Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/66

54 in any writer prior to the nineteenth century. It is, of course, difficult to prove a negative, and so it would not be surprising if some such allusion were to be dug up. But even then the wonder would remain that it had attracted little, if any, attention from others. As a matter of fact, mental happenings of this order did not interest our forebears much. Shakespeare is the exception to this statement, and that is one of his claims to greatness.

Moreover, quite apart from this particular, the writings of the old English poets and of such French and German authors as I am acquainted with, seem curiously deficient in references to all but the more gross and obvious phenomena of olfaction, and these are most frequently of the farcical order, a little too gross and obvious for modern readers.

Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour.

I do not agree with the purists who deny to Dickens the glory of a great writer of English prose. Dickens was an impressionist, perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of this school, and as such he was a master. Few equal and none surpass him in the rare vigour of scene, and portrait-painting. And it is significant to find him using the aroma of the place and also of