Only,as it happened,I knew the poet personally;I had seen him a great many times,and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,if seen only once.He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland Scotch,who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and dark emotions to the world.But in him the unmistakable strain,Gaelic or whatever it is,was accentuated almost to oddity;and he looked like some swarthy elf.He was small,with a big head and a crescent of coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness.Immediately under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have been painted scarlet;three black tufts,two on the upper lip and one under the lower,seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches of Mephistopheles.His eyes had that "dancing madness"in them which Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck;but he sometimes distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of them.
A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find.You could have picked him out in any crowd--so long as you had not seen his photograph.
But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes,accidental and conventional,had combined to obliterate him altogether.The limits of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring of cheek and eyebrow.The accident of the lighting took nearly all the darkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man.The framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write poetry made him look like a lazy man.Holding his head back,as people do when they are being photographed (or shot),but as he certainly never held it normally,accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated his slight figure.Here we have a clockwork picture,begun and finished by a button and a box of chemicals,from which every projecting feature has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer,painting in the weakest water-colours,on the smoothest ivory.