By way of relief from the exacting mental strain of the last chapter, I have thought that the reader who has got this length might be grateful for something more simple, and so it is not altogether egotism that leads me to finish up with a few of the olfactory pictures I cherish. Before proceeding with the subject-matter proper of the chapter, however, let me put in a plea for the conscious cultivation of the sense of smell. But little more, I take it, is needed in this way than to pay attention to the olfactory sensations that reach us, for the very fact of taking note of them is sufficient probably to increase the power and delicacy of olfaction, this being always the effect of the mental process known as attention.
Smell may thus be easily cultivated and improved, and with the increase in its appreciation of the world comes an enriching of the other sense-impressions that is quite surprising.
It is possible that there is no substance in the natural world entirely devoid of odour. At all 141events, after a time the amateur in smell may find himself able, like Rousseau, to perceive perfumes when other people do not notice any, and as a mark at which he can aim let it be said that when he finds himself able to distinguish streets from each other by their smell alone he has made some little progress in the art.
The innate acuteness of the sense varies widely in different people. Some go through life blunt to all but the coarser smells, while others are gifted with a sensitiveness as delicate almost as that of a macrosmatic animal. This is scarcely an exaggeration. I am acquainted with people—English people—who are able to recognise by olfaction not only different races and the two sexes, but even different persons. One of those sensitives informs me that to her the personal olfactory atmosphere is every whit as characteristic and unmistakable as the play of features or the carriage of the figure.
Another remarkable feat within the capacity of human macrosmatics, and one that seems almost incredible to the ordinary individual, is that of being able to distinguish the clothing of different persons by its aroma. Some can even recognise their own, a remarkable circumstance in view of the almost universal rule that each is anosmic to his own particular atmosphere.
142It is true that we can get on quite well without smelling. Probably congenital anosmia is the least crippling of all sense-deprivations. But how much it enters into our enjoyment of life when we have once possessed it is shown by the blankness that attends its loss; we feel then as if a tint had been bleached out of the world.
At this juncture we may stay a moment to allude to the action of tobacco on olfaction. There are few people nowadays who would uphold King Jamie’s “Counterblaste,” wherein he denounces smoking as—
“a custome loathsome to the Eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the Braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.”
But, in fact, regarding the influence of the tobacco-habit on the sense there is a conflict of opinion. Some say it dulls olfaction; others, it has no deleterious effect. My own experience would lead me to agree with the former opinion.
We now proceed with our memories.
Who does not become a boy again when the fragrance of a gardener’s bonfire fills the air? In my own case when I smell it my eyes begin to smart and to water, and I hear the laughter and shouts of my brothers as, daring the wrath of 143Olympus, we leap over the blaze and land on the white powdery ash that rises in clouds around us to the ruination of boots and clothing. It is always evening, “’twixt the gloamin’ and the mirk.” The moon, still golden, is hung low in the sky; the wind is sharp with a touch of frost, but the glare and the glow of the embers reddens and warms us—at least that part of us we turn to the fire. (Have you ever felt the fierce pleasure of being at once scorched and frozen?)
In those few country places in Scotland where the old Beltane fires of midsummer or midwinter are still kindled, children are encouraged to pass through the smoke, that being good for their health. The custom, frankly pagan, is probably the maimed rite of a sacrifice of children to the old gods. That may be quite true, and yet I concur in believing the practice to be beneficial. At all events, the bonfires of so many years ago have left with me a memory that has often recurred since, and always with healing on its wings.
Again, the fainter, keener odour of burning pine-wood combined with the fanning sensation on the face of the cold wind of the dawn always brings back to me a summer morning at the Swiss frontier station of Pontarlier after an evening when vin ordinaire had induced effects extraordinaire upon a youth unaccustomed to that fiery 144beverage. Those, no doubt, were the days when nothing mattered much. Nevertheless the fragrant coolness of that morning after touches my aching brow to this day with the soothing gentleness of a hand fraught with understanding and forgiveness.
Then what sea-lover is there but responds to the salt pungency of seaweed on an empty beach?
It is an interesting fact that the smell of the sea may travel inland for miles on a favouring breeze. With the south-west wind blowing moist, I have in the heart of Lanarkshire repeatedly been stirred out of everyday hebetude by the smell of the sea on the Ayrshire coast, some thirty miles away. And Réné Bazin (in “Les Oberlé”) says you can even smell it sometimes in Alsace, 250 miles from the Mediterranean.
Once, indeed, at King’s Cross, London, I beheld monstrous railway-stations and muddy streets, with their motor-’buses, dingy wayfarers, yelling newsboys and all, melting away into the glimmer and space of the sea in a sort of magical transformation, just as mist low-lying in Russell Square will turn at times those garish hotels into sea-girt palaces.... Only this time there was no mist. There was, indeed, no need of mist. For the spell of power was a sudden whiff of the sea from far across the bricks, slates, and sooty chimneys.
145But there is another sea-smell, equally powerful and much less romantic. Can you endure the breath of hot oil and metal from the engines of a steamer without a qualm?
If ever a boy has watched and helped the fishermen clean and tan their nets, he will always after, as often as chance brings the smell to his nostrils, revive again the pit in the ground and the gruff voices of the heavy-booted men pulling the twisted net up and down, in and out.
Or the bean-flowers’ boon?
This, as it happens, concerns also somebody else, but as she has long since been lost in the crowd, I am not breaking any confidences in recalling the scene.
We are standing together beside the gate of a hill plantation, and I see a tall lady’s delicately cut profile against the sombre green and brown of the fir-trees. Although the flush of the sunset has almost entirely faded from the sky, it seems to be lingering yet a while on her cheek as if reluctant to leave her. As for me, I am as keen to every breath of emotion as the little loch below is to the slightest stir of air. The time is past for talk, and I am watching her in silence. So I see the thin curved nostril dilate a little, at once to be quietly restrained, as if even this little display of feeling on her part 146were out of place,—and then I also turn to look at the butterfly bean-flowers in the field at our feet.
Now as often as the bean blooms, so does her memory.
How powerfully associations affect our olfactory likes and dislikes we hinted on a former page, and in this matter of smell-memories we can observe the same effect. Smells which to others seem offensive may, if they arouse a pleasant memory, borrow from it a tinge that turns their offence into a joy for ever. In my own case iodine and the rather irritating odour of bleaching powder are always welcome and always sweet. Yet they recall nothing more interesting than the days of childhood to me! On the other hand, perfumes generally considered to be pleasant will be objectionable to us if they arouse unhappy memories.
The most beautiful, however, are those which have been young with us, and yet have never forsaken us, by continual refreshment keeping an eternal youth. And of all the odours in life none surely is so rich both in retrospect and in prospect as the smell of books to him who loves them. The cosy invitation of a library! Not a public library, needless to say, where the intimate appeal is lost 147in a jumble of smells—dust, paste, ink and clammy overcoats. Such public mixtures the bookworm, that solitary self-centred individual, must, by reason of his shyness, ever consistently shun. But usher him into the private room of a private house where books, many books, have reposed for many years. Then go away and leave him to it.
The smell of a room full of books is slow to form. Like the bouquet of wine, it must ripen. You have to wait. But if you are able to wait, then one fine day you will be welcomed there by the snuggest smell in all the world, which, when once it comes, will for ever remain, like rooks in a clump of elms. I know a few houses where this most seductive of all perfumes has resided for untold years, and whence it will never depart as long as our immemorial England endures. But alas! like most people, I have only been a fleeting visitor to those nooks of enchantment, and have had to wait myself not once, but many times, as often indeed as I have shifted my roof-tree, for that ancient fusty atmosphere. There is, I fear, no way of hastening the appearance of this beckoning finger to oblivion. We need not linger over the analysis of this particular odour. Book-lovers know it. Others don’t care.
“You are a reader, I see,” said an observant doctor to me once.
148“How d’you know that?” I asked in surprise, as we had just met for the first time.
“I know it,” was his reply, “by the caressing way you took up that book!”
Your real bookworm loves all books. Like the modern genius, he is amoral. But unlike the genius, his amorality, simple soul, is confined within the four walls of a library. He could never, I am sure, bring himself to agree with André Theuriet, who in “La Chanoinesse” depicts
“les Bijoux indiscrets auprès des ?uvres de Duclos; Candide, Jacques la Fataliste et le Sophia voisinant de Restif de la Brétonne à deux pas de l’Emile, et les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas—une nouveauté—non loin de l’Histoire philosophique des Indes,”
all of which books, by a kind of moral exercise of his imagination we cannot sufficiently deplore, he found exhaling “une odeur de volupté perverse, quelque chose comme le parfum aphrodisiac des seringes et des tubereuses dans une chambre close.”
Every dwelling-house has its own peculiar atmosphere, sometimes agreeable, sometimes not. But, whatever its quality, so characteristic and persistent are some of them that I am sure a blind man would always be able to tell them by the smell alone. Few of us may be gifted with the analytical nose of a Charles Dickens to detect the ingredients 149that make up a complex domiciliary atmosphere, but everybody must have noticed that basement houses smell differently from bungalows, the former greeting you with a harmonious blend of earthiness, soapsuds, and sinks.
Nay! The house you live in has a separate odour for each room: the drawing-room with it............