Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
DUST OF THE ROSE PETAL
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 events, 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.
It 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—
“as custome loathsome to the Eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the Braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, necrest rescmbling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is botlomlesse.”
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 Olympus, 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 beverage. 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 Oberle”) 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 gatish 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.
But 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 were 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, arc 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 80 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 in 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.
“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 Brjoux indiscrets auprés des œuvres de Duclos ; Candide, Jacques la Fataliste et le Sophia voisinant de Restif de la Bréttone à deux pas de l’Emile, et les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas—une nouveauts—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 peryerse, quelque chose comme le parfum aphrodisiac des scringes 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 T 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 that 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 its chintzes ; the snuggery with its stale tobacco, and, perhaps, like an insinuating nudge, with a whiff of the stronger alcohols; the bedrooms, if your housekeeper knows her business, with the freshness of well-aired linen.
The very days of the week have each its own particular olfactory mark, dating from our childhood : Sundays (in Scotland), peppermint followed by roast beef and richness; Mondays, pickles and soapsuds ; Tuesday, the damp airs from the washing hung up to dry ; Wednesdays, warmth and beeswax from the laundry, with ever and anon the thump of the flat iron ; Thursdays, bread new from the baker and the washing of floors with soft soap—“Mind yer feet, now!”—Fridays, jam-boiling and the never-to-be-forgotten aroma of oat-cakes on the girdle ; Saturdays—but Saturday is a day of wind and banging doors, of tops and dust ; all its smells are out of doors.
Shops, too ! What of the coffee-shop ?—Who does not pause a moment at that door when the beans are roasting? One of the richest of all odours that; curious how you lose it in the beverage ! Then there is the ironmonger’s, where the sharp smell of steel strikes, by some strange reflex, the upper incisor teeth and gums; the oil and colour shop, with its putty, turpentine, and general clamminess ; and, last and best of all, the druggist’s !
What about the fried fish-shop ? Faugh ! I once for a reason connected with my calling had cause to spend a whole night in a room above a fish-shop—once only. The next time (there never will be a next time, she swears, but there always is)—the next time I happened, curiously enough, to arrive late !
But although houses and rooms and, as we hinted, streets also, all smell differently, each town and city has its own peculiar fundamental odour. There is a town in Yorkshire that smells of “mungo.” I know another that smells of mineral oil, and many that exhale the dank smell of the coal-mine.
London has a smell of its own, a fundamental familiar odour, which, by the way, has changed of late. Twenty years ago it was faintly acid with a background of horses and harness. To-day it is a mixture of tar and burned lubricating oil, by no means so pleasant. In addition to these, however, there is another and less prominent odour characteristic of the London atmosphere, which I confess I cannot describe.
“Once upon a time, some forty years ago, there lived at Highgate, which then still retained some of the characters of a village, a lady who declared that when a yellow fog drifted up from London she could detect the smell of tobaceo smoke in it. to most people the odour is flatly that of coal smoke, which is perhaps always more or less to be perceived in London air. This at any rate would seem to have been the opinion of Edward Jenner, if we may trust a note made by Farington in his diary for 1809, which is being printed in the Morning&nbps;Post. Tarington’s note is as follows :
“‘Dr. Jenner observed to Lawrence that He could by smelling at His Handkerchief on going out of London ascertain when he came into an atmosphere untainted by the London air. His method was to smell at His Handkerchief occasionally, and while He continued within the London atmosphere He could never be sensible of any taint upon it ; but, for instance, when He approached Blackheath and took His Handkerchief out of His pocket where it had not been exposed to the better air of that situation—His sense of smelling having become more pure he could perceive the taint, His calculation was that the air of London affected that in the vicinity to the distance of three miles’” (The Lancet).
Paris, in like manner, has its own peculiar aroma, Lord Frederick Hamilton analyses it correctly into “one-half wood-smoke, one-quarter roasting coffee, and one-quarter drains.” But for myself the Paris air always brings a curious half-suppressed feeling of excitement, part of it pleasure, part apprehension, as if something tremendous were about to happen. But here perhaps we cross the border-line between conscious sensation and subconscious stimulation.
Rome is a city of candles and incense mingled with the dry mustiness of crumbling skeletons.
In Edinburgh you encounter here and there the smell of old Scotland. Thatch enters into its make-up, why I cannot tell you. But the cold grey metropolis still preserves the soul of the thatch, a cosy sensation that is prone to bring tears to the eyes of the returning exile.
In Glasgow damp soot struggles with the smell of the Bromielaw for the mastery.
Dublin mingles the warm, rich aroma of Guinness’s Brewery with the cold smell of a corpse from the Liffey.
Those are the cities I know best myself. But I have often been told, and can quite believe it, that every city has its own particular atmosphere.
Some days, both in a city and in the country, are as rich and full of odours as a Turner picture is rich and various in colour. Other days bring us but a grey Whistlerian monotone, in which, nevertheless, the trained sense delights to distinguish an infinity of tender shades, unobserved by the casual.
I used to think that country smells were particularly dear to the country-born only, and that their charm lay in their evocation of childish memories. But that is not the whole of the story. They attract us by their own inherent beauty. I have known town-bred lads linger about a stable because the smell, I was told, was “so sweet.” And most of us are, to be sure, sufficiently horsey to enjoy that smell of straw and ammonia. We linger near it as bees haunt clover or cats valerian. And we are all horse-lovers sitting behind a smart cob on a hot day when the smell of the harness is mingling with the horse-odour. But these now old-world odours are being every day more and more ousted by the less pleasant smells of the motor-car, petrol, lubricating oil, and acetylene—a pure stink this last.
But the farm is an olfactory museum, a library, a symphony ! How warm and comforting is the smell of a byre full of cows ! Plunge into it from the cool of the evening and listen again to the sudden swish of the warm milk into the pail, the uncompleted low of the sober cattle and the rattle of the chain as they turn to look at the new-comer. A gentle relaxation of the spirit attends the visit like the relief of the limbs from a cramped position, and we readily fall into that mood, so rare these latter days, when attention disperses and the reins drop on the neck of the mind so that it wanders on at its will up and down the lanes and by-ways of fancy. These paths are dangerous, to be sure, leading as they do to the Castle of Indolence, where you may dream your life away and be none the wiser.
Yet there must be many who have so wandered regardless, and have wakened up too late to recapture the days they have lost in dreaming, if they ever do want to recapture them, which is doubtful. If we really intended happiness in life—as we do not ; what we intend, and ensure, too, for that matter, is excitement—but if we really intended happiness, here is where we should find it, in and about a farmyard as hangers-on. Not as the farmer, needless to say, to whose mind these olfactory stimuli arc stimulant, not anodyne. So that there can be no greater contrast than that between him and us. Every one knows how the idler idling irritates the worker working, And so we are brought back to reality all too soon by the slap of fate, waking up from a bank of thyme and dreams to the pavement of worry and hard work.
But it is sweet while it lasts, and if you can acquire, or are Incky enough to have been born with, pachydermia of the soul, then it may last for a lifetime—unless, that is to say, fate, as aforesaid, in the shape of the farmer, brings you back a-bump to earth with a clout on the side of the head and an order to take the hook and cut down thistles.
Stevenson has told us that idling is no loss of time. Perhaps not, if we happen to be geniuses. But the mischief is that the rest of your family deny (with oaths) the major premiss, and the prophet - without - honour consolation prize is but a poor substitute for the loss of comfortable eternities dozed away beside the lazy kine.
Some time in the ’eighties of last century a French professor (Jaccoud) recommended the air of a byre as beneficial in phthisis.
I have known worse cures.
Why do not the perfume-makers present us with more of these gateways to Paradise, short cuts beside which De Quincey’s laudanum in the waistcoat-pocket is but a by-path to hell? We might be given odours of peace and contentment—think of them in the hands of a clever wife ! We might make libraries of them as people make libraries of gramophone records. So far all we have are flower scents, like roses, lilies, violets, and outlandish Eastern aromata, redolent rather of vice and its excitements than of virtue and its placidity.
Then there is the scent of thyme and roses in the farm garden. This brings to me old Sundays and ladies passing the open garden-gate on their way to church, with their Bible carefully wrapped up in a clean pocket-handkerchief, bearing with them also what somebody in Scotland calls “the odour of sanctity” —peppermints, to wit—and all the time the bees are humming in the warm air a deep note to the trills and runs of the skylark lost in the blue.
But I could wander on for an eternity with these smell memories and pictures, One more, and I have done with the farm, and that is the cool smell of the milk-house. It is dark there after the blaze outside, and the stone flags strike cold to a boy’s bare feet wandering in from the burning cobbles of the courtyard. As your eyes become accustomed to the dimness you can see on the floor the wide, shallow milk coolers, silvery as full moons in that twilight, the only light that enters coming through the long slit of a narrow unglazed window where blistery leaves of green docken, springing rank from the unkempt garden without, show a splash of sunlight. The smell is sourish and cold, if we may speak, as I think we may, of the temperature of a smell. This is forbidden land to boys for obvious reasons, but so strong is the impression that I have never forgotten my one and only visit to that secluded chamber.
What is it that gives to a dungeon its characteristic smell ? Emphatic as a blow. Obviously, we have here a combination of several sense impressions, tactile, visual, olfactory : tactile, for the air is damp and chilly ; visual, for it is a blank, a negative, and yet a powerful influence ; olfactory, smelling ominous and of death. Old dried bones emit precisely the same exhalation. In a subtle way, too, the presence of mould is perceptible, all blending into the horrible and grisly atmosphere of despair; the Valse Triste and the Dance of Death.
Smell can bring as certainly and as irresistibly as music emotions of all sorts to the mind.
In this same category we may place the dusty smell of a dry hay-loft, which is curiously like that of bitter almonds and hydrocyanic acid. It has a sensation like ghostly fingers fumbling about your neck with a threat, half playful, half serious, of suffocation, And, curiously enough, the mental feeling of throttling fingers is not amiss. Prussic acid kills by paralysing the respiratory centres.
Let us get out into fresh air again ! The sun is shining. A gentle breeze from the west is snowing the lawn with fragrant hawthorn blossoms. I catch a whiff of delicate lilac, and see coming towards me over the grass a slender figure in white. …
And so we close with the perfumes of the spring, sunshine, and beauty.