fils himself in many ways, even by local
government. . . .

Several things in your letter require notice. First the accusation
levelled against me of being prejudiced against Professor Huxley, I
repel with indignation and scorn. You are not prejudiced against
cheese because you like oranges; and though the Professor is not
Isaiah or St. Francis or Whitman or Richard le Gallienne (to name
some of those whom I happen to affect) I should be the last person in
the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted and
most refreshingly rational man: by far the best man of his type I
know. As to what you say on education generally, I am entirely with
you, but it will take a good interview to say how much. As for the
little Solomons, I am prepared to [be] fond of all of them, as I am
of all children, even the grubby little mendicants that run these
Italian streets. I am glad you and Grey have pottered. Potter again.
I have had such a nice letter from Lawrence. It makes me think it is
all going "to be the fair beginning of a time."

Had the months of art study only developed in Gilbert Chesterton his
power of drawing, they might still have been worthwhile. But they
gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a
University degree would never have allowed. His views and his mind
were developing fast, and he was also developing a power to which we
owe some of his best work--depth of vision.

Most art criticism is the work of those who never could have been
artists--which is possibly why it tends to be so critical. Gilbert,
who could perhaps have been an artist, preferred to appreciate what
the artist was trying to say and to put into words what he read on
the canvas. Hence both in his _Watts_ and his _Blake_ we get what
some of us ask of an art critic--the enlargement of our own powers of
vision. This is what made Ruskin so great an art critic, a fact once
realised, today forgotten. He may have made a thousand mistakes, he
had a multitude of foolish prejudices, but he opened the eyes of a
whole generation to see and understand great art.

G.K. was to begin his published writings with poetry and art
criticism--in other words with vision. And this vision he partly owed
to the Slade School. Here is a letter (undated) to Bentley containing
a hint of what eight years later became a book on Watts:

On Saturday I saw two exhibitions of pictures. The first w