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II. Of the evils of garrulity, which, like the ceaseless droppings of water, will eat into the toughest rock of patience and self-satisfaction, I have spoken at considerable length elsewhere. Its evils are so evident that they hardly call for further illustration. The garrulous man, paradoxical as it may seem to say it, is a kind of pickpocket without intending to steal anything–nay, rather he is fain to please you by placing something in your pocket–though too often it is like the egg of the cuckoo in the nest of another bird.

III. Now, as to Interruption, what’s to be done? It is a question that I have often considered. For the evil is great, and the remedy occult. I look upon a man that interrupts another in conversation as a monster far less excusable than a cannibal; yet cannibals (though, comparatively with interrupters, valuable members of society) are rare, and, even where they are not rare, they don’t practise as cannibals every day: it is but on sentimental occasions that the exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them. This enormous nuisance I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian’s politeness of never interrupting. What, absolutely never? Is there no case in which I should? If a man’s nose, or ear, as sometimes happens in high latitudes, were suddenly and visibly frost-bitten, so as instantly to require being rubbed with snow, I conceive it lawful to interrupt that man in the most pathetic sentence, or even to ruin a whole paragraph of his prose. You can never indeed give him back the rhetoric which you have undermined; that is true; but neither could he, in the alternative case, have given back to himself the nose which you have saved.

I contend also, against a great casuist in this matter, that had you been a friend of AEschylus, and distinctly observed that absurd old purblind eagle that mistook (or pretended to mistake) the great poet’s bald head–that head which created the Prometheus and the Agamemnon–for a white tablet of rock, and had you interrupted the poet in his talk at the very moment when the bird was dropping a lobster on the sacred cranium, with the view of unshelling the lobster, but unaware that at the same time he was unshelling a great poet’s brain, you would have been fully justified. An impertinence it would certainly have been to interrupt a sentence as undeniable in its Greek as any which that gentleman can be supposed to have turned out, but still the eagle’s impertinence was greater.[2] That would have been your excuse. AEschylus, or my friend the casuist, is not to be listened to in his very learned arguments contra.

Short of these cases, nothing can justify an interruption; and such cases surely cannot be common, since how often can we suppose it to happen that an eagle has a lobster to break just at the moment when a tragic poet is walking abroad without his hat? What the reader’s experience may have been, of course, is unknown to me; but, for my own part, I hardly meet with such a case twice in ten years, though I know an extensive circle of tragic poets, and a reasonable number of bald heads; eagles certainly not so many–they are but few on my visiting list; and indeed, if that’s their way of going on–cracking literary skulls without leave asked or warning given–the fewer one knows the better. If, then, a long life hardly breeds a case in which it is strictly lawful to interrupt a co-dialogist, what are we to think of those who move in conversation by the very principle of interruption? And a variety of the nuisance there is, which I consider equally bad. Men, that do not absolutely interrupt you, are yet continually on the fret to do so, and undisguisedly on the fret all the time you are speaking. To invent a Latin word which ought to have been invented before my time, ‘non interrumpunt at interrupturiunt.’ You can’t talk in peace for such people; and as to prosing, which I suppose you’ve a right to do by Magna Charta, it is quite out of the question when a man is looking in your face all the time with a cruel expression in his eye amounting to ‘Surely, that’s enough!’ or a pathetic expression which says, ‘Have you done?’ throwing a dreadful reproach into the Have. In Cumberland, at a farmhouse where I once had lodgings for a week or two, a huge dog as high as the dining-table used to plant himself in a position to watch all my motions at dinner. Being alone, and either reading or thinking, at first I did not observe him; but as soon as I did, and noticed that he pursued each rising and descent of my fork as the poet ‘with wistful eyes pursues the setting sun,’ that unconsciously he mimicked and rehearsed all the notes and appoggiaturas that make up the successive bars in the music of eating one’s dinner, I was compelled to rise, and say, ‘My good fellow, I can’t stand this; will you do me the favour to accept anything on my plate at this moment? And to-morrow I’ll endeavour to arrange for your being otherwise employed at this hour than in watching me.’ It seems a weakness, but I really cannot eat anything under the oppression of an envious surveillance like that dog’s. A man said to me, ‘Oh, what need you care about him? He has had his dinner long ago.’ True, at twelve or one o’clock; but at six he might want another; but, if he thinks so himself, the result is the same. And that result is what the whole South of Frankistan[3] calls the evil eye. Wanting dinner, when he sees another person in the very act of dining, the dog (though otherwise an excellent creature) must be filled with envy; and envy is so contagiously allied to malice, that in elder English one word expresses both those dark modifications of hatred. The dog’s eye therefore, without any consciousness on his own part, becomes in such a case an evil eye: upon me, at least, it fell with as painful an effect as any established eye of that class could do upon the most superstitious Portuguese.