Maurice Hewlett’s heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom of another sort of tree—a place where the very sky looked different; but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth, crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there, and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his moods. Molly could not dream that all history—and, behind history, geography—had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different mood, from the Wapping she had known. She “lacked the historic sense.” It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar way; it would have been wrong if it had been possible to think of Rome as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches, all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity which gave it an “atmosphere” of its own.
For a mind that is moulded to a locality the historical novel can come as travel and as an opening of the windows of the world. It is not a history-lesson, a book that sits to facts, a record of things as they actually happened; or rather, it may be all this and it has an added power if it is, but its appeal and purpose are not here. When a reader comes to the historical novel he is not, or ought not to be, ignorant of the fact that it is a form of fiction that he is reading, and that history in it is mixed with inventions in a proportion which he cannot be expected to estimate with any precision. The novel does not replace the history-book; it is a splendid thing if it drives us to the history-book, if it provides us with something—some sort of texture—in which the facts of the history-book, when we come to them, can find a context and a lively significance and a field that gives them play. The real justification of the novel as a way of dealing with the past, is that it brings home to readers the fact that there is such a thing as a world of the past to tell tales about—an arena of vivid and momentous life, in which, men and women were flesh and blood, their sorrows and hopes and adventures real as ours, and their moment as precious as our moment. The power of the novel is that it can give to people the feeling for history, the consciousness that this world is an old world that can tell many stories of lost years, the sense that the present age is the last of a trail of centuries. It makes history a kind of extension of our personal experience, and not merely an addition to the sum of our knowledge.
For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as a world different from our own, and to show something of its character and colouring than to map out a particular path in that world and to track down a particular course of public events. It is more important for him to breathe the spirit of a bygone age, and make his book the stuff of its mind, and recapture its turns of thought, its fund of feeling, and all its waywardnesses than to chronicle events with precision and keep tight to big political happenings. The supreme thing for him is to catch the age as a synthesis, to reproduce its way of looking at the world, its acceptance of life, and the peculiar quality of its experience, rather than to relate things that actually happened. Looking to some distant time he does not, so to speak, see “notes,” and relations of notes, but catches a “tune”; he figures it, not as a heap of facts and happenings but as the World-life in one of its moods. He enumerates, describes, comments, perhaps; but the real secret of his art is that in doing all these things he disengages a subtle influence—does it as if by stealth—he breathes a thing that quickens and that is as spirit to the body; so that while he is describing or reflecting or narrating the age itself seems to conspire with him, and presents itself in its “atmosphere.”
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.
These various areas of life—ages of history, localities and circles of activity—may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results, as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. And just as a child learning to read at first spells out only letters, and consciously combines them into words and only gradually learns to see words as a whole and take them in at a glance—just as a learner in music at first only sees notes and has to use some effort in order to combine them into a chord, and only later comes to grasp a chord at sight—so the student of history at first sees only these isolated details and pieces of fact, and must gradually come to the point at which his mind can jump to a synthesis and see the one life that is the source of a variety of facts. The novelist consciously reproducing facts from history, copying its handwriting letter by letter, advancing by accumulation, and straining for a faithful presentation of details in the life of a people, can scarcely avoid betraying the mechanism with which he works; but the writer who has caught the principle that lies behind all these facts, and sees not merely men and actions and sayings, but a life underneath all these, has caught history at its source; he can throw down his scaffolding. Step by step he has followed facts and weighed his evidence and hung upon details, until there has flashed in upon him the something that gives light and meaning to them all, and changes them into a vision. The age of history is no longer to him a sum of information, but a world that has been won and appropriated. More facts and details that he may amass find their setting and significance, find a context in that world; they may also check, or change, or amplify his acceptance and appreciation of it; but to him, that age of history is a world in his mind, like a childhood’s scene half-remembered, and he may withdraw to it at will, retreading it in his thinking—crossing and recrossing, and playing upon it in his imagination, all the time recasting it in the process.
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.
And just as he enters into the things that conditioned the thinking of these men of former days, the novelist in a larger way fits life to the things which conditioned their experience, and moves within the framework of the age. It is the same human nature all the time, which he is describing, but it comes in different disguises, and is always finding fresh symbols for itself, fresh forms for its expression. The same essential fact, the same inner experience, takes different turns in its unfolding. The boy who runs away to escape the drudgery near at hand may be the same in every century; but to-day it will be the dullness of school-routine that brings unrest and the cinema that brings incitement; while in some bygone age it would be the cruelty of apprentice-life that became unbearable, and tales of high adventure on the Spanish Main that made the world inviting. This would lead to a different wayfaring. It is a fresh story altogether. Love may be ever the same but it will not blossom out into the identical facts, it will not raise the same issues, it will not lure to the same adventures, altogether it will not unfold its story in the same way, in various worlds of convention. The novelist who knows the experience must weave it to the pattern and run it into the mould of the century with which he is dealing, he must fit it to the machinery of life as it then was, he must translate it into the terms of the age. Present experience, in so far as it is eternal experience, can be referred back to a different world, where even to the farthest detail of its working it will run into different forms; and the facility, the inevitability with which this is done, so that you do not find a modern love-story transplanted into alien soil, patched into an old tapestry, set in a mere background of mediaeval staging and dress, but the whole theme overhauled with insistent reference to the conditioning features of the age, by a mind that has not wearied of playing upon the implications of these things—is one of the things which make the age as reproduced in the novel come to us with conviction, and with atmosphere. Perhaps the lack of this constant way of running back to the past in thinking till everything has been remoulded is what makes The Cloister and the Hearth fail in atmosphere, and seem like a story of modern convention merely clothed in an old-world dress and staged in mediaeval setting, without coming as a live blossoming of mediaeval life.
It is recalled in Henry James’s Notes on Novelists how Robert Louis Stevenson made Edinburgh his “own.”
And this (we are told) even in spite of continual absence—in virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession.