e,
to jostle us out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.

Experience is of two sorts, extensive and intensive. A mere glance at
the range of Mr. Kipling's subjects would show us the breadth of his
extensive experience: evidently he has lived in many lands and looked
with sympathy upon the lives of many sorts of people. But in certain
stories, like his "They" for instance, we are arrested rather by the
depth of his intensive experience. "They" reveals to us an author who
not necessarily has roamed about the world, but who necessarily has
felt all phases of the mother-longing in a woman. The things that Mr.
Kipling knows in "They" could never have been learned 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.

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 kn