The Editors of The Daily Mirror and The Daily Sketch, also speaking in unison, said they agreed to a large extent with the last speakers.  It would not really matter if every painting disappeared, so long as the camera remained.  One living photographer was better than a thousand dead Masters.

Sir CLAUDE PHILLIPS asked how the Masters would ever have been called Masters had it not been for the critics.  Painters merely painted and left it there; it was the critics who decided whether or not they should be immortal, and whether their pictures should be worth tens or thousands.

Mr. MARION SPIELMANN said that no one would deny that the contemplation of pictures, even those of Saints or Holy Families, had given enormous pleasure.  But why?  Not because the crowds that flocked to the galleries really cared for them, but because gifted writers had for centuries been setting up hypnotic suggestions that in this way was pleasure to be obtained.  He had often seen men and women standing before a canvas of REMBRANDT, hating the grubby muddle of it in their hearts, but adoring it in their heads—­all because some well-known critic had told them to.  Their pleasure, however, was real, and therefore it should, in a world of sadness, be encouraged, and consequently Art critics should be encouraged.

Mr. ROGER FRY here rose to point out that the test of a picture is not the pleasure which it imparts, as the last speaker seemed to think, but the pain.  The sooner the public got that fact into its thick head the better would it be for those artists who were not so clay-souled as to allow stuffy conventions to interfere with the development of their personality.

Mr. D.W.  GRIFFITH said that he had never heard so much talk about pictures, with so little reference to himself.  It was he who invented “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” and he was the Picture King, and as such he wished to tell them that the best Art critic in the world couldn’t hold a candle to a very ordinary Press agent. (Uproar, during which the meeting broke up.)

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[Illustration:  The “Nut” of the Regiment (reading Army order re dress).  “BY JOVE, MAJOR, THIS IS SERIOUS!  SHIRTS, COLLARS AND TIES HAVE GOT TO BE THE SAME COLOUR AS UNIFORM.  IT JOLLY WELL MEANS THAT WE’LL HAVE TO GET A NEW UNIFORM EVERY TIME WE HAVE A COLLAR WASHED.”]

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MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS O’REILLY.

THE GREAT DOG FIGHT.

Next to the beauty of its girls my little Western home is noted for two things—­the ferocity of its dogs and its bountiful provision for assuaging an attack of thirst.  For the latter there are fifteen houses, ten of which have licences and the rest back-doors.  We are by birth a temperate people, but there is much salt in the air.

Our dogs are very like ourselves, as peaceable and well-conducted as can be, except when some rascal takes up their challenge and makes faces at them or trails a tail of too much pretension and too suddenly in their neighbourhood.  Then the fur is apt to fly.