ed except through sympathy.

Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writer
than extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although the
latter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel and
voluntary association with many and various types of people, the
former can never be gained through any amount of deliberate and
conscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of life, like love
and friendship, must come unsought if they are to come at all; and no
man can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimenting
purposely with life. The deep experiences must be watched and waited
for. The author must be ever ready to realize them when they come: when
they knock upon his door, he must not make the mistake of answering
that he is not at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake of
going out into the highways and hedges to compel them to come within
his gates.

=The Experiencing Nature.=--Undoubtedly, very few people are always at
home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very few
people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But
great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature;
and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers
are born, not made. The experiencing nature is difficult to define;
but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a lively
curiosity and a ready sympathy. A combination of these two qualities
gives a man that intensity of interest in human life which is a
condition precedent to his ever growing to understand it. Curiosity,
for instance, is the most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling's equipment. We
did not need his playful confession in the "Just So Stories"--

"I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew):--
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who"--

to convince us that from his very early youth he has been an
indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthy
curiosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specific
knowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayed
in his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through
his vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn so
thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London.

=Curiosity and Sympathy.=--Experience gravitates t