Part 32

One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against Byron’s Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done. Crabbe’s Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that sombre career,—

“Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled, And wept his woes upon a restless bed; Retiring late, at early hour to rise, With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes; If sleep one moment closed the dismal view, Fancy her terrors built upon the true; And night and day had their alternate woes, That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.”

The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half the night repeating, Must she die?

“And now to right she turned, and now to left, And found no ease in turning or in rest”—

like one of those depicted by Keble—

“... who darkling and alone, Would wish the weary night were gone, Though dawning morn should only show The secret of their unknown woe.”

Shelley sings of the desire “of the night for the morrow” when expressing the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray vividly depicts the state of mind of one who—

“... starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning— To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning.”

Of Mrs. Gaskell’s Jemima we read, that “the night, the sleepless night, was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day; and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick for the solitude of night.” So with Shenstone’s Jessie:—

“Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry, When will the morn’s once pleasing scenes return? Yet what can morn’s returning ray supply, But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?”

_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.

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:—

“Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair, A single one,—I saw it; otherwise The woman looked immortal.”

It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious, sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length. “Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on the same trite theme:—

“Some there were took fond delight, Sporting with these tresses bright, To enring with living gold Fingers now beneath the mould (Woe is me!) grown icy cold. ... Now again a shining streak ’Gins the dusky cloud to break;— Here and there a glittering thread Lights the ringlets, dark and dead— Glittering light!—but pale and cold— Glittering thread!—but _not_ of _gold_.

Silent warning! silvery streak! Not unheeded dost thou speak. Not with feelings light and vain, Not with fond, regretful pain, Look I on the token sent To declare the day far spent.”

Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.” Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later stage:—

“One day, as the lady saw her youth Depart, and the silver thread that streaked Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth, The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked— She wondered who the woman was, So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked.”

Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase, old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: _obrepit non intellecta senectus_. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand with Juvenal, almost word for word: _non intelligitur quando obrepit senectus_. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age, beguiling as it wears away: _labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas_; and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless years we grow older till we grow old: _Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis_. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: _Rien n’est pénible à démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose vienne du dehors et coupe court_.

There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who has to own of himself—

“For I had hope, by something rare, To prove myself a poet; But, while I plan, and plan, my hair Is gray before I know it.”

_RESTRAINED ANGER._

PROVERBS xvi. 32.

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” To be ruled by one’s angry spirit is cruel bondage indeed, for that taskmaster never spares the lash. To rule or to be ruled,—that is the question.

“Ira furor brevis est: animum rege; qui, nisi paret, Imperat: hunc frenis, hunc tu compesce catenâ.”

Marcus Antoninus, in his Meditations, calls rage and resentment marks of an unmanly disposition; mildness and temper being not only more humane, but, he contends, more masculine too. And the philosophic emperor wrote and spoke as one of, what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls, those

“... milder natures, and more free, Whom an unblamed serenity Hath freed from passions, and the state Of struggle these necessitate.”