It was an illustration of some Chaucerian lines, describing the face of a man on his way to execution, seen among a crowd: 'a pale face Among a press ...' so stricken that, amid all the thronging multitude, 'men might know his face that was bestead' from all the rest.
The idea--of helpless pain, in the grip of cruel and triumphant force--had been realised with a passionate wealth of detail, comparable to some of the early work of Holman Hunt.

The head of the victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe--and in the distance a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister--each figure and group, rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it something harshly, intolerably true.

The picture was too painful to be borne; but it was neither common nor mean.
Cuningham turned away from it with a shudder.
'Some of it's magnificent, Dick--but I couldn't live with it if you paid me!' 'Because you look at it wrongly,' said Watson, gruffly.

'You take it as an anecdote.

It isn't an anecdote--it's a symbol.' 'What ?--The World ?--and The Victim ?--from all time ?--and to all time?
Well, that makes it more gruesome than ever.