is nothing in imagination that has not been in sensation. So runs an early so-called law of psychology. If we are apt to have recollections such as I have just spoken of, then our imagination will have acquired material for pleasurable activity.

Altogether, simply to be visited by these recollections at odd moments of his waking life and to be able to dwell on them, and no doubt also to have them nourishing his dreams, gives a man an indefinable advantage over his less fortunate fellows. To obtain that much from our reading is far from despicable. But in fact, having these recollections is, so to speak, no more than the fringe of the profit.

It may be said that this profit is really being obtained when it amounts to an enlargement of the understanding—or rather the intuition-of the nature of life which we obtain from our own experience of living. The direct experience of life which any one person can acquire is inevitably narrow. Life itself is too vast, too varied, and too complex for any one individual—even if he is what we call a public man-to meet with more than an inadequately representative fragment of it at first hand in the course of his life. Yet the greater the variety of human experience in general that we can, so to speak, assimilate, the better for our understanding, our intuition, of the nature of life. It is through our reading that we are best able to learn of the experience of life of other people; through our reading that we are best able to find out what other people-remote from us in space and often remote from us in time as well-have thought, have felt, have imagined, and hoped. Hence a further item in the profit which we may obtain from reading-I might even say, the main profit—is that our own experience of life and our own intuition of the characteristics-the nature-of human existence, both in its solitude and in society, will be supplemented, broadened, and intensified. Thereby, our contacts and relations with our fellow men are likely to be made in their turn smoother, our expectations are likely to be brought in their turn within the bounds of possible fulfillment. In a word, our reading is likely to mellow our discontent. And even that is not all that our reading can do for us. It can do more still. It can enlighten us regarding human ideals at large, and so can lend substance to our own vision and aspiration.

These hints or indications of the nature of the profit uncon

nected with money that may accrue to us from our reading are enough to show us its value and importance. But, as I have said, they do not show us what the profit actually is. They do not make us conscious of it. The profit is, I repeat, only to be known in being won. Curiously enough, notwithstanding its importance and its worth, it is far from being won by as many as should want it. The people who read for profit, and who have some inkling of their debt to books, are relatively too few.

For one thing, of course, there is a strong temptation to read merely for relaxation, or amusement, or escape. We have so much to do besides read. There are so many claims on our time. And so it is when we are at a loss to kill time-the unique treasure which all of us squander recklessly-that we turn to books, or it may be only to magazines and newspapers, and even then our reading matter has to compete for our attention with the radio. Moreover, we may be tired, or recovering from an illness, or on vacation. We cannot be bothered to read unless it is with no effort.

For another thing, we may fancy that to read for profit means acquiring culture, and that literary culture is a specialism which may be left to college lecturers and to the writers in college reviews. We may fancy that it begets a preoccupation with the trivial and an enthusiasm for splitting hairs.

I feel, therefore, that I cannot insist too strongly, here at the very outset, not only on the fact that the profit to be had from reading is entirely profit for our own selves, ministering to our own individual advantage, but also on two other facts.

In the first place, it does not follow, because we are content to read solely for entertainment, as we suppose, that we are not influenced by our reading. Unquestionably books are sources of influence, and writers of reminiscences frequently acknowledge that they owe a great deal to particular books which came into their hands at momentous junctures in their lives. It would seem, then, that our choice, as regards reading, cannot lie between being influenced by whatever we read and not being influenced: it must lie rather between consciously striving to detect what is likely to happen to us under the impact of reading and being influenced in spite of ourselves, passively and unawares. If we are being influenced without knowing it, the influence to which we then submit may be beneficial or detrimental: we can

not tell. Indeed, our inmost selves are delivered over to external powers-to the direction of other minds. That is to say, we allow ourselves to be pushed hither and thither by the authors of the books which, as we mistakenly fancy, no more than entertain us. Is it not weak of us to let that occur?

In order to prevent this we have to be less passive and more active. Instead of never giving another thought to the book which we have thrown aside as soon as the last page is reached, we need to try to hold up before our mind the thoughts and feelings with which each spell of reading leaves us, and to try to ponder the value to us of those thoughts and feelings. No doubt a reader cannot be fully conscious of the effect which a book, and especially a great book, has upon him. And the profit I would help to make available is certainly not to be measured like a length of cloth. But to some extent all of us can ask ourselves what is the effect which a book is having on us, what is it that we are left thinking and feeling; and that is how we may come to read for profit. I do not mean that we should neglect to revel in the happenings within us while we actually read. It is always for their sake primarily that we read at all—for the sheer enjoyment of being absorbed in a book—and unless we read there can obviously be no profit from reading. But we need, further, to meditate upon the impression which a book leaves on us after the reading of it is done. Often enough, it is not till a book is closed that we can honestly ask ourselves if it has given us any new understanding, and what that understanding is.

In the second place, reading for profit does not consist in turning bookworm or in renouncing other pleasurable activities for the sake of grinding study. For us to obtain profit from our reading depends, above all, on that which we are ourselves. It depends on our going, not only to books, but to life itself, in the right spirit. Our own susceptibility and sensitiveness to the written word must, in some degree-indeed, in a very great degree-determine how our lives are colored, our character and our conduct shaped, as the result of our reading. And, in large measure, our susceptibility and sensitiveness to the written word are functions of the quality of our own personal experience, and of our ensuing intuition, at any given period, of the nature of the life we ourselves live. To the valuable, the worth-while, in

life, we must not remain oblivious. We must not be content to let life interest and excite us, to let it seem alive to us, only as it is freakish and odd.

I confess surprise at the absence of any expression of concern with the exclusive preoccupation of large sections of the public at present with the freakish and odd, and I presume that it is because the frequently exclusive character of the preoccupation is imperfectly realized. The fascination exerted upon many people by the popular press and the radio reflects the whole of their outlook on life; they may be compared to people with a mania for going to the zoo and to the fair. As we know, the popular press entertains its readers mainly with information about oddities and freaks: "Duke Marries Flower Girl", "Man Bites Dog"-that kind of thing. Parlor games and much purveyed by the radio are of the same order. To gape at wild animals in cages is to treat them as being merely odd, and it is at the fair that the bearded lady, the Siamese or coadunate twins, and other freaks are on view. So long as people react to life entirely through an interest in the freakish and odd, they are foredoomed never to read for real profit. For this profit is intimately bound up with life beyond freakishness and oddity— with life itself, with the seriousness of life and the serious in life. If we are to read for profit, we need first to realize the nature of the tragic and the nature of the truly momentous in life; we have got to take life seriously. It is essential that whenever we come across the serious, the valuable, the worth-while in its true form, alike in real life and in books, we should not fail to recognize it. That, in the first place, is what, if possible, we need to train ourselves for. What I mean by the freakish and odd on the one hand, and by the serious and valuable on the other, is well indicated in a sentence of G. K. Chesterton's in his book entitled Orthodoxy. "Death", he says there, "is more tragic than death by starvation." It is not the freakish death, it is not the odd death, that really matters; it is death itself. The affirmation applies to very many other things. For instance, marriage will always be more momentous than a duke's marrying a flower girl. Chesterton's statement sums up a whole point of view. Somehow or other, it is this point of view that we have to make our own if we are to read for profit.

Regarding what is required of us ourselves, it is hardly within

my power in this place to say anything more definite or more directly helpful. But I may point out that, provided it is undertaken in the right spirit, in the appropriate frame of mind—and of that I shall have something to say presently-our reading can assist us in acquiring the serious outlook. This outlook we should not expect to find ourselves in possession of as the result of any sudden transformation, although the first step we take towards possessing it may be sudden enough. That first step may take place as the result of our reading a book. It may even take place as the result of our coming across a single sentence; for instance, the sentence of Chesterton's which I quoted just now, that "death is more tragic than death by starvation." Once we truly grasp the import of a simple, unassuming, but fundamental affirmation such as that, we are already launched on the road to being able to read for profit-that is to say, to being able to read with profit.

Thus our reading can assist our reading. But, as I say, in order so to assist itself, our reading needs to be undertaken in the right spirit. And that brings me to another of the requirements that have to be met if our reading is to affect us and to influence our life as we would wish.

It is requisite that we should come to feel with more or less vividness the spirit of all literature, and hence, that we should feel the literature of the past as a living force. If I can say little that can be directly helpful regarding what is required of us ourselves in order that we should read for profit, on the other hand, regarding how we may come to feel the enduring power of the literature of the past and regarding what it is that accounts for that enduring power, there are quite a few things which I can say. Indeed, I am confident that to help readers to feel the literature of the past as a living force can and should be the greater part of my object. The question arises: How can this be done best? Various possibilities suggest themselves.

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It might seem to take one such possibility-that what will serve us best would be a miniature bird's eye view of the past. Whenever we are confronted with some new subject, some unfamiliar domain of study, we incline instinctively to obtain first