But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to translate its urgings into practice.
The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading to a general popular reformation?
The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred, to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with the evil thing.
Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated: either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action. And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.
A citizen of Cologne in Coleridge’s days, for example, must have been anosmic to most of the seven-and-twenty stenches that offended the Englishman, and in my own time I have counted as many as ten objectionable public perfumes, yea! even in Lucerne, the “Lovely Lucerne” of the railway posters. Several of these, perhaps, did not amount to more than a mere whiff, just the suspicion of a something unpleasant, no more (but no less) disturbing than, say, one note a semitone flat in a major chord; two or three of them, however, to the sensitive, thin-winged organ of an English school-ma’am, would have attained to the rank of a “smell,” a word on her lips as emphatic as an oath on yours or mine; four of them, at the least, were plain stenches, and so beyond her vocabulary altogether; and one was—well! beyond even mine, but only too eloquent itself of something ugly and bloated, some mess becoming aerial just round the corner. I did not turn that corner.
Now, the people of Lucerne could never have smelled them, or at all events they could never have appreciated those perfumes as I did, or the town would have been evacuated. Their olfactory sense compared with mine must have been a stupid thing, dense to begin with, and cudgelled by use and wont into blank insensibility. Because, it is obvious, delicacy in this, as in all the senses, can only be acquired by avoiding habitual overstimulation. And that avoidance is only possible in a country where odours are fine, etherealised, rare.
Even in France, France the enlightened, the sensitive, the refined, primitive odours pervade the country, as our Army knows very well. Not only is the farm dunghill given place of honour in the farm courtyard, close to doors and windows, but even in the mansions of the wealthy the cesspool still remains—not outside, but inside, the house, the water-carriage system, even the pail-system (if that can be called a system), being unknown. So that our Army authorities had to send round a peculiar petrol-engine, known to the Tommies as “Stinking Willie,” to empty those pools of corruption. Some of the monasteries used by us as hospitals were, at the beginning of the war, even worse.
From this we may surmise that the olfactory sense of our neighbours is not yet so sensitive as is ours.
But in this matter Western Europe, at its worst—say, in one of the corridor-trains to Marseilles—is a mountain-top to a pigstye compared with the old and gorgeous East. “The East,” ejaculated an old Scotsman once—“the East is just a smell! It begins at Port Said and disna stop till ye come to San Francisco, ... if there!” he added after a pause. From his sweeping condemnation we must, however, exempt Japan.
Who can ever forget the bazaar smells of India, the mingled must and fust with its background of garlic and strange vices, or the still more mysterious atmospheres of China with their deep suggestion of musk?