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.”