Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
OLFACTORY MEMORY
The predominant special senses in man are vision and hearing, olfaction occupying a quite unimportant position in the scale,
Smell and taste, by the way, are usually regarded not only as allied senses, but also as if they were akin in their nature and function, Allied they are, undoubtedly, seeing that both subserve the function of food-perception. But the resemblance ends there, For, of the two, smell is at once the more delicate and the more extensive in capacity, and, as they differ widely in their anatomical structure, there can be no doubt but that in physiological action also they are dissimilar.
The taste-bulbs are capable of appreciating four sensations only, and these quite simple, while the capacity of the olfactory organ, as we shall see more fully later on, is practically unlimited. All the subtlety of “taste,” all that we call “flavour,” is an olfactory sensation. Thus, people devoid of the sense of smell cannot discern the finer savours. They would be unable to distinguish, say, a vanilla from a strawberry ice. All they could tell would be that both were cold and sweet.
The popular phrase which refers the appreciation of the finer shades of taste to the “palate” we may therefore look upon as an attempt to express the feeling that delicate flavours are sensed somewhere higher up than in the mouth. So that a “man of taste” is really a man of smell, and all the literary eloquence in praise of wine and dainty food, to say nothing of the more prosy cookery books, is, in reality, a general hymn of adulation offered unwittingly to the nose !
Compared with sight and hearing, however, smell in man is only one of the minor senses. But, as if to make up for a position so inferior, it is remarkable as being the most subtle of all
our senses, possibly, as some hold, because of the ancestral appeal to our (more or less repressed) animal nature. So subtle is it, indeed, that I am persuaded its stimuli may not, on occasion, emerge into consciousness at all. They remain below the threshold. So that, although subjected to their influence, we may remain ignorant of the cause of that influence. For smell often operates powerfully, not only in surreptitiously enriching and invigorating the mental impression of an event, but also in directing at times the flow of ideas into some particular channel independent of the will. The influence of the perfume of a woman’s hair in unexpectedly arousing a feeling of intimacy will appeal to the male reader as a good example of this upsurging interference with the placid flow of normal ideation.
Perhaps, also, this is the explanation of a strange and rather unpleasant ghost-story I once heard. I dare not vouch for the truth of it, but as it bears upon the subject we are considering, I give it here, not without misgiving, for what it is worth, For the sake of verisimilitude I shall relate it pretty much in the narrator’s own words :
“The evening he came back I was sitting in my room alone. T had just got back from the play, the subject of which had been, it so happened, the influence of people recently dead upon those left behind. I suppose that’s what turned my mind to my sorrow of the previous year when I lost him. It is my husband I am talking about.
“I was sitting gazing at the fire, and I expect you will say I had fallen asleep. Perhaps I had. It doesn't matter really.
“We had been happy enough together, he and I. Just an ordinary married couple, you might say. But now and then a terrible longing would come over me just to see him once more, … to hear him speak, … to touch him. … I know it is selfish, and maybe unwise, to give way to those feelings, … but never mind that! Well, on the night I am telling you about, there came to my recollection some of the silly cantrips those Spiritualist people used to carry on. Oh, yes, it is quite true : I had gone once or twice to see them, and had even taken part in their services—séances, I should say—in James’s lifetime, I mean, before he died. Indeed T went with him. … I never went after. … I don’t know. … It seemed to me like trifling somehow. Anyhow I have never gone since.
“All the same there came into my head a curious jingling thyme I had heard them repeat once or twice, because they said somebody called Plato or Plautus or something had used it. It would bring back the dead, so they used to say, if you recited it alonc at midnight, and accompanied it with certain gestures. The words are nothing but gibberish, a jumbled sort of … No, I'mnot going to repeat them. … Let me go on.
“Before I had realised what I was doing, without stopping to think, I uttered the words aloud, moving my arms so as to follow the ritual. Scarcely were the syllables out of my mouth—it closes with the name and the clock was striking twelve as I spoke it—scarcely, 1 say, were the words out of my mouth when—God ! the pang comes yet when I think of it !—I heard the latch-key going into the hall door, and the door slowly opening—I was alone in the flat, and—oh ! I can never tell you! I felt dreadful !—I didn't know how to undo the thing, and yet I knew it was wrong—wicked—I never for a moment thought.—Perhaps it had been my longing so much.—The hall door opened.—The chain wasn’t up—I heard a step,—a cough—oh ! the usual sounds he used to make when he came in.—What would he be like ?—What … what… ?
“Then the door of the room opened, and there he stood, swinging himself backwards and forwards, half toes, half heels, in a way he had, and replacing his jingling keys in his trouser-pocket—I could only stare at him speechless, and gasp—till suddenly he stretched out his hand and pointed at me with a … a sort of snarl.
“‘Good heavens, Jane !’—the words sounded so commonplace that every trace of the unearthly was dissipated at the first syllable.—‘Good heavens, Jane! Go and change that frock !—How often have I told you what a fright you look in mauve—A mill-girl on a holiday !—Come ! Get along and change it !’
“It seems silly, I daresay, and all that, but, do you know, no sooner did I hear him growling and grumbling and finding fault with colours he had a dozen times at least admired and praised than—I conldn’t help it !—I forgot everything —everything. And all I could say was :
“‘James! You've been eating onions again !’
“‘Not my fault, I assure you, my dear,’ he snapped back ; ‘that dammed cook always will put garlic in the nectar ! You must get rid of her.’
“… I suppose I must have fainted then, for I remember no more till I found myself lying on the floor with my head on the fender. I picked myself up very puzzled as to what had happened. Then I remembered my … dream, with a shock rather of amusement than fear, when suddenly—suddenly I smelled the nauseating stench of strong garlic ! That finished me entirely. How 1 got out of the place I cannot tell. Out I did get. And I have never gone back.”
This lady evidently would not have subscribed to the old teaching of Salerno :
Six things that heere in order shall issue
Against all poisons have a secret poure.
Peares, Garlick, reddish-roots, Nuts, Rape and Rew,
But Garlick cheese, for they that it devoure
May walk in ways infected every houre ;
Sith Garlick then hath poure to save from death
Bear with it though it make unsavoury breath :
And scorne not Garlick, like to some that think
It only makes men wink, and drinke, and stink.”
(It may be remembered, by the way, that Wilkie Collins’s “Haunted Hotel” was haunted by a smell.)
Although we may agree with Shelley that
“Odours when sweet violets sicken
Live within the sense they quicken,”
yet we must admit that the memory of an odour cannot be reproduced in our mind with the same clearness as a vanished scene or an old tune.
It may be found on trial that by concentrating the attention strongly upon some familiar smell, particularly if at the same time we stimulate the memory by picturing in our mind’s eye a scene in which that odour figured as a feature in the sensory landscape, we are sometimes able to recall its actual sensation. But the recollection lacks the intimate reality of visual and auditory images. Without doubt the mind’s eye and mind’s ear, when consciously aroused, are consistently more acute and their representations are more vivid than those of the mind’s olfactory organ.
When, for instance, I call to memory the drawing-room of my boyhood days, I can once more catch a faint reminiscence of the acid-sweet rose-leaves that filled it with perennial fragrance, but not until I have first of all recalled its pale greys and blues and its over-bright windows, not until I have listened once more to “The March of the Troubadours” my mother is playing on the old rosewood piano, like a call to some life greater, grander, and, above all, more simple than this bewildering affair !
People, Ribot has ascertained, vary considerably in their power of resuscitating dead perfumes. According to his statistics, 40 per cent. could not revive any image at all ; 48 per cent. could recall some, but not all; and only 12 per cent. could recall all or nearly all at pleasure. The odours most easy to bring back were pinks, musk, violet, heliotrope, carbolic acid, the smell of the country, grass, and so on. Many, as in my own case, have to evoke the visual image first.
But if the recollection of a scene can only with difficulty, or not at all, revive the sensation of an odour, the converse is most startlingly true. For odours have an extraordinary, an inexplicable, power of spontaneously and suddenly presenting a forgotten scene to the mind, and with such nearness to reality that we are translated bodily, being caught up by the spirit, as it were, like St. Philip, to be placed once more in the midst of the old past life, where we live the moment over again with the full chord of its emotions vibrating our soul and startling our consciousness. There are, it is true, certain sounds which wield the same miraculous power over our being—
“…the chime familiar of a bell
Last heard at sea, but now on homely ground,
Can, with the sprites that deep in memory dwell,
Create the world anew with stroke of sound,
Transforming daisied fields to foaming seas,
And changing vales from summer calm serene
To warring tides round wintry Hebrides
That fling and toss in wat’ry hillocks green”—
but I do not think they operate in this way so frequently as do smells.
This strange revival of bygone days by olfaction is, as I have said, automatic. It is most clearly and completely to be realised when the inciting odour comes upon us unawares, and then as in a dream the whole of the long-forgotten incident is displayed, even although it may have been an incident in which the odour itself was not specially obtrusive. Yet the display is not only a spectacle, for we become, as I have already laboured to point out, once more actors in the old life-drama.
Now memory can nearly always be recognised as memory. There is about its representations a dulling in colour, a haziness in outline, a vagueness in detail, that serves to distinguish it from the harder, clearer pictures of the imagination. Its figures and their doings are like ghosts ; through them you can see the solid furniture of to-day. But from the olfactory miracle we are now considering the effect of time, the fraying effect of time and superimposed incident, is absent. That is still fresh, still, as we might say, in process of elaboration, the manifold and complicated experiences we have undergone since its occurrence being blotted for the moment out of the mind.
Curiously enough, although Ribot finds that about 60 per cent. of people experience the “spontaneous” revival of odour in memory, and so presumably are subject to this arresting phenomenon, it does not seem to have been mentioned by writers in general until about our own time. At all events, the earliest allusion I can find to it is in “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire :
“Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré
Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise
Ce grain d’encens qui remplit une église
On d’un sachet le muse inveteré ?
“Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le présent lc passé restauré”…
Shortly after Baudelaire’s time Bret Harte, on the other side of the Atlantic, imported it into “The Newport Romance” :
“But the smell of that subtle, sad perfume,
As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast
The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,
Awakes my buried past.
“And I think of the passion that shook my youth,
Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,
And am thankful now of the certain truth
That only the sweet remains.”
But the most precise and definite allusion to this curious power of odours seems to have first been made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here is what he says, and it will be noted that he makes as high a claim for the power of olfaction as I have done :
“Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of smell than by almost any other channel.”
“Phosphorus fires this tram of associations in an instant ; its luminous vapours with their penetrating odour throw me into a trance ; it comes to me in a double sense, ‘trailing clouds of glory.’”
“Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odour to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of the pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with. tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.”
In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer's novels, … and in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.”
When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems strange that the older writers made no use of it.
Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick of the sense, Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking because her night-posset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had drugged Duncan's guards with.
Several seventeenth century writers make a general reference to odours as “strengthening the memory.” Here is one for which I am indebted to my friend F. W. Watkyn-Thomas :
“Olfactus (loq.)—
Hence do I likewise minister perfume
Unto the neighbour brain, perfume of force,
To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright
To refine wit and sharp invention,
And strengthen memory : from whence it came
That old devotion incense did ordain
To make man's spirit more apt for things divine. …
(“Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senscs,” Act IV., Sc. 5, Anthony Brewer (circa 1600) : Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” Vol V., p. 179, 1825.)
And Montaigne may be alluding to it when he says :
“Physicians might (m my opinion) draw more use and good from odours than they do. For myself have often perceived, that according unto their strength and qualitie, they change and alter, and move my spirit, and worke strange effects in me : Which makes me approve the common saying, that invention of incense and perfumes in Churches, so ancient and so far-dispersed throughout all nations and religions, had an especiall regard to rejoyce, to comfort, to quicken and to rowze and to purifie our senses, …”
The Jacobean herbalists and therapeutists in general, as we shall sec later on, frequently credit aromatics with the power of strengthening the memory. But, so far as my reading goes, I have failed to find a clear and unmistakable description of this peculiar phenomenon in any writer prior to the nineteenth century. It is, of course, difficult to prove a negative, and so it would not be surprising if some such allusion were to be dug up. But even then the wonder would remain that it had attracted little, if any, attention from others. As a matter of fact, mental happenings of this order did not interest our forebears much. Shakespeare is the exception to this statement, and that is one of his claims to greatness.
Moreover, quite apart from this particular, the writings of the old English poets and of such French and German authors as I am acquainted with, seem curiously deficient in references to all but the more gross and obvious phenomena of olfaction, and these are most frequently of the farcical order, a little too gross and obvious for modern readers.
Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour.
I do not agree with the purists who deny to Dickens the glory of a great writer of English prose. Dickens was an impressionist, perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of this school, and as such he was a master. Few equal and none surpass him in the rare vigour of scene, and portrait-painting. And it is significant to find him using the aroma of the place and also of the person to impart life and reality to his description.
Take for example, to cite but one out of many olfactory references in his books, the humorous analysis of the smells in various London churches in “The Uncommercial Traveller.” One congregation furnishes “an agreeable odour of pomatum,” while in the others “rat and mildew and dead citizens” seemed to be the fundamentals, to which in some localities was added “in a dreamy way not at all displeasing ” the staple character of the neighbourhood. “A dry whiff of wheat” circulated about Mark Lane, and he “accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock” in another. The reader’s throat begins at once to feel dry.
Then note how Mr. E. W. B. Childers starts from the page the moment his creator breathes into our nostrils a breath of his life :—“a smell of lamp oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender, and sawdust.”
I could fill this book with olfactory citations from Dickens alone. But to come to contemporary writers, those of Rudyard Kipling are almost as plentiful, the smell that brings places to the mind being a favourite with him. But I have always wondered how it came about that the highly sensitive nose of Mr. Kipling permitted Imray’s corpse on the rafters above the ceiling-cloth to remain undiscovered for as long as three months. This in India. The bungalow, we gather, was haunted. It would be.
Nevertheless, in spite of the keen olfaction of both of those writers, neither of them, as far as I can remember, weaves the memory-reviving power of olfaction into a plot. We come across it, however, in foreign literature, as in the suggestive play made with the smell of lamp-oil in Dostoievsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
The more recent English and foreign writers, however, give us a surfeit of odours—as if to prove their superiority in this as in all else.
It seems strange, moreover, that the theatre should have overlooked this avenue to the memory and imagination of its audiences. The ancient Romans, to be sure, during the gladiatorial games, used to perfume the atmosphere of the Colosscum, whether to counteract the raw smell of dust, blood, and sweat, it were hard to say, as these rank odours play their part, again subtly, in stimulating the slaughterous passions of mankind.
But our modern theatre, which a prominent Scots ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century characterised as redolent only of “orange-peel, sawdust, and vice,” has not yet risen to anything higher than a continuous discharge of incense during spectacular dramas depicting the (theatrical) East.
Why not go further ? Think how the appeal of a love-scene would be strengthened by an invisible cloud of roses blown into the house through the ventilating shafts The villain would be heralded by an olfactory motif of a brimstony flavour mingled, if he was of the usual swarthy countenance, with a soupçon of garlic. The hero, well groomed and clean-limbed, would waft a delicate suggestion of Brown Windsor to the love-sick maidens in the dress-circle. The heavy father would radiate snuff with his red pocket-handkerchief. The large-eyed foreign adventuress would permeate the auditorium on wings of patchouli. The dear broken-hearted old mother would disseminate that most respectable of perfumes (for there is a caste-system among smells) eau de Cologne—a scent that always evokes in my mind a darkened room, tiptoes, hushed voices, raised forefingers, and Somebody in bed with a—headache.
And so on. Here is a new way of “putting it over.”
Critics will object that, as the influence of eau de Cologne on my own mind shows, the particular odours so supplied would defeat their purpose by calling up a thousand different and incongruous images in the thousand minds of the audience. But such mischances could easily be avoided by conventionalising the odours after the manner already familiar in the stock gesticulations of our players, all of whom enter, sit down, pull off their gloves, blow their noses, utter defiance, shed tears, launch curses, make love, live, die, and are buried, according to an inveterate, cast-iron ritual.