alled their hustling method can
truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle
in, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem the very
warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that
he soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a
very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in this
respect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for an
Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which
American journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. It
might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on the
spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; but
I really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go
very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. The Englishman
would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path;
but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much more
disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our own national
temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when
connections had really been established. Possibly that is the reason why
our national temperament does not establish them. I suspect that the
real reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off
talking. I suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separate
railway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists as
escaping from a race of talkers.

However this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantage
in the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower to
flower. He may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not
force himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on
knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. It may be,
to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as
if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on
being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great deal of the
interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism
does not apply; there is nothing which even an Englishman of extreme
sensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involved
are generally entirely public, and treated with not a little public
spirit. But my only reason for saying here what can be said even for