OF GOOD AND EVIL ODOURS
Of all times of the day for good odours I think the early morning the
very best, although the evening just after sunset, if the air falls
still and cool, is often as good. Certain qualities or states of the
atmosphere seem to favour the distillation of good odours and I have
known times even at midday when the earth was very wonderful to smell.
There is a curious, fainting fragrance that comes only with sunshine
and still heat. Not long ago I was cutting away a thicket of wild
spiraea which was crowding in upon the cultivated land. It was a hot
day and the leaves wilted quickly, giving off such a penetrating,
fainting fragrance that I let the branches lie where they fell the
afternoon through and came often back to smell of them, for it was a
fine thing thus to discover an odour wholly new to me.
I like also the first wild, sweet smell of new-cut meadow grass, not
the familiar odour of new-mown hay, which comes a little later, and is
worthy of its good report, but the brief, despairing odour of grass
just cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly
in the fields at the mowing. I like also the midday smell of peach
leaves and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let
any one else cut out the old canes from the blackberry rows in my
garden for the goodness of the scents which wait upon that work.
Another odour I have found animating is the odour of burning wastage in
new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the
smoke drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange
chemical process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that
nothing will so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered
odour. I have had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street
such a vivid return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have
stopped, trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought
forgotten.
Once in a foreign city, passing a latticed gateway that closed in a
narrow court, I caught the odour of wild sweet balsam. I do not know
now where it came from, or what could have caused it—but it stopped me
short where I stood, and the solid brick walls of that city rolled
aside like painted curtains, and the iron streets dissolved before my
eyes, and with the curious dizziness of nostalgia, I was myself upon
the hill of my youth—with the gleaming river in the valley, and a hawk
sailing majestically in the high blue of the sky, and all about and
everywhere the balsams—and the balsams—full of the sweet, wild odours
of the north, and of dreaming boyhood.
And there while my body, the shell of me, loitered in that strange
city, I was myself four thousand miles and a quarter of a century away,
reliving, with a conscious passion that boyhood never knew, a moment
caught up, like a torch, out of the smouldering wreckage of the past.
Do not tell me that such things die! They all remain with us-all the
sights, and sounds, and thoughts of by-gone times awaiting only the
whiff from some latticed gateway, some closed-in court to spring again
into exuberant life. If only we are ready for the great moment!
As for the odour of the burning wastage of the fields at evening I
scarcely know if I dare say it. I find it produces in the blood of me a
kind of primitive emotion, as though it stirred memories older than my
present life. Some drowsy cells of the brain awaken to a familiar
stimulus—the odour of the lodge-fire of the savage, the wigwam of the
Indian. Racial memories!
But it is not the time of the day, nor the turn of the season, nor yet
the way of the wind that matters most but the ardour and glow we
ourselves bring to the fragrant earth. It is a sad thing to reflect
that in a world so overflowing with goodness of smell, of fine sights
and sweet sounds, we pass by hastily and take so little of them. Days
pass when we see no beautiful sight, hear no sweet sound, smell no
memorable odour: when we exchange no single word of deeper
understanding with a friend. We have lived a day and added nothing to
our lives! A blind, grubbing, senseless life—that!
It is a strange thing, also, that instead of sharpening the tools by
which we take hold of life we make studied efforts to dull them. We
seem to fear life and early begin to stop our ears and close our eyes
lest we hear and see too much: we clog our senses and cloud our minds.
We seek dull security and ease and cease longer to desire adventure and
struggle. And then—the tragedy of it—the poet we all have in us in
youth begins to die, the philosopher in us dies, the martyr in us dies,
so that the long, long time beyond youth with so many of us becomes a
busy death. And this I think truer of men than of women: beyond forty
many women just begin to awaken to power and beauty, but most men
beyond that age go on dying. The task of the artist, whether poet, or
musician, or painter, is to keep alive the perishing spirit of free
adventure in men: to nourish the poet, the prophet, the martyr, we all
have in us.
One’s sense of smell, like the sense of taste, is sharpest when he is
hungry, and I am convinced also that one sees and hears best when
unclogged with food, undulled with drink, undrugged with smoke. For me,
also, weariness, though not exhaustion, seems to sharpen all the
senses. Keenness goes with leanness. When I have been working hard or
tramping the country roads in the open air and come in weary and hungry
at night and catch the fragrance of the evening along the road or upon
the hill, or at barn-doors smell the unmilked cows, or at the doorway,
the comfortable odours of cooking supper how good that all is! At such
times I know Esau to the core: the forthright, nature-loving, simple
man he was, coming in dabbled with the blood of hunted animals and
hungry for the steaming pottage.
It follows that if we take excessive joys of one sense, as of taste,
nature, ever seeking just balances, deprives us of the full enjoyment
of the others, “I am stuffed, cousin,” cries Beatrice in the play, “I
cannot smell.” “I have drunk,” remarks the Clown in Arcady, “what are
roses to me?” We forget that there are five chords in the great scale
of life—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and—few of us ever master
the chords well enough to get the full symphony of life, but are
something like little pig-tailed girls playing Peter Piper with one
finger while all the music of the universe is in the Great Instrument,
and all to be had for the taking.
Of most evil odours, it can be said that they are temporary or
unnecessary: and any unpleasant odour, such as that of fruit sprays in
spring, or fertilizer newly spread on the land, can be borne and even
welcomed if it is appropriate to the time and place. Some smells, evil
at first, become through usage not unpleasant. I once stopped with a
wolf-trapper in the north country, who set his bottle of bait outside
when I came in. He said it was “good and strong” and sniffed it with
appreciation. I agreed with him that it was strong. To him it was not
unpleasant, though made of the rancid fat of the muscallonge. All
nature seems to strive against evil odours, for when she warns us of
decay she is speeding decay: and a manured field produces later the
best of all odours. Almost all shut-in places sooner or later acquire
an evil odour: and it seems a requisite for good smells that there be
plenty of sunshine and air; and so it is with the hearts and souls of
men. If they are long shut in upon themselves they grow rancid.
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