As surely as there is such a thing as creative writing there is such a thing as creative reading. That it is not very common appears from the universal demand for fiction, in which the creative process has already been applied to the material in hand, so that the reader is called upon to contribute very little himself. Indeed, if the writer of fiction is strong enough he can carry his more compliant readers to almost any distance from the world of their experience and can persuade them to accept as its equal or as its superior some merely invented region. To go so far with a romancer is not, as is often thought, a necessary sign that the reader is imaginative: he may be only limp or uncritical, unable to hold his own in the presence of a more powerful fancy. Children are regularly beguiled in this fashion, as are the credulous of all ages by travellers and politicians and priests who have a romantic turn of mind. The creative reader, however, begins to build the minute he begins to read. In varying degrees, of course, he leans upon his writer, but he takes profit from his book in proportion to the amount of creative energy he puts into it. Perhaps the simplest illustration of this is to be noted in the fact that one reads a book with different results at different times. A reader, for instance, who has never been in love cannot find in a play or poem, a novel or biography portraying the effects of love, more than a fraction of what he would find there if he had genuinely known the passion. Another who has thought the history of some foreign country dull may discover that it is fascinating after he has visited that country. And still another may suddenly perceive a large pertinence in ideas or speculations which heretofore have left him cold: he has in his own person caught up with them, and now greets them heartily for the first time though they have been there in the book all the time.