1 THE CAPITAL INVESTMENT i THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE A BOOK ABOUT MAKING MONEY, AND nobody must be misled by the title into thinking that it is. Admittedly, the title is ambiguous. There is a well-known English manual for aspiring writers entitled Complete Writing for Profit. It is by Mr. Michael Joseph, a London publisher. In that manual writing is dealt with not as science or as an art but as an industry. It is designed to show those who care to study it not merely how to write, but how to write in order to sell. Much of it is an account of markets for pieces of writing and of the requirements of these markets. In short, there is no denying that Mr. Joseph, in calling his book, Complete Writing for Profit, intended the word "profit" to mean simply money. The phrase "to write for profit" is indeed commonly understood to mean to write for money. I recognize that in the same way the phrase "to read for profit" may be taken to mean to read for money. It is easy to think of people who seem to make money by reading. They are the readers employed by publishers, the reviewers of new books in the press, and the literary critics. A publisher's reader reads a manuscript and then writes a report on it. A reviewer reads new book and then writes a notice or review of it. There are people who make a living in this way. It may be a popular fancy that what they are paid for is not what they write -the report or the review-but the reading. They may be supposed to read for profit as others write for profit. And, because this book is called Reading for Profit, it could be supposed that it was going to be a guide to qualifying, and obtaining employment, as a publisher's reader, a reviewer, or a literary critic. So I want to begin by making it clear that that is not what I intend at all. Certainly it is profit that I should like to help men and women to obtain from reading, but it is not money. It is, in fact, profit of quite another kind. Intangible, impalpable, it is yet a profit of the highest value and importance. It is a profit which is manifested in the consequences of our reading upon both the waking moments and the dreams of the individual, upon his character, and upon his conduct. That reading can and does influence character, that reading can and does influence conduct, has been pointed out, for instance, by Sir Richard Livingstone, the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in a little book entitled The Future in Education. In the same book he says also that our reading may paint pictures on walls of the mind that would otherwise remain bare. That is another way of saying that reading can and does have consequences for our waking moments and for our dreams. In making these claims for reading, Sir Richard Livingstone does not stand alone. He is but last in a long line of witnesses, a line which stretches back across history, through Milton, who declared a good book to be "the precious life-blood of a master spirit", all the way to Aristotle, who remarked that the best reason any man can have for reading is that the reading will be "for the sake of his own development". Statements of that sort sound very fine. But for anybody who is not already aware of reading for profit they must have one great defect. They fail to make him see what the profit is. Such statements are intelligible only to those who already know of the profit by experience-by direct acquaintance. In fact, the profit is not only, as I have said, intangible or impalpable. It is exclusively itself. That is to say, for anyone to come to know it by description is impossible. It can only be known in being won. Till we have won it, the most that we can be given of its nature are only hints. The reading of books may be expected to furnish the mind, the imagination, and the feelings of a reader with a varied material, and when we speak of great books we mean in part that the material which they offer is rich and profoundly nourishing. To that extent reading acts, at the very least, as a stimulus. Our mind, our imagination, our feelings, are all quickened by what they take in through reading. That is what Sir Richard Livingstone refers to in saying that reading may paint pictures on walls of the mind that would otherwise remain bare. Both our waking moments and our dreams become more vivid. Many people are apt to recollect at unforeseen moments lines from poems they have read or even to recollect complete short poems. They will be putting on their shoes or preparing to get out of a train when they will suddenly recall, say, the lines from Milton's Paradise Lost: And with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a falling star or lines such as these from Byron's Don Juan: Her beauties seized the unconscious hour of night Many people, too, are apt to recall at odd moments a scene from some novel they have read-often that they read long ago. They may be opening the evening paper or sitting in the dentist's chair, and suddenly they will think of Becky Sharp's first meeting with Sir Pitt Crawley in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or of the admiration which the bravo in Stevenson's Catriona expresses for David Balfour's courage after he has compelled him to fight a duel and discovers he cannot hold a sword, or of little Phoebe Pyncheon, in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, when her hand is grasped in the dark by another hand, and a gentle and warm pressure causes her heart to leap and thrill, or of Anne Elliott's great moment at the end of Jane Austen's Persuasion when she gives voice to her views on constancy. It is obvious that merely to be visited at odd times by such recollections-recollections of poems and recollections of novels-is bound to be pleasurable. When, as often happens, the first recollection of lines of poetry or of some scene in fiction brings in its train the recollection of the context of the lines or scene, the pleasure will be so much the greater. Moreover, having these recollections has consequences for our mental and affective being. In particular, our imagination is dependent for its activity on the quantity and quality of its available material. There |