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.
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