“Somewhat more splendid in dress, in a waistcoat of a lady, Lindsay succeeded, the lively, the cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay, Lindsay the ready of speech, the Piper, the Dialectician: This was his title from Adam, because of the words he invented, Who in three weeks had created a dialect new for the party.
“Hewson and Hobbes were down at the matutine bathing; of course Arthur Audley, the bather par excellence glory of headers: Arthur they called him for love and for euphony: so were they bathing There where in mornings was custom, where, over a ledge of granite, Into a granite bason descended the amber torrent. There were they bathing and dressing: it was but a step from the cottage, Only the road and larches and ruinous millstead between. Hewson and Hobbes followed quick upon Adam; on them followed Arthur.
“Airlie descended the last, splendescent as god of Olympus. When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway; He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber.”—pp. 5, 6.
A peculiar point of style in this poem, and one which gives a certain classic character to some of its more familiar aspects, is the frequent recurrence of the same line, and the repeated definition of a personage by the same attributes. Thus, Lindsay is “the Piper, the Dialectician,” Arthur Audley “the glory of headers,” and the tutor “the grave man nicknamed Adam,” from beginning to end; and so also of the others.
Omitting the after-dinner speeches, with their “Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean,” that only of “Sir Hector, the Chief and the Chairman;” in honor of the Oxonians, than which nothing could be more unpoetically truthful, is preserved, with the acknowledgment, ending in a sarcasm at the game laws, by Hewson, who, as he is leaving the room, is accosted by “a thin man, clad as the Saxon:”
“‘Young man, if ye pass thro' the Braes o'Lochaber, See by the Loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.’”—p. 9.
Throughout this scene, as through the whole book, no opportunity is overlooked for giving individuality to the persons introduced: Sir Hector, of whom we lose sight henceforward, the attaché, the Guards-man, are not mere names, but characters: it is not enough to say that two tables were set apart “for keeper and gillie and peasant:” there is something to be added yet; and with others assembled around them were “Pipers five or six; among them the young one, the drunkard.”
The morrow's conversation of the reading party turns on “noble ladies and rustic girls, their partners.” And here speaks out Hewson the chartist:
“‘Never (of course you will laugh, but of course all the same I shall say it,) Never, believe me, revealed itself to me the sexual glory, Till, in some village fields, in holidays now getting stupid, One day sauntering long and listless, as Tennyson has it, Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbydihoyhood, Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless bonnetless maiden, Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes. Was it the air? who can say? or herself? or the charm of the labor? But a new thing was in me, and longing delicious possessed me, Longing to take her and lift her, and put her away from her slaving. Was it to clasp her in lifting, or was it to lift her by clasping, Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind? Hard question. But a new thing was in me: I too was a youth among maidens. Was it the air? who can say? But, in part, 'twas the charm of the labor.’”
And he proceeds in a rapture to talk on the beauty of household service.