I
Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on
the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an
individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye.
I like a good smell--the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm
morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild
Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the
good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows
late on summer afternoons.
What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever
learned to endure that foul blue air? In the Seventeenth Century, the
air about a city must have been much the same air as overhung a large
village; to-day the town atmosphere is to be endured only by the new
synthetic man.
Our whole English tradition neglects smell. In English, the nose is
still something of an indelicate organ, and I am not so sure that
its use is not regarded as somewhat sensual. Our literary pictures,
our poetic landscapes are things to hang on the mind’s wall, things
for the eye. French letters are more indulgent to the nose; one can
scarcely read ten lines of any French verse without encountering the
omnipresent, the inevitable _parfum_. And here the French are right,
for though the eye is the human master sense and chief æsthetic gate,
the creation of a mood or of a moment of earth poetry is a rite for
which other senses may be properly invoked. Of all such appeals to
sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in
the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover
of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to
keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never
have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them,
indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense
grown duller.
One reason for my love of this great beach is that, living here, I
dwell in a world that has a good natural smell, that is full of keen,
vivid, and interesting savours and fragrances. I have them at their
best, perhaps, when hot days are dulled with a warm rain. So well do
I know them, indeed, that were I blindfolded and led about the summer
beach, I think I could tell on what part of it I was at any moment
standing. At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool--cold
even--and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution
of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope
beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the
innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It
is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is
blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward
the dunes, now a point toward the sea. For twenty feet a humid and
tropical exhalation of hot, wet sand encircles one, and from this one
steps, as through a door, into as many yards of mid-September. In a
point of time, one goes from Central America to Maine.
Atop the broad eight-foot back of the summer bar, inland forty feet
or so from the edge of low tide, other odours wait. Here have the
tides strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted
festoons of ocean vegetation--with common sea grass, with rockweed
olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled
green leaves of sea lettuce, with edible, purple-red dulse and bleached
sea moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long.
In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering--for their very
substance is water--and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into
the burning air. I like this good natural savour. Sometimes a dead,
surf-trapped fish, perhaps a dead skate curling up in the heat, adds to
this odour of vegetation a faint fishy rankness, but the smell is not
earth corruption, and the scavengers of the beach soon enough remove
the cause.
Beyond the bar and the tidal runnel farther in, the flat region I call
the upper beach runs back to the shadeless bastion of the dunes. In
summer this beach is rarely covered by the tides. Here lies a hot and
pleasant odour of sand. I find myself an angle of shade slanting off
from a mass of wreckage still embedded in a dune, take up a handful
of the dry, bright sand, sift it slowly through my fingers, and note
how the heat brings out the fine, sharp, stony smell of it. There is
weed here, too, well buried in the dry sand--flotsam of last month’s
high, full-moon tides. In the shadowless glare, the topmost fronds
and heart-shaped air sacs have ripened to an odd iodine orange and a
blackish iodine brown. Overwhelmed thus by sand and heat, the aroma of
this foliage has dissolved; only a shower will summon it again from
these crisping, strangely coloured leaves.
[Illustration: _Nesting Tern_]
Cool breath of eastern ocean, the aroma of beach vegetation in the
sun, the hot, pungent exhalation of fine sand--these mingled are the
midsummer savour of the beach.