"John's own John," as Dr. Holmes says, may be very unlike his neighbour's
John; but in the case of Mr. Stevenson, his Louis was very similar to my
Louis; I mean that, as he presents his personality to the world in his
writings, even so did that personality appear to me in our intercourse.
The man I knew was always a boy.
"Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,"
he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the lad was never
"gone." Like Keats and Shelley, he was, and he looked, of the immortally
young. He and I were at school together, but I was an elderly boy of
seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of "gytes," as the members of
the lowest form are called. Like all Scotch people, we had a vague
family connection; a great-uncle of his, I fancy, married an aunt of my
own, called for her beauty, "The Flower of Ettrick." So we had both
heard; but these things were before our day. A lady of my kindred
remembers carrying Stevenson about when he was "a rather peevish baby,"
and I have seen a beautiful photograph of him, like one of Raffael's
children, taken when his years were three or four. But I never had heard
of his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the
interests of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the British
Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson. He looked as, in my eyes, he
always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth
oval face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common, large lucid
eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot remember, if brown, certainly
light brown.
Pages:
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54