Atmosphere eludes the analyst. It might almost be said that to define it would be to explain it away. Probably the novelist most successful in producing it would be unable to describe how the thing is done. It is part of its essence that you should not see its working; if you detect scaffolding anywhere there is disillusionment and you are back to earth again; if you discover the spell it revenges itself upon you and sulks, and though you may admire the cleverness of it, it is magic no longer for you. It likes you to forget it, and captures you unawares, and then you will recall how it was atmosphere that stole you; but hunt it, and you thwart it, and put yourself out of tune for it. You may remember that some book was a world, and that world showed itself in its atmosphere, and the atmosphere was everywhere, but you cannot put your finger upon a printed page and say “it is here.” In this it is worthy of its name, it defies immediate apprehension. It will not meet you in the face. It is a conspiracy. Various ages of history have their atmosphere--the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century; but atmosphere does not move in step with history, does not belong merely to epochs. Countries and localities have it--like the Highlands of Scotland, or Hungary; and the atmosphere of Puritan London is not that of the contemporary Paris. The peasantry of Scott and the racy story-world in which Dumas was himself, come to us with their atmosphere; and a monastery or a diplomatic circle or the court of some king may carry theirs in a similar way. These are definite areas that cover the lives of men, and they have not merely characteristics but characters of their own. They are not simply modifications of one another any more than Rome is Wapping with a difference. Each is a fresh canvas and in calling them to mind we mix our colours and our emotions differently every time; each leaps in turn as a whole into our minds, so that we think of them as being not merely varied groupings of notes, but different tunes altogether. Each, like a personality, has its particular way of looking at the world and its peculiar attitude to things, and this comes out in a particular twist of mind in men, peculiar tricks of thought and prejudices and shades of feeling. The peasantry of Scotland must have a different sort of jokes, a different range of allusions from the courtiers of Louis XIV. Various of these regions of life and circles of activity must have their special phraseology, even a kind of dialect of their own. Atmosphere belongs to a region that is a life, an identity, a world in itself, and a peculiar synthesis; and he who has the atmosphere must have found--or rather felt--the synthesis.