 Sidney Colvin Licensed by Creative Commons"If you want to realize the kind of effect he made, at least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital presence, with something about it that at first struck you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, a sprite, an Ariel"
(Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852-1912 [London: E. Arnold, 1921], p. 101)
Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) was a critic, scholar and one of RLS’s closest friends. Colvin and RLS first met in July 1873, when RLS was visiting his cousin at Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk. On 26 July 1873, RLS had met Fanny Sitwell at Cockfield, who he had fallen in love with. Estranged from her husband, she and Colvin were in love and in a relationship. Fanny felt that Stevenson should meet Colvin, who could help to support his literary ambition. From their meeting at Cockfield, Colvin, Sitwell and RLS developed a lifelong friendship.
After studying at Cambridge University, Colvin settled in London. He became a fine arts critic, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Fortnightly Review and the Portfolio, among others. He was elected Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge in 1873, and subsequently re-elected four more times. He was also the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1884, Colvin became the Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. As part of his new role, Colvin moved into apartments in the museum. RLS would often stay with him there.
Colvin was knighted in 1911. He also wrote a biography on Keats, John Keats. His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame (1917). In addition, he published an autobiographical work, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852-1912 (1921). In one of the chapters he described his friendship with RLS. He wrote about RLS again in Robert Louis Stevenson: His Work and Personality (1924).
Colvin had met and fallen in love with Fanny Sitwell in the 1860s, who was married. The couple were unable to marry until July 1903. Their friendship with Stevenson was not always easy. Colvin disliked RLS’s wife and deeply disapproved of Stevenson’s decision to settle in Samoa (overlooking the fact that RLS’s health would not permit him to make the exhausting journey back to the UK). He believed that the decision was disrespectful to their friendship, and that Stevenson’s literary career would suffer – Colvin particularly disliked RLS’s writing from Samoa.
Even after Stevenson’s death, Colvin struggled with Stevenson – but this time with his literary legacy. He had hoped to write Stevenson’s biography, but arguments with Fanny Stevenson and Lloyd about what could and would be written caused him to drop the project. Graham Balfour took it up instead, publishing The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1901). Colvin had also worked on the publication of RLS’s letters (1899), but was having difficulties with Lloyd over payment. Despite these problems, Colvin worked on the Edinburgh Edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (with Charles Baxter).
Stevenson wrote a poem, for Colvin, “To S.C.” from the South Seas in 1889. The poem suggests that RLS was thinking nostalgically about the past and of his friends in the UK: .
To S.C.
I HEARD the pulse of the besieging sea
Throb far away all night. I heard the wind
Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms.
I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand,
And flailing fans and shadows of the palm;
The heaven all moon and wind and the blind vault;
The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept.
The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives,
Slept in the precinct of the palisade;
Where single, in the wind, under the moon,
Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,
Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel.
To other lands and nights my fancy turned -
To London first, and chiefly to your house,
The many-pillared and the well-beloved.
There yearning fancy lighted; there again
In the upper room I lay, and heard far off
The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
The muffled tramp of the Museum guard
Once more went by me; I beheld again
Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
Again I longed for the returning morn,
The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
The consentaneous trill of tiny song
That weaves round monumental cornices
A passing charm of beauty. Most of all,
For your light foot I wearied, and your knock
That was the glad reveille of my day.
Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
At morning through the portico you pass,
One moment glance, where by the pillared wall
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined:
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
So far, so foreign, your divided friends
Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.
Apemama.
(RLS, “To S.C.”, Songs of Travel, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanston edn, vol xiv [London: Chatto and Windus, 1911], pp. 244-45).
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