Were this deion carefully re-written,it would be quite admirable.The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim.In a very ugly and sensible age,the arts borrow,not from life,but from each other.
His sympathies,too,were wonderfully varied.In everything connected with the stage,for instance,he was always extremely interested,and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeological accuracy in costume and scene-painting.'In art,'he says in one of his essays,'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well';and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms,it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn.In literature,again,like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion,he was 'on the side of the angels.'He was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley -'the tremulously-sensitive and poetical Shelley,'as he calls him.His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and profound.He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.
One of the best copies of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'that is now in existence was wrought specially for him.He loved Alain Chartier,and Ronsard,and the Elizabethan dramatists,and Chaucer and Chapman,and Petrarch.And to him all the arts were one.'Our critics,'he remarks with much wisdom,'seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting,nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other';and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks of his love for Milton,he is deceiving either himself or his listeners.To his fellow-contributors in the LONDON MAGAZINE he was always most generous,and praises Barry Cornwall,Allan Cunningham,Hazlitt,Elton,and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a friend.Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,and,with the art of the true comedian,borrow their style from their subject:-What can I say of thee more than all know?that thou hadst the gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man:as gentle a heart as ever sent tears to the eyes.
How wittily would he mistake your meaning,and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season.His talk without affectation was compressed,like his beloved Elizabethans,even unto obscurity.
Like grains of fine gold,his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.He had small mercy on spurious fame,and a caustic observation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish.
Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie'of his;so was Burton,and old Fuller.In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio odour;and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams.He would deliver critical touches on these,like one inspired,but it was good to let him choose his own game;if another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt,or rather append,in a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or mischievous.One night at C-'s,the above dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.Mr.X.commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy （I don't know which of them）,but was instantly taken up by Elia,who told him 'THAT was nothing;the lyrics were the high things -the lyrics!'
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the early part of this century.He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose,and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers,and this school JANUS WEATHERCOCK may be said to have invented.He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality,and in his purely journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had for dinner,where he gets his clothes,what wines he likes,and in what state of health he is,just as if he were writing weekly notes for some popular newspaper of our own time.This being the least valuable side of his work,is the one that has had the most obvious influence.A publicist,nowadays,is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
