Over the Teacups | Page 6

do. Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what all
who write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of
the clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every
year for fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a
hundred audiences during the same political campaign, always using
the same arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor,
as Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning,
until we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do
when we read the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which
ends in an advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all- curing
remedy!
The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my
consciousness fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private
apartments of a good many other people's thoughts. The longer we live,
the more we find we are like other persons. When I meet with any facts
in my own mental experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them

repeated or anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others.
This feeling gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he
could not have enjoyed without it. My story belongs to you as much as
to me. De te fabula narratur. Change the personal pronoun,--that is all.
It gives many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them
something they have long known or felt, but which they have never
before found any one to put in words for them. An author does not
always know when he is doing the service of the angel who stirred the
waters of the pool of Bethesda. Many a reader is delighted to find his
solitary thought has a companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who
has strengthened him. This is the advantage of the humble reader over
the ambitious and self- worshipping writer. It is not with him pereant
illi, but beati sunt illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those
who have said our good things for us.
What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
reflections like which I think many readers will find something in their
own mental history. The area of consciousness is covered by layers of
habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave- worn, rounded
pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day,
from week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and
from year to year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon
them daily as we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement
and murmur of ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in
slumber. When we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only
listening to sound of attrition between these inert elements of
intelligence. They shift their places a little, they change their relations
to each other, they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a
new fragment is cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes
its place with the others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is
almost as stationary as the pavement of a city thoroughfare.
It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell which I
am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has seen
before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any other
writer.
If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make
to some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects, my

answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with
whom I like to talk.
All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous
and hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
service by accumulating