Having, as I thought, completed this book—bar the Preface, which is, of course, always the last chapter—I sent it in manuscript to an old friend of mine for his opinion. He let me have it.
“Your brochure,” he wrote, “is remarkable more perhaps for what it omits than for what it contains. For example, there is no mention whatever made of the vomero-nasal organ, or organ of Jacobson.”
Then, after drastically sweeping away the much that seems to him redundant in the body of the work, he closes his general criticism (which I omit) with “I should like to have heard your views on the vomero-nasal organ. Parker devotes a whole chapter to it.”
A carpenter, according to the adage, is known by his chips. And it was by the simple removal of some superfluous marble, as everyone knows, that the Venus of Milo was revealed to the world—which is only another way of saying the same thing.
But what sort of a carpenter is he who leaves viamong his chips the mouldings of his door? And what should we say of the sculptor, even in these days, who would treat as a superfluity his lady’s chin?
No mention of the vomero-nasal or Jacobson’s organ! A serious, nay! a damning, defect.
So here am I trying to atone for the sin of omission by giving the neglected item place of honour in my Preface. “The stone which the builders rejected....”
But my motive for erecting it here, in the gateway to my little pagoda of the perfumes, is not quite so simple as I am pretending. The fact is that in my capacity as creator I predetermined, I actually foredained, the omission from my text of the structure to which “Parker devotes a whole chapter.”
I am sorry in some ways. But as the Aberdeen minister so consolingly said: “There are many things the Creator does in His offeecial capacity that He would scorn to do as a private indiveedual.”
You see, I had a feeling about it. One of those feelings artists are subject to. (But a scientific writer an artist?—Certainly! Why not?)
I felt, to be quite frank, that if I were to interpolate a description and a discussion of this minutia my book would ... would.... Quite so. The artist will understand.
I came, in short, to look upon this “organ,” viithis nose within a nose, as a touchstone, so to speak. The thing became a Symbol.
But here we plunge head over heels into the Subjective, on the other side of which stream lie the misty shades of the Occult. For that is what happens to you when you begin talking about Symbols.
However, we shall not be crossing to the other side on this occasion, my symbolism being after all but a humdrum affair.—Merely this, that to me this organ of Jacobson is the symbol of the Exhaustive—of the minute, punctilious, unwearying, laboured comprehensiveness, Teutonic in its over and under and through, that characterises the genuine, the reliable, scientific treatise and renders it so desperately full of interest—to examinees.
Imagine, if you can, the indignation of kindly Sir Walter were the news ever to reach him in Valhalla that urchins now at school are not only forced to study his light-hearted romances as holiday tasks, but are actually examined upon them!
So, comparing small things with great, let me say: “Absit omen.”
My faith in the spoken charm of that phrase is, however, none too robust. Heaven helps the man who helps himself. And so, by way of reinforcing viiithe Powers in their efforts to divert professorial attention from this essay of mine, I am leaving it, by a careful act of carelessness, incomplete.
Here, then, you have the real reason for my exclusion of the organ of Jacobson (and the like). It is merely a dodge to prevent the book ever becoming a task in any way, for any one, at any time.
He who runs may read herein, then, without slackening pace—or he may refrain from reading, just as he pleases, seeing that he can never be under the compulsion of remembering a single word I have written.
This, if I may say so, is, in my opinion, the only kind of book worth reading. At all events, it is the only kind I ever enjoy reading, and I say if a book is not enjoyable it is already placed upon the only Index Expurgatorius that is worth a ... an anathema.
D. M.