nes, certain illustrated
interviews with prominent people, which have given me a deep sense of
mental and moral nausea. I do not think I am afflicted with a strong
sense of the sacredness of a man's home life--at least, if it is sacred
at all, it seems to me to be just as much profaned by allowing visitors
or strangers to see it and share it as it is by allowing it to be
written about in a periodical. If it is sacred in a peculiar sense,
then only very intimate friends ought to be allowed to see it, and
there should be a tacit sense that they ought not to tell any one
outside what it is like; but if I am invited to luncheon with a
celebrated man whom I do not know, because I happen to be staying in
the neighbourhood, I do not think I violate his privacy by describing
my experience to other people. If a man has a beautiful house, a happy
interior, a gifted family circle, and if he is himself a remarkable
man, it is a privilege to be admitted to it, it does one good to see
it; and it seems to me that the more people who realise the beauty and
happiness of it the better. The question of numbers has nothing to do
with it. Suppose, for instance, that I am invited to stay with a great
man, and suppose that I have a talent for drawing; I may sketch his
house and his rooms, himself and his family, if he does not object--and
it seems to me that it would be churlish and affected of him to
object--I may write descriptive letters from the place, giving an
account of his domestic ways, his wife and family, his rooms, his
books, his garden, his talk. I do not see that there is any reasonable
objection to my showing those sketches to other people who are
interested in the great man, or to the descriptive letters or diary
that I write being shown or read to others who do not know him. Indeed
I think it is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire to know
something of the life and habits of great men; I would go further, and
say that it is an improving and inspiring sort of knowledge to be
acquainted with the pleasant details of the well-ordered, contented,
and happy life of a high-minded and effective man. Who, for instance,
considers it to be a sort of treachery for the world at large to know
something of the splendid and affectionate life of the Kingsley circle
at Eversley Rectory, or of the Tennyson circle at Freshwater? to look
at pictures of the scene, to hear how the great men looked and moved
and spoke? And if it is not profanatio