Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/68

56 remain undiscovered for as long as three months. This in India. The bungalow, we gather, was haunted. It would be.

Nevertheless, in spite of the keen olfaction of both of those writers, neither of them, as far as I can remember, weaves the memory-reviving power of olfaction into a plot. We come across it, however, in foreign literature, as in the suggestive play made with the smell of lamp-oil in Dostoievsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”

The more recent English and foreign writers, however, give us a surfeit of odours—as if to prove their superiority in this as in all else.

It seems strange, moreover, that the theatre should have overlooked this avenue to the memory and imagination of its audiences. The ancient Romans, to be sure, during the gladiatorial games, used to perfume the atmosphere of the Colosscum, whether to counteract the raw smell of dust, blood, and sweat, it were hard to say, as these rank odours play their part, again subtly, in stimulating the slaughterous passions of mankind.

But our modern theatre, which a prominent Scots ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century characterised as redolent only of “orange-peel, sawdust, and vice,” has not yet risen to anything higher than a continuous discharge of incense