as the
Royal Academy, where I went with Salter. There was one picture there,
though the walls were decorated with frames very prettily. As to the
one picture, if you look at an Academy catalogue you will see
"Jonah": by G. F. Watts, and you will imagine a big silly picture of
a whale. But if you go to Burlington House you will see something
terrible. A spare, wild figure, clad in a strange sort of green with
his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of
foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy,
his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and
defiance. And as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have
the tracery of the Assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in
the British Museum, a row of those processions of numberless captives
bowing before smiling Kings: a cruel sort of art. And the passionate
energy of that lonely screaming figure in front, makes you think of a
great many things besides Assyrians: among others of some words of
Renan: I quote from memory: "But the trace of Israel will be eternal.
She it was who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity, raised her
voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten."

But this only expresses a fraction of it. The only thing to do is
to come and look at this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair
that approaches green, his eyes simply white with madness. And Jonah
said, "Yea, I do well to be angry: even unto death."

He had learnt to look at colour, to look at line, to describe
pictures. But far more important than this, he could now create in
the imagination gardens and sunsets and sheer colour, so as to give
to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and
to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his very first
volume of Essays, _The Defendant_, were to be passages that could be
written only by one who had learnt to draw. For instance, in "A
Defence of Skeletons":

The actual sight of the little wood, with its grey and silver sea
of life is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart
of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure
stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.

In the year 1895, in which G.K. left art for publishing, he came of
age "with a loud repo