Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
SMELL AND THE PERSONALITY
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 two 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 imagining, 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.”
John 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 know 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 m a Roman Catholic church bring such an assurance of peace to the congregation ?” writes a friend of mine. “This remarkable sensation T 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 knceling 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 ?
This 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 of the nature of an ethereal vibration. Consider too the following facts.
It is well known that there are people who have an instinctive dislike of cats. The late Lord Roberts was one, and it is said of him that he was aware of the presence of his béte noire before he caught sight of it. How was he made aware ?
The same instinctive aversion is felt by some people towards spiders. I myself know of one, a young girl, who cannot sleep if her bedroom contains one of these creatures. She, like Lord Roberts feels without knowing how when a spider is near her.
Here also is a letter to a newspaper from a correspondent telling the same tale :
“Sir,
“I notice with interest that the official photographer who is to accompany Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Quest expedition has an intense dislike of spiders. Can any of your readers explain this uncanny horror, which I believe is shared by a large number of people ?
“I myself loathe and fear spiders—so much so that I have been known on more than one occasion to go into a darkened room and to declare the presence of one of these creatures, my pet abomination being subsequently discovered. …
What sense-organ—because there must be one—enables F. E. and others like him (or her) to detect the presence of a small creepy-crawly ?
We turn now to a series of medical cases which may throw some light upon this peculiarity.
There are people who suffer from asthma when they go near horses. To enter a stable or to sit behind a horse is to them a certain means of bringing on an attack.
This susceptibility and the peculiar form taken by the reaction remind us of hay fever. In sufferers from this troublesome complaint the pollen of certain plants has an irritating effect upon the mucous surfaces of the eyes, nose, and bronchial tubes. So in like manner recent investigation has shown that there is in the blood of the horse a proteid substance which acts as an irritant poison to those susceptible people. Their asthma, therefore, is merely a manifestation of the irritation produced by the poisonous body or its emanation when it is borne to them through the air. Similarly we are justified in arguing that cats and spiders may throw off an effluvium which is irritating to those susceptible to it.
But it is to be noted that the antipathy in these last instances manifests itself, not in a tissue change, but in a feeling of the mind, an emotion. Nay more, these people do not smell the cat or the spider, except in the way that James I. “smelled” gunpowder. Nevertheless, the irritant must travel through the air as an odour does, and it probably enters the organism by the mucous membrane of the nose.
But does it act upon the olfactory cells ? Here we encounter, I must confess, a serious obstacle to an acceptance of this theory.
The interior of the nose is sensitive not only to odours, but also to certain chemical irritants. Any one who has peeled a raw onion or has taken a good sniff at a bottle of strong smelling-salts knows what I mean. Now, the chemical irritant, in the latter case ammonia gas, affects not the olfactory nerve, but certain naked nerve fibrils in the mucous membrane belonging to what is known as the fifth cranial nerve, a nerve of simple sensation.[1] And the simultaneous irritation of the eyelids, and in the case of the pollen and horse effluvia the bronchial tubes, shows that these resemble in their action the simple chemical irritants, and not the odours.
It must be remembered, however, that, as we have said, the cat and the spider efluvia induce an emotional effect simply, without local irritation. And emotional change not only follows, it may also precede, the perception of an odour.
The following anecdote of Goethe, for example, shows how smell may affect the personality before it is recognised as an odour by the consciousness :
“An air that was beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison,” Gocthe said to Eckermann, “I called on him one day, and as 1 did not find him at home, I seated myself at his writing-table to note down various matters. I had not been seated long before I felt a strange indisposition steal over me, which gradually increased, until at last I nearly fainted. At first I did not know to what cause I should ascribe this wretched, and to me unusual, state, until I discovered that a dreadful odour issued from a drawer near me. When I opened it I found, to my astonishment, that it was full of rotten apples. I immediately went to the window, and inhaled the fresh air, by which I was instantly restored. Meanwhile his wife came in, and told me that the drawer was always filled with rotten apples, because the scent was beneficial to Schiller, and he could not live without it.”
I wish to emphasise, for the sake of my argument, that Goethe underwent a profound constitutional disturbance, with its attendant discomfort, before he realised that its cause was an odour.
If, then, an odour can induce such emotional changes without attracting attention to itself, the suggestion is not, after all, so very far-fetched that an emanation proceeding from the worshippers at the moment of the elevation of the Host in a Roman Catholic church may be transmitted to the bystanders through the olfactory door to induce in them an emotion similar to that felt by the initiated.
It may be objected that Goethe’s experience and that of my friend are not alike, since Goethe plainly, though tardily, became aware of a real odour. It must be remembered, however, that Goethe was a scientist and naturally gifted, besides, with an unusual power of introspective analysis. He found the cause of his disturbance because he sought for it.
Moreover, we learn from Havelock Ellis that during religious excitement a real (and pleasant) odour is sometimes perceptible in the atmosphere around the faithful.
May it not also be the same kind of influence, transmitted in the same way, that dominates the mind, in company with impressions received by sight and hearing, when we are in the vicinity of other people ?
Our study of smells has brought us, to be sure, into a strange region of psychology, for it is possible that we have here one explanation of the mysteries of crowd-psychology, of those unreasonable waves of passion that sometimes sweep through masses of people and lead to all manner of strange happenings, like crusades and holy wars ; autos-da-fé; witch-burnings ; lynch-murders ; state-prohibition ; spiritualistic manifestations ; and other miracles.
(The somewhat uncanny “sense” we have when some one else is present in what we suppose to be an empty room may be olfactory in origin, but it has generally seemed to me that it is due rather to an alteration in the echo of the room, a change in its normal sound-picture. If the room is a strange one to us, I do not think we so readily become suspicious of the presence of an unseen and unexpected visitor.)
- ↑ The difference between those two sensations becomes clearly evident when an anosmic person is peeling an onion. The usual irritation of the eyes and nose is felt and manifested, but the patient is unaware of any odour.