tion will not have
verisimilitude emotionally. A story is both a physical spectacle and an
emotional progression; the author must write both for the reader's eye
and for his soul. If any story touches emotional heights, its reader
must be stimulated thereto by proper preparation.

It remains to consider the matter of atmosphere, as the term is used
with relation to the strict story of atmosphere, which emphasizes the
emotional value of the whole for a reader rather than the significance
of the events or characters.

The intrinsic difficulty to blend such diverse matters as people,
events, and setting or environment into an even emotional unity requires
that the strict story of atmosphere be a short story. Even if it is not
a short story in point of actual length, it will be a short story in
point of structure, that is, it will lead relatively few characters
through little diversity of setting to a single main situation, or
perhaps even to no main situation, in a dramatic sense. As noted in
discussing story types, the progression of the particular atmosphere to
the point of highest intensity gives the strict story of atmosphere much
of its story-character. The human element is incidental and subordinate.
However, the task of keeping people, events, and setting true to a fixed
emotional tone is so difficult that a writer cannot sustain the effort
for long. Many novels or relatively lengthy stories have high
atmospheric value; Hardy's Wessex novels possess the quality, as does
much of Joseph Conrad's work, "Almayer's Folly," for instance; but it is
generally true that the intrinsic difficulty of the story of atmosphere
tends to confine it within brief limits. It is certainly true that only
the skilled hand can compass the feat of writing it at all.

I have stated that the setting of a story is not its atmosphere, and
that is true. Nevertheless the setting is most often what determines the
emotional effect of the whole. A hundred instances might be cited--"The
Merry Men," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Almayer's Folly," "The
Return of the Native." This results from the fact that setting or
environment is much more potent to produce a relatively definite
emotional effect on an observer than either a person or an event, the
two other elements of a story. A murder may produce a very definite
feeling of horror in an observer or reader, but the emotion, while
definite, is not linked inevitably to murder alone. Many other