Whatever of myth there may be in the quaint stories we related in Chapter V., there is no doubt about this, that there is great variety among different individuals in respect to their personal atmosphere. I mean the natural atmosphere of the person, of course, not the artificial airs that surround and envelop the beperfumed modern lady. There is no need to enlarge upon this branch of our subject. Those who are curious about it may apply themselves to Havelock Ellis for more detailed information. What I am concerned with here is something much less commonplace and obvious, the question, namely, whether we disseminate and receive, each of us, anything less material than the odours we are conscious of.
In addition to his other olfactory accomplishments, our friend the dog seems to be able to distinguish by smell when a strange dog is to be cultivated as a friend or wrangled with as a foe, and nothing is more amusing to watch than the careful and even suspicious olfactory investigation 88two dogs meeting for the first time make of each other’s odours, during which exchange of credentials a state of armed neutrality exists, to pass, apparently as a result of some mysterious olfactory decision, either into frank, open, and unchangeable hostility, or into friendship equally frank, open, and unchangeable.
But what it is that makes one dog smell to another of enmity or of friendship is as mysterious as—the mutual attraction or repulsion felt for each other by two human beings, shall we say? For, of course, this suspense of judgment on encountering a new-comer is a human no less than a canine trait. There were physiognomists before Lavater, since we are naturally influenced by what our senses, and especially our eyes and our ears, tell us about a person we are meeting for the first time. We like the look of the man, his expression, his smile, the character of his movements, bodily as well as facial; we find the intonation of his voice, his accent, his laugh, agreeable. Or we don’t. And our decision is curiously independent of his moral character, even after we have got to know that side of him. Now, this act of judgment seems to us to be quite independent of any olfactory evidence. We rely upon our predominant senses just as the dog relies upon his. Yet I sometimes catch myself wondering whether olfaction, olfaction rarefied and refined beyond 89imagining, does not without our knowledge play some part in our estimate of the pros and cons in character.
What is conveyed to us by the “personality” of a man? Here we have apparently a complex of sense-impressions, for the most part vague, which we are seldom able to analyse, even to ourselves. Still less can we put it into words capable of conveying our impression to other people. “There is something about him that I like” is about the sum-total of our attempts at description.
And if this be true as between man and man, it is even more often remarked as between man and woman. Meredith it is, I think, who says that the surest way to a woman’s heart is through her eye. Fortunately for most of us, his dictum is open to question. Otherwise the human race would soon come to an end. Now, although, unlike Meredith, I cannot claim the rank of a high-priest in the temple of Venus, yet so far as I may dare to express an opinion upon a matter so recondite, not to say mysterious, I should rather be inclined to say that the surest route is by way of her ear, and I am fortified in my belief by an authority as erudite in these matters as Meredith himself, Shakespeare to wit:
“That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”
90John Wilkes, they say, to all appearance a “most uninteresting-looking man,” asked for only half an hour of a start to beat the handsomest gentleman in England at the game of games. Women forgot what he was like as soon as he began to talk.
Who has not seen women turning sidelong glances, with that surreptitious intentness we all know so well, towards some very ordinary man in whose voice they, but not we, detect the indefinable something that has the power of luring these shy creatures from their inaccessible retreats? What man has not seen this play and puzzled over it? The quality—is it perhaps something caressing, or something brutal and ultra-masculine, or both at once? Who knows what it is that their intuition perceives?
So we ask, we less favoured mortals, as we turn and look at him also, hard and long, only to give it up with a shrug!
When I am one of a crowd under the spell of an orator—a rare bird, by the way, in England—I feel his power less in what he says than in how he says it. Gladstone, for example, swayed his audience by the fervour of his personality, not by any beauty of word or thought in his rhetoric. How meaningless his speeches seem to us nowadays as we vainly try to read them, how involved, discursive, ambiguous, turgid. How dull! And yet we 91know that these same involved, discursive, ambiguous, turgid and dull speeches could and did rouse hard-bitten Scotsmen to a wildness of enthusiasm that seems to us incredible.
Thus the personality is something that travels on the wings of sound. But is that all? Is there not something more, something imperceptible which yet exercises a secret power over our emotions and passions? Is there an olfactory aura?
“Why does the elevation of the Host in a Roman Catholic church bring such an assurance of peace to the congregation?” writes a friend of mine. “This remarkable sensation I have myself frequently experienced and wondered at. Yet I am, as you know, a Scots Presbyterian, and do not credit for a single moment the miraculous change of bread and wine. And yet to this gracious and comforting influence I have been subject on more than one occasion. It is for all the world as if the constant pin-pricks of our normal life were suspended for a moment or two.
“It is present only during service, and then only at the culmination of the rite.
“As I do not believe in the miracle, the influence must come to me from without, not from within myself. Indeed, I have actually come to the conclusion that it is borne in upon me not by the church atmosphere with its incense, nor by the solemn intonation of the priest, nor by the whisper of the muted organ, nor yet by the distant murmur of the choir, but—by the congregation itself!
“It is from the kneeling worshippers that the mysterious influence emanates, invisibly, inaudibly, intangibly, to suffuse with the peace of some other world the spirit even of an unbeliever....”
Is it possible that influences such as these may enter by the olfactory door?
92This perhaps may seem to be rather a fanciful suggestion for a scientifically trained writer to offer. But it is not wholly fanciful, since it has some support at least from theory (whatever that may be worth), and even from some considerations based upon solid fact.
As to theory, we have already seen how Fabre arrived at the conclusion that the olfactory sense of certain insects is capable of receiving stimuli to which we are insensitive, stimuli which he surmised to be o............