Of Smells

Physicians tell us that smells affect the humors more directly than we commonly suppose — that certain perfumes elevate the spirits, that putrid airs depress them, that the body registers through the nose what the mind has not yet consciously noticed. I am inclined to believe this, not on authority but on observation of myself. I have entered rooms and felt, before I understood why, a kind of malaise or a kind of ease, and when I have traced it back to its source it has often been a smell — something slightly off about the air, or something warm and good about it, or the particular scent of an old building that has known many people.

My own sense of smell is, I think, rather more acute than the average. I do not say this as a boast — it is as much a burden as an advantage. I cannot sit near a man who is not clean without suffering for it. I find the perfumes that some wear to correct this situation nearly as disagreeable as what they are meant to cover; they add a sweetness over a sourness rather than removing either. The only smells I find entirely agreeable are those that require no artifice: clean linen, fresh air, good bread, and — I confess it — the particular smell of my own hands after I have handled a woman who uses none of the above-mentioned remedies.

“The smell of a man tells you things about him that his conversation may spend an hour concealing. We have, in our emphasis on words and appearances, perhaps undervalued this most intimate of communications.”

Alexander the Great, according to his biographers, exhaled a natural perfume from his body — a sweetness of breath and of skin that he owed, they said, to the particular excellence of his constitution. I note this not because I believe it entirely but because it illustrates how the ancients connected bodily smell with inner quality, as though the external sweetness were a sign of an inner one. We have mostly abandoned this way of thinking, and perhaps rightly — the wicked are often well-bathed — but there is a residue of truth in it. Health does produce a different atmosphere than illness, and character may follow suit more than we credit.

What I find most remarkable about smell, considered as a sense, is its directness. You cannot be polite about a smell the way you can be polite about an opinion or a face. It strikes you before your manners have time to intervene. In this it is, among all the senses, the most honest and the most animal, and I find that combination, in a world much devoted to the management of appearances, rather refreshing.