In one of those charming articles which he writes in _The New Statesman_,
Mr. J. Arthur Thomson tells of the wonderful world of odours to which we
are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more
upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had
a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less
atrophied.
Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
said the Giant in the story. But that was long ago. If we were left to the
testimony of our noses we could not tell an Englishman from a hippopotamus.
To the bee, on the other hand, with its two or three thousand olfactory
pores, the world is primarily a world of smell. If we could question that
wonderful creature we should find that it thought and talked of nothing but
the odours of the field. We should find that it had a range of experience
in that realm beyond our wildest imaginings. We should find that there are
more smells in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience.
But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our
comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our
finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the
scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went
into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me
forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it
hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of
earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world
too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite
perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their
comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power
beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly
wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by
some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond
the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.
And it is not only the worlds which are peculiar to the myriad creatures of
diverse instincts and faculties which are so strangely separate. We
ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety. I do not mean the social
and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is
not one but many. There is not much in common between the world as it
appears to Sarah Ellen, who "runs" four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed
during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns
herself in Mayfair.
But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private
thought and emotions. My world is not your world, nor yours mine. We sit
and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange
confidences and share our laughter and our experiences. But ultimately we
can neither of us understand the world of the other--that world which is
the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as
air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour
and sound, attachments and antipathies often so obscure that we cannot even
explain them to ourselves. We may feel a collective emotion under the
impulse of some powerful event or personality. We may ebb and flow as a
tide to the rhythm of a great melody or to the incantation of noble
oratory. The news of a great victory in these days would move us to our
common centre and bring all our separate worlds into a mighty chorus of
thanksgiving. But even in these common emotions there are infinite shades
of difference, and when they have passed we subside again into the world
where we dwell alone.
Most of us are doomed to go through life without communicating the
mysteries of our experience.
Alas for those who never sing.
But die with all their music in them.
It is the privilege of the artist in any medium to enrich the general life
with the consciousness of the world that he alone has experienced. He gives
us new kingdoms for our inheritance, makes us the sharers of his visions,
opens out wider horizons, and floods our life with richer glories.
I entered such a kingdom the other afternoon. I turned out of the Strand,
which was thronged and throbbing with the news of the great advance,--it
was the first day of the battle of the Somme--and entered the Aldwych
Theatre. As if by magic, I passed from the thrilling drama of the present
into a realm