OLFACTORY MEMORY
The predominant special senses in man are vision and hearing, olfaction
occupying a quite unimportant position in the scale.
Smell and taste, by the way, are usually regarded not only as allied
senses, but also as if they were akin in their nature and function.
Allied they are, undoubtedly, seeing that both subserve the function of
food-perception. But the resemblance ends there. For, of the two, smell
is at once the more delicate and the more extensive in capacity, and, as
they differ widely in their anatomical structure, there can be no doubt
but that in physiological action also they are dissimilar.
The taste-bulbs are capable of appreciating four sensations only, and
these quite simple, while the capacity of the olfactory organ, as we
shall see more fully later on, is practically unlimited. All the
subtlety of “taste,” all that we call “flavour,” is an olfactory
sensation. Thus, people devoid of the sense of smell cannot discern the
finer savours. They would be unable to distinguish, say, a vanilla from
a strawberry ice. All they could tell would be that both were cold and
sweet.
The popular phrase which refers the appreciation of the finer shades of
taste to the “palate” we may therefore look upon as an attempt to
express the feeling that delicate flavours are sensed somewhere higher
up than in the mouth. So that a “man of taste” is really a man of smell,
and all the literary eloquence in praise of wine and dainty food, to say
nothing of the more prosy cookery books, is, in reality, a general hymn
of adulation offered unwittingly to the nose!
Compared with sight and hearing, however, smell in man is only one of
the minor senses. But, as if to make up for a position so inferior, it
is remarkable as being the most subtle of all our senses, possibly, as
some hold, because of the ancestral appeal to our (more or less
repressed) animal nature. So subtle is it, indeed, that I am persuaded
its stimuli may not, on occasion, emerge into consciousness at all. They
remain below the threshold. So that, although subjected to their
influence, we may remain ignorant of the cause of that influence. For
smell often operates powerfully, not only in surreptitiously enriching
and invigorating the mental impression of an event, but also in
directing at times the flow of ideas into some particular channel
independent of the will. The influence of the perfume of a woman’s hair
in unexpectedly arousing a feeling of intimacy will appeal to the male
reader as a good example of this upsurging interference with the placid
flow of normal ideation.
Perhaps, also, this is the explanation of a strange and rather
unpleasant ghost-story I once heard. I dare not vouch for the truth of
it, but as it bears upon the subject we are considering, I give it here,
not without misgiving, for what it is worth. For the sake of
verisimilitude I shall relate it pretty much in the narrator’s own
words:
“The evening he came back I was sitting in my room alone. I had just
got back from the play, the subject of which had been, it so
happened, the influence of people recently dead upon those left
behind. I suppose that’s what turned my mind to my sorrow of the
previous year when I lost him. It is my husband I am talking about.
“I was sitting gazing at the fire, and I expect you will say I had
fallen asleep. Perhaps I had. It doesn’t matter really.
“We had been happy enough together, he and I. Just an ordinary
married couple, you might say. But now and then a terrible longing
would come over me just to see him once more, ... to hear him
speak, ... to touch him.... I know it is selfish, and maybe unwise,
to give way to those feelings, ... but never mind that! Well, on the
night I am telling you about, there came to my recollection some of
the silly cantrips those Spiritualist people used to carry on. Oh,
yes, it is quite true: I had gone once or twice to see them, and had
even taken part in their services—séances, I should say—in James’s
lifetime, I mean, before he died. Indeed I went with him.... I never
went after.... I don’t know.... It seemed to me like trifling
somehow. Anyhow I have never gone since.
“All the same there came into my head a curious jingling rhyme I had
heard them repeat once or twice, because they said somebody called
Plato or Plautus or something had used it. It would bring back the
dead, so they used to say, if you recited it alone at midnight, and
accompanied it with certain gestures. The words are nothing but
gibberish, a jumbled sort of.... No, I’m not going to repeat
them.... Let me go on.
“Before I had realised what I was doing, without stopping to think,
I uttered the words aloud, moving my arms so as to follow the
ritual. Scarcely were the syllables out of my mouth—it closes with
the name and the clock was striking twelve as I spoke it—scarcely, I
say, were the words out of my mouth when—God! the pang comes yet
when I think of it!—I heard the latch-key going into the hall door,
and the door slowly opening—I was alone in the flat, and—oh! I can
never tell you! I felt dreadful!—I didn’t know how to undo the
thing, and yet I knew it was wrong—wicked—I never for a moment
thought.—Perhaps it had been my longing so much.—The hall door
opened.—The chain wasn’t up.—I heard a step,—a cough—oh! the usual
sounds he used to make when he came in.—What would he be
like?—What...? what...?
“Then the door of the room opened, and there he stood, swinging
himself backwards and forwards, half toes, half heels, in a way he
had, and replacing his jingling keys in his trouser-pocket—I could
only stare at him speechless, and gasp—till suddenly he stretched
out his hand and pointed at me with a ... a sort of snarl.
“‘Good heavens, Jane!’—the words sounded so commonplace that every
trace of the unearthly was dissipated at the first syllable.—‘Good
heavens, Jane! Go and change that frock!—How often have I told you
what a fright you look in mauve.—A mill-girl on a holiday!—Come! Get
along and change it!’
“It seems silly, I daresay, and all that, but, do you know, no
sooner did I hear him growling and grumbling and finding fault with
colours he had a dozen times at least admired and praised than—I
couldn’t help it!—I forgot everything—everything. And all I could
say was:
“‘James! You’ve been eating onions again!’
“‘Not my fault, I assure you, my dear,’ he snapped back; ‘that
damned cook always will put garlic in the nectar! You must get rid
of her.’
“... I suppose I must have fainted then, for I remember no more till
I found myself lying on the floor with my head on the fender. I
picked myself up very puzzled as to what had happened. Then I
remembered my ... dream, with a shock rather of amusement than fear,
when suddenly—suddenly I smelled the nauseating stench of strong
garlic! That finished me entirely. How I got out of the place I
cannot tell. Out I did get. And I have never gone back.”
This lady evidently would not have subscribed to the old teaching of
Salerno:
“Six things that heere in order shall issue
Against all poisons have a secret poure.
Peares, Garlick, reddish-roots, Nuts, Rape and Rew,
But Garlick cheese, for they that it devoure
May walk in ways infected every houre;
Sith Garlick then hath poure to save from death
Bear with it though it make unsavoury breath:
And scorne not Garlick, like to some that think
It only makes men wink, and drinke, and stink.”
(It may be remembered, by the way, that Wilkie Collins’s “Haunted Hotel”
was haunted by a smell.)
Although we may agree with Shelley that
“Odours when sweet violets sicken
Live within the sense they quicken,”
yet we must admit that the memory of an odour cannot be reproduced in
our mind with the same clearness as a vanished scene or an old tune.
It may be found on trial that by concentrating the attention strongly
upon some familiar smell, particularly if at the same time we stimulate
the memory by picturing in our mind’s eye a scene in which that odour
figured as a feature in the sensory landscape, we are sometimes able to
recall its actual sensation. But the recollection lacks the intimate
reality of visual and auditory images. Without doubt the mind’s eye and
mind’s ear, when consciously aroused, are consistently more acute and
their representations are more vivid than those of the mind’s olfactory
organ.
When, for instance, I call to memory the drawing-room of my boyhood
days, I can once more catch a faint reminiscence of the acid-sweet
rose-leaves that filled it with perennial fragrance, but not until I
have first of all recalled its pale greys and blues and its over-bright
windows, not until I have listened once more to “The March of the
Troubadours” my mother is playing on the old rosewood piano, like a call
to some life greater, grander, and, above all, more simple than this
bewildering affair!
People, Ribot has ascertained, vary considerably in their power of
resuscitating dead perfumes. According to his statistics, 40 per cent.
could not revive any image at all; 48 per cent. could recall some, but
not all; and only 12 per cent. could recall all or nearly all at
pleasure. The odours most easy to bring back were pinks, musk, violet,
heliotrope, carbolic acid, the smell of the country, grass, and so on.
Many, as in my own case, have to evoke the visual image first.
But if the recollection of a scene can only with difficulty, or not at
all, revive the sensation of an odour, the converse is most startlingly
true. For odours have an extraordinary, an inexplicable, power of
spontaneously and suddenly presenting a forgotten scene to the mind, and
with such nearness to reality that we are translated bodily, being
caught up by the spirit, as it were, like St. Philip, to be placed once
more in the midst of the old past life, where we live the moment over
again with the full chord of its emotions vibrating our soul and
startling our consciousness. There are, it is true, certain sounds which
wield the same miraculous power over our being—
“... the chime familiar of a bell
Last heard at sea, but now on homely ground,
Can, with the sprites that deep in memory dwell,
Create the world anew with stroke of sound,
Transforming daisied fields to foaming seas,
And changing vales from summer calm serene
To warring tides round wintry Hebrides
That fling and toss in wat’ry hillocks green”—
but I do not think they operate in this way so frequently as do smells.
This strange revival of bygone days by olfaction is, as I have said,
automatic. It is most clearly and completely to be realised when the
inciting odour comes upon us unawares, and then as in a dream the whole
of the long-forgotten incident is displayed, even although it may have
been an incident in which the odour itself was not specially obtrusive.
Yet the display is not only a spectacle, for we become, as I have
already laboured to point out, once more actors in the old life-drama.
Now memory can nearly always be recognised as memory. There is about its
representations a dulling in colour, a haziness in outline, a vagueness
in detail, that serves to distinguish it from the harder, clearer
pictures of the imagination. Its figures and their doings are like
ghosts; through them you can see the solid furniture of to-day. But from
the olfactory miracle we are now considering the effect of time, the
fraying effect of time and superimposed incident, is absent. That is
still fresh, still, as we might say, in process of elaboration, the
manifold and complicated experiences we have undergone since its
occurrence being blotted for the moment out of the mind.
Curiously enough, although Ribot finds that about 60 per cent. of people
experience the “spontaneous” revival of odour in memory, and so
presumably are subject to this arresting phenomenon, it does not seem to
have been mentioned by writers in general until about our own time. At
all events, the earliest allusion I can find to it is in “Les Fleurs du
Mal” of Baudelaire:
“Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré
Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise
Ce grain d’encens qui remplit une église
Ou d’un sachet le musc invétéré?
“Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le présent le passé restauré”....
Shortly after Baudelaire’s time Bret Harte, on the other side of the
Atlantic, imported it into “The Newport Romance”:
“But the smell of that subtle, sad perfume,
As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast
The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,
Awakes my buried past.
“And I think of the passion that shook my youth,
Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,
And am thankful now of the certain truth
That only the sweet remains.”
But the most precise and definite allusion to this curious power of
odours seems to have first been made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here is what he says, and it will be
noted that he makes as high a claim for the power of olfaction as I have
done:
“Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more
readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other
channel.”
“Phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its
luminous vapours with their penetrating odour throw me into a
trance; it comes to me in a double sense, ‘trailing clouds of
glory.’”
“Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our
autumn fields, has the most suggestive odour to me of all those that
set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and
emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of the pale, dry,
rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it
had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had
lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of
immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its
lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with
tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel
that border the River of Life.”
In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met
with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, ... and
in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.”
When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon
as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems
strange that the older writers made no use of it.
Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are
not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick
of the sense. Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking
because her nightposset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had
drugged Duncan’s guards with.
Several seventeenth century writers make a general reference to odours
as “strengthening the memory.” Here is one for which I am indebted to my
friend F. W. Watkyn-Thomas:
“OLFACTUS (_loq._)—
Hence do I likewise minister perfume
Unto the neighbour brain, perfume of force,
To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright
To refine wit and sharp invention,
_And strengthen memory_: from whence it came
That old devotion incense did ordain
To make man’s spirit more apt for things divine....”
(“Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses,”