Behind a thousand sunsets there lies a world where men were full of the hunt and the anxious harvest-times, and slept with their swords near at hand. To them the Atlantic Ocean was a thing to raise terror, a place for strange storytelling; the demons were not yet driven from the woods; and earth was a precarious place in which the elemental forces seemed inexorable. It was a world of wild mythologies, and of simple things half-understood. It comes to us--we “remember” it--in fragments like this; and we try to piece it together again. The centuries have tiptoed and gone, and the things that people have been afraid of, the things that have raised a thrill, the things men have talked and joked and told easy lies about, have not always remained the same. Their logic has been different from our logic, as a schoolboy’s is different from a priest’s. The things which in their thinking they were always referring to, mirrored the world they knew. The ideas that were handy to their minds, the words that came soonest to their lips, the turn that was easiest to their talk, their whole fund of metaphors and expressions, betrayed their preoccupations and lit up the background of their lives. Perhaps the Sunday church-bell sounded differently to their ears and reached a hidden corner in their minds. Perhaps they had not learned to think of the stars as loveliness. For them there could be no evening silhouettes of chimney-pots and telegraph-wires against the glaring moon, no dream of long white roads that should shake with hurried, humming traffic--the pictures they felt at home with were not the same as ours. And just as, in a land where earthquakes are to be expected, the fact must give a twist to the art of building, the thoughts of architects, so, in those distant ages, the world that people knew, the things they felt at home with, a hundred significant details, moulded the forms of their thoughts, and conditioned the terms of their thinking, and made the maps of their minds. It is by entering into this fact that the novelist can do more than simply copy some recorded details of their world, and can recapture something of their life. In so far as he succeeds at all it is because the things which conditioned their thinking, he accepts for himself. He does not analyse them from the outside, but submits and surrenders to them, makes them in fact his own. Telling a tale of some far-off world, he will not speak of the stars with the love of the poet; he will remember that the astrologers had made them a dread relentless destiny, so that this would be an alien fact. He will explore things of this kind, and take them into his thinking, and make them part of his kingdom; for it is a surprise of facts such as this--which show the age true to itself in an unexpected way--and it is the cumulative effect of a host of them, that powerfully make for atmosphere.