summaries of public opinion, do they represent anyone’s opinion at all, or are they simply the sort of thing you talk about in a railway-carriage with a man you don’t know?  Does anyone’s mind really dwell on such things and ponder them?  The newspapers do not really know what is happening—­everything takes them by surprise.  The ordinary person is interested in his work, his amusements, the people he lives with—­in real things.  There seems to be nothing real here; it is all shadowy, I want to get at men’s minds, not at what journalists think is in men’s minds.  The human being in the newspapers seems to me an utterly unreal person, picturesque, theatrical, fatuous, slobbering, absurd.  Does not the newspaper-convention misrepresent us as much as the book-convention misrepresents us?  We straggle irregularly along, we are capable of entertaining at the same moment two wholly contrary opinions, we do what we don’t intend to do, we don’t carry out our hopes or our purposes.  The man in the papers is agitated, excited, wild, inquisitive—­the ordinary person is calm, indifferent, and on the whole fairly happy, unless some one frightens him.  I can’t make it out, because it isn’t a conspiracy to deceive, and yet it does deceive; and what is more, most people don’t even seem to know that they are being misrepresented.  It all seems to me to differ as much from real life as the Morning Service read in church differs from the thoughts of the congregation!”

“How would you mend it?” said Barthrop.  “It seems to me it must represent something.”

“Something!” said Father Payne.  “I don’t know!  I don’t believe we are so stupid and so ignoble!  As to mending it, that’s another question.  Writing is such a curious thing—­it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man’s thoughts.  Reverie—­has anyone ever tried to represent that?  I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in that if what has passed through my mind were all printed in full in a book, it would make a large octavo volume—­and precious stuff, too!  Yet the few thoughts which do stand out when it is all over, the few bright flashes, they are things which can hardly be written down—­at least they never are written down.”

“But what would you do?” I said—­“with the newspapers, I mean.”

“Well,” said Father Payne, “a great deal of the news most worth telling can be told best in pictures.  I believe very much in illustrated papers.  They really do help the imagination.  That’s the worst of words—­a dozen scratches on a bit of paper do more to make one realise a scene than columns of description.  I would do a lot with pictures, and a bit of print below to tell people what to notice.  Then we must have a number of bare facts and notices—­weather, business, trade, law—­the sort of thing that people concerned must read.  But I would make a clean sweep of fashion, and all sensational intelligence—­murders, accidents, sudden deaths.  I would have much more