Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells

by Dan McKenzie

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 are 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 lucky 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.