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 (in 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 see 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 Colosseum, 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.