t to learn, for instance, how the
great short-stories have been constructed. It is easy enough for the
critic, on the basis of such knowledge, to formulate empirically the
principles of this special art of narrative. But it is not easy for
the student to discover, or for the critic to suggest, how a man in
his early twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life as
is displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of
Clergy." A few suggestions may, perhaps, be offered; but they must be
considered merely as suggestions, and must not be overvalued.

=General and Particular Experience.=--At the outset, it may be
noted that the writer of fiction needs two different endowments of
experience:--first, a broad and general experience of life at
large; and second, a deep and specific experience of that particular
phase of life which he wishes to depict. A general and broad
experience is common to all masters of the art of fiction: it is in
the particular nature of their specific and deep experience that
they differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of general
knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he
confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day
English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have
made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field.
Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on
London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization.
It would seem, therefore, that a young author, while keeping his
observation fresh for all experience, should devote especial notice
to experience of some particular phase of life. But along comes Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle us
out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.

=Extensive and Intensive Experience.=--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 learn