The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading to a general popular reformation?
The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred, to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with the evil thing.
Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated: either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action. And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.
A citizen of Cologne in Coleridge’s days, for example, must have been anosmic to most of the seven-and-twenty stenches that offended the Englishman, and in my own time I have counted as many as ten objectionable public perfumes, yea! even in Lucerne, the “Lovely Lucerne” of the railway posters. Several of these, perhaps, did not amount to more than a mere whiff, just the suspicion of a something unpleasant, no more (but no less) disturbing than, say, one note a semitone flat in a major chord; two or three of them, however, to the sensitive, thin-winged organ of an English school-ma’am, would have attained to the rank of a “smell,” a word on her lips as emphatic as an oath on yours or mine; four of them, at the least, were plain stenches, and so beyond _her_ vocabulary altogether; and one was—well! beyond even mine, but only too eloquent itself of something ugly and bloated, some mess becoming aerial just round the corner. I did not turn that corner.