that horse, and of that bargain, so soon as he is gone his way, the horse his, and the bargain made. It must be a distorted type of human nature that resembles the discontented man of Theophrastus, who, after taking a great deal of pains to beat down the price of a slave, and after he has paid his money for him,—instead of boasting, breaks out into the grumble, “I am sure thou art good for nothing, or I should not have had thee so cheap.” A companion picture, in its way, but with the difference between an inveterate grumbler and an impenetrable oaf, is that by Plautus of a fool with an old grange to sell, of which property he advertises the singular attractions to draw buyers to bid and buy. Nothing ever thrived on it, he says; no owner of it ever died in his bed; the trees were all blasted; the swine died of the measles, the cattle of the murrain, the sheep of the rot; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or goose. Hospitium fuit calamitatis. It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer? No, the seller, in this case.
GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES.
Hosea vii. 9.
Among the reminders and remonstrances which it was the mission of the prophet, the son of Beeri, in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah, to deliver to Ephraim, there was this significant passage, expressive of a reckless people’s unconscious decline, whose lapses were taken account of on high, and Ephraim knew it not—“Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not.”
Who, asks Hartley Coleridge, ever saw their first gray hairs, or marked the crow feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentaneous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is fled for ever? “None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near.” Gray hairs, in an advancing stage of the plural number, may be here and there upon us before we know of it. But the actual discovery of the first is a bit of an epoch in one’s life; and if one exclaims Eureka! it is hardly in the most jubilant of tones or the most exultant of tempers.
Falstaff was surprised into a full purpose of amendment of life when he lighted on the first white hair on his chin; but only to keep on renewing the purpose weekly, long after chin and head, too, must have been covered with silver or snow.
With some the humour is to pass off the discovery in seeming glee; and perhaps it is the saturnine, melancholy temperament that is likeliest to do this. For instance, Gerbier relates of Charles the First, that one morning “as the King was combing his head, he found a white hair, which he sent to the Queen in merriment. Henrietta Maria immediately wrote back that Don Carlos would cause many more to come up before the Emperor gave up the Palatinate.” Had the King not been himself combing his head on this not too auspicious occasion, the probability is, as courts and courtiers go, that his first white hair would not thus have been allowed to attract and invite attention. A courtly dresser would have been shocked to reveal what he saw, and would have kept the secret with ex officio conscientiousness. Many and many are the uncrowned heads upon which gray hairs are gathering here and there—a familiar sight enough to overseeing (and not overlooking) attendants or friends, but by the owners themselves unsuspected as yet. Mrs. Browning lets Aurora Leigh espy one such straggler, which even the neat-handed maid-in-waiting overlooks, at Lady Waldemar’s toilet:—