Part 3 (1/2)

Once, long ago, in a crowded railway station, a lady kissed me as she hurried by I had not touched even her dress But she left a scent with her kiss which gave limpse of her The years are many since she kissed me Yet her odour is fresh initself, the elusive person-odour There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approxiue, unsubstantial odour that floats about,every effort to identify it It is the will-o'-the-wisp of my olfactive experience Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent, and I seldo On the other hand, one who has a pungent odour often possesses great vitality, energy, and vigour of er, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of wo elemental, as of fire, storests all things strong and beautiful and joyous, and gives me a sense of physical happiness I wonder if others observe that all infants have the same scent--pure, simple, undecipherable as their dore of six or seven that they begin to have perceptible individual odours

These develop andwith their mental and bodily powers

What I have written about sarded as the abnormal sentiment of one who can have no idea of the ”world of reality and beauty which the eye perceives” There are people who are colour-blind, people who are tone-deaf Most people are smell-blind-and-deaf We should not condemn a musical couish one chord froe a picture by the verdict of a colour-blind critic The sensations of smell which cheer, inform, and broaden my life are not less pleasant ht pathway of the eye has not cultivated his olfactive sense Without the shy, fugitive, often unobserved sensations and the certainties which taste, sed to take my conception of the universe wholly from others I should lack the alcheht, colour, and the Protean spark The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of ination would be shattered The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse itself in space The objects dear to s, and I should walk ahosts

RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES

VII

RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES

I WAS once without the sense of smell and taste for several days It seemed incredible, this utter detachment frole scent The feeling was probably siree, to that of one who first loses sight and cannot but expect to see the light again any day, any ain some time Still, after the wonder had passed off, a loneliness crept over me as vast as the air whose hts that smell makes mine became for a time wistful memories When I recovered the lost sense, ladness It is a fine draives to the story of Kay and Gerda in the passage about flowers Kay, wholass has blinded to human love, rushes away fiercely from home when he discovers that the roses have lost their sweetness

The loss of save me a clearer idea than I had ever had what it is to be blinded suddenly, helplessly With a little stretch of the ireat curtain shuts out suddenly the light of day, the stars, and the firht, as he fearfully tries to walk his old rounds, until the unchanging blank that everywhere spreads before him stamps the reality of the dark upon his consciousness

My temporary loss of smell proved to me, too, that the absence of a sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view of the world, and so I reason that blindness and deafness need not pervert the inner order of the intellect I know that if there were no odours for me I should still possess a considerable part of the world

Novelties and surprises would abound, adventures would thicken in the dark

In my classification of the senses, sreat deal the eye's superior I find that great artists and philosophers agree with me in this Diderot says:

Je trouvais que de tous les sens, l'oeil etait le plus superficiel; l'oreille, le plus orgueilleux; l'odorat, le plus voluptueux; le gout, le plus superstitieux et le plus inconstant; le toucher, le plus profond et le plus philosophe[C]

A friend whom I have never seen sends me a quotation from Symonds's ”Renaissance in Italy”:

Lorenzo Ghiberti, after describing a piece of antique sculpture he saw in Ro, uage

Its ht, but only by the touch of the hand passed over it” Of another classic marble at Padua he says, ”This statue, when the Christian faith triuentle soul, who, seeing it so perfect, fashi+oned with art so wonderful, and with such power of genius, and being moved to reverent pity, caused a sepulchre of bricks to be built, and there within buried the statue, and covered it with a broad slab of stone, that it ht not in any way be injured It has very many sweet beauties which the eyes alone can coht; only the hand by touching them finds them out”

Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeaer their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, ”inhale great draughts of space,” wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity Pile note on note the infinite ly to your soul fro waters How can the world be shrivelled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I aht and that of touch, I would not part with the war contact of human hands or the wealth of form, the nobility and fullness that press into my palms

FOOTNOTE: