In a former chapter we dwelt upon the curious fact that memories aroused by olfactory stimuli are independent of the will. Now there is yet another way in which smell ignores the head of the cerebral hierarchy. Although on occasion confining its operations to the subconsciousness, and exercising, so to speak, only a backstairs influence upon the mind, olfaction much more frequently insists upon recognition, breaking in upon our privacy, like a disreputable acquaintance, at most inopportune moments.
If you do not wish to see you can look the other way. When you would rather not hear you can be inattentive. A proffered handshake you can ignore. A dish you dislike you may decline. But you can’t help smelling—no, not even if you turn up your nose.
Olfaction is thus the great leveller among the senses, equality having here a reality but rarely found elsewhere. For odour makes its way into the nose of king and cadger, duke and drayman, 80lady and lout, indifferently. Nay, by an ironical law of olfaction the f?tors are more powerful than the fragrances, and vervain the feeble turns tail before the onslaught of scatol (as well it might, indeed!), in which case there is nothing to be done but to bear it (without the grin mostly); or to follow the wise example of vervain; or to remove the offence, as we have done in England these latter days, only to render ourselves, as I have carefully pointed out in Chapter I., all the more sensitive to it when it does come.
To many of us it comes on the dog.
This animal has a regrettable fondness for wallowing, diligently and with forethought, in the Abominable, until his coat is thoroughly well impregnated. For no other reason, I do verily believe, than, as he thinks, to give his human friends for once some of the olfactory pleasure he himself enjoys. A treat he thinks it, without any doubt. Just look at the smirk of pride and satisfaction on his face as he trots in and resumes his place on the drawing-room hearthrug and the amazement with which he receives the sudden toe of your boot!
And yet he rolls himself over on the odoriferous for the same reason that a fashionable lady has orris-root put in her bath; namely, for the pleasure and gratification of society at large. There are who say that my lady’s perfume seems 81as vile to her Pekinese as his then does to her! If so, he is the more tolerant animal of the two.
Anyhow, he certainly has the knack of thrusting the Unmentionable upon the attention of the most fastidious, and smell is no longer speechless.
Now, if we are to treat fully of things olfactory, we must at least take cognisance of the Unmentionable. But to extend our notice would take us across the garden to the muckrake and the dunghill. And such nearer investigation and description I must decline, even although in these days of outspokenness I may have to apologise for Victorian squeamishness. To attain merit as a writer the advice now given you is: Be frank! And if you disgust, why, so much the better!
That may be so. I do not question the value of the advice, not for a moment. All I say is that I prefer not to take it. And if somebody else desires this particular laurel-crown, this crown of tainted laurel, he shall wear it without arousing any envy upon my part, albeit, as I know full well, this is a branch of the subject which illuminates many obscurities and seeming eccentricities in human conduct. I know all about that, but, as Herodotus so often says, I am not going to tell all I know, although, I fear, an allusion or two may be necessary.
82We may take it as on the whole true that a repulsive odour is a dangerous odour. Not invariably, however. Otherwise grouse in their season would not be esteemed a dainty and Gorgonzola would everywhere be buried. Nevertheless in these high realms palatability is limited to quite a narrow streak. There is a level beyond which the boldest gastronomic adventurer dare not climb.
It is remarkable that the liking for half-decomposed food, although an acquired taste, is found everywhere in the world, among savage and civilised, rich and poor, high and low—but not among young and old. For young people do not usually approve of such recherché flavours. It would be a mistake, however, to argue from that fact that these savoury meats act as fillips to a sense jaded with age, because it is generally agreed that neither smell nor taste declines in acuteness as we grow old. On the contrary, they become more instructed, more particular, more delicate. Appetite declines if you like, but taste and smell abide increasingly unto the end.
Nevertheless we can only look upon this particular liking as acquired, since the high relish of one country but fills its neighbours with disgust.
It is worthy of remark, perhaps, that the last whiff, the final sublimated breath of ripe Gorgonzola as it passes over, is a faint suggestion of 83ammonia. Curiously enough, this always fills my imagination with the sack of cities and the end of all things in smoke and thunder. It may be because the penultimate phase of life itself is ammonia. Fire, slaughter, and much more besides come quite promptly to this gas for the City of Destruction, what there is left of the remainder in dust and ashes being but a handful for the wind.
To the keen-sensed medical man certain morbid states can be recognised by their exhalations. I have even heard of an enthusiast on the subject who alluded to them as “both visible and tangible”; but that, I think, must be exceptional.
Physicians of the last generation used to speak of typhus fever as having a close, mawkish odour, and the smell of smallpox is horrible. But these, as well as the appalling stench of the hospitals in olden days, are among the smells which have, for the most part, fled our country.
There are others, however, less powerful and repugnant, which are still with us, and which we recognise as among the prominent characteristics of certain maladies, the acid smell of acute rheumatism for one, and I have sometimes thought I could detect a characteristic odour also in acute nephritis, a smell resembling that of chaff. The odour of a big h?morrhage is unmistakable and, to obstetricians particularly, ominous.
84Then there is the smell of mice which attends upon the skin disease known as favus.
The breath of a chronic drunkard is familiar enough to everybody, and the more delicate aroma in the circumambient atmosphere of the careful tippler, ethereal and by no means unpleasant, will often reveal to the physician the hidden cause of obscure symptoms. It is particularly valuable when your patient is, as so many of these secret drinkers are, a woman, it may be a woman of good social standing.
A disease-odour of great value and significance is the sweet-smelling breath caused by acetone poisoning in the later stages of diabetes.
A sweet smell is also said by Bacon to attend plague:
“The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath the scent of a smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague, as white lilies, cowslips and hyacynth.” (Quoted by Creighton, “A History of British Epidemics,” p. 685, f.n.)
Death sometimes heralds his approach by means of an odour, said in some parts of the country to bring ravens about the house, which may well be true, as it is apparently a summons of the same nature that calls the Indian vulture in flocks from apparently untenanted skies. Birds in general, 85however, seem to belong to the microsmatic group of animals, relying chiefly upon their vision, which is often highly perfected, particularly for distance.
Much has been made, too much perhaps, of the part played by olfaction in the sex-life, and its undoubted prominence in the coupling of four-footed animals is pointed to as an indication of its potency in mankind also. But the reasoning is fallacious. Olfactory influences predominate in these animals simply because olfaction is their principal sense.
Among birds, now, courtship and marriage are conducted without any apparent aid from olfaction, and in no group of beings, not even in mankind, is the poetic side of courtship, both before and after marriage, so highly developed and so beautifully displayed. In their love-making the birds appeal to each other through the ear in their songs, and through the eye in the nuptial splendours of the male, splendours which he parades with glorious pomp before what often seems to be, indeed, but a lackadaisical and indifferent spouse.
As we have already seen, this independence of olfactory stimuli is, so far as obvious indications go, also the case with human lovers. True, we have numerous references by poets to the sweetness 86of their ladies’ breath, only one, as far as I know, being blunt enough to say:
“And in some perfumes there is more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.”
But the sum and substance of Havelock Ellis’s exhaustive inquiry on this point is undoubtedly this, that if a lover loves the aroma of his lady, that is because of his love, not because of her inherent sweetness. In other words, the attraction, subtle though it be, at least in the early or romantic stage, is seldom or never obviously olfactory. It is the suggestion of closer intimacy that constitutes the attraction of her nearer environment, and this suggestion is the offspring of the lover’s imagination.
As to the influence of her personal emanation in the second, the realistic, stage, there also, it would seem, its power is subsidiary, certainly to that of touch, although more active than that of sight and hearing, seeing that the holy of holies is only unveiled in darkness and in silence.
As for our opinion in everyday life, I think most people will subscribe to the old adage “Mulier bene olet dum nihil olet.”