n to hear and see this in the
pages of a biography, why is it a profanation to read and see it in the
pages of a magazine? To object to it seems to me to be a species of
prudish conventionality.

Only you must be sure that you get a natural, simple, and unaffected
picture of it all; and what I object to in the interviews which I have
been reading is that one gets an unnatural, affected, self-conscious,
and pompous picture of it all. To go and pose in your favourite seat in
a shrubbery or a copse, where you think out your books or poems, in
order that an interviewer may take a snap-shot of you--especially if in
addition you assume a look of owlish solemnity as though you were the
prey of great thoughts--that seems to me to be an infernal piece of
posing. But still worse than that is the kind of conversation in which
people are tempted to indulge in the presence of an interviewer. A man
ought not to say to a wandering journalist whom he has never seen
before, in the presence of his own wife, that women are the inspirers
and magnetisers of the world, and that he owes all that has made him
what he is to the sweet presence and sympathetic tenderness of his
Bessy. This, it seems to me, is the lowest kind of melodrama. The thing
may be perfectly true, the thought may be often in his mind, but he
cannot be accustomed to say such things in ordinary life; and one feels
that when he says them to an interviewer he does it in a thoroughly
self-conscious mood, in order that he may make an impressive figure
before the public. The conversations in the interviews I have been
reading give me the uncomfortable sense that they have been thought out
beforehand from the dramatic point of view; and indeed one earnestly
hopes that this is the solution of the situation, because it would make
one feel very faint if one thought that remarks of this kind were the
habitual utterances of the circle--indeed, it would cure one very
effectually of the desire to know anything of the interiors of
celebrated people, if one thought that they habitually talked like the
heroes of a Sunday-school romance. That is why the reading of these
interviews is so painful, because, in the first place, one feels sure
that one is not realising the daily life of these people at all, but
only looking on at a tableau vivant prepared by them for the occasion;
and secondly, it makes one very unhappy to think that people of real
eminence and effectiveness can condescend to beh