“I remember,”--said an old friend, telling me the romance of his
youth,--“that I could always find her cloak in the cloak-room without a
light, when it was time to take her home. I used to know it in the dark,
because it had the smell of sweet new milk....”
Which set me somehow to thinking of English dawns, the scent of
hayfields, the fragrance of hawthorn days;--and cluster after cluster
of memories lighted up in succession through a great arc of remembrance
that flashed over half a lifetime even before my friend’s last words
had ceased to sound in my ears. And then recollection smouldered into
revery,--a revery about the riddle of the odor of youth.
* * * * *
That quality of the _parfum de jeunesse_ which my friend described is
not uncommon,--though I fancy that it belongs to Northern rather than
to Southern races. It signifies perfect health and splendid vigor. But
there are other and more delicate varieties of the attraction. Sometimes
it may cause you to think of precious gums or spices from the uttermost
tropics; sometimes it is a thin, thin sweetness,--like a ghost of musk.
It is not personal (though physical personality certainly has an odor):
it is the fragrance of a season,--of the springtime of life. But even
as the fragrance of spring, though everywhere a passing delight, varies
with country and climate, so varies the fragrance of youth.
Whether it be of one sex more than of another were difficult to say.
We notice it chiefly in girls and in children with long hair, probably
because it dwells especially in the hair. But it is always independent
of artifice as the sweetness of the wild violet is. It belongs to the
youth of the savage not less than to the youth of the civilized,--to
the adolescence of the peasant not less than to that of the prince.
It is not found in the sickly and the feeble, but only in perfect
joyous health. Perhaps, like beauty, it may have some vague general
relation to conditions ethical. Individual odors assuredly have,--as the
discrimination of the dog gives witness.
Evolutionists have suggested that the pleasure we find in the perfume
of a flower may be an emotional reflection from æons enormously
remote, when such odor announced, to forms of ancestral life far lower
than human, the presence of savory food. To what organic memory of
association might be due, upon the same hypothesis, our pleasure in the
perfume of youth?
Perhaps there were ages in which that perfume had significances more
definite and special than any which we can now attach to it. Like the
pleasure yielded by the fragrance of flowers, the pleasure given by the
healthy fragrance of a young body may be, partly at least, a survival
from some era in which odorous impressions made direct appeal to the
simplest of life-serving impulses. Long dissociated from such possible
primitive relation, odor of blossom and odor of youth alike have now
become for us excitants of the higher emotional life,--of vague but
voluminous and supremely delicate æsthetic feeling.
Like the feeling awakened by beauty, the pleasure of odor is a pleasure
of remembrance,--is the magical appeal of a sensation to countless
memories of countless lives. And even as the scent of a blossom
evokes the ghosts of feelings experienced in millions of millions of
unrecorded springs,--so the fragrance of youth bestirs within us the
spectral survival of sensations associated with every vernal cycle of
all the human existence that has vanished behind us.
And this fragrance of fresh being likewise makes invocation to
ideal sentiment,--to parental scarcely less than to amorous
tenderness,--because conjoined through immeasurable time with the charm
and the beauty of childhood. Out of night and death is summoned by its
necromancy more than a shadowy thrill from the rapture of perished
passion,--more than a phantom-reflex from the delight of countless
bridals;--even something also of the ecstasy of pressing lips of caress
to the silky head of the first-born,--faint refluence from the forgotten
joy of myriad millions of buried mothers.