“Thaddeus dropped upon his knee, imprinted on both her hands a compassionate and fervent kiss, and, rising hastily, quitted the room without a word.”
In the novels of our day, kissing is as indispensable an adjunct to love-making as it ever was, but its treatment has changed as the æsthetic and practical views of courtship have changed with the influences of society. Whether as the impulse of passionate attachment or the expression of refined affection, it is, for the most part, handled by our modern writers in a healthful, natural, legitimate, decorous, and felicitous manner. Those who indulge in namby-pamby effusion or sentimental gush, on the one hand, or the startling aberrations and obliquities of inconventionalism on the other, may expect to hear from the satirists and reviewers. No one entertained for weakly sentimentalism or affected prettiness more profound contempt and impatience than Thackeray. Yet where shall we find more exquisite touches than those which abound in the pages of the great humorist and satirist? Take, for example, a few scattered passages from “The Newcomes:”
“There she sits; the same, but changed: as gone from him as if she were dead; departed indeed into another sphere, and entered into a kind of death. If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied. Strew round it the flowers of youth. Wash it with tears of passion. Wrap it and envelop it with fond devotion. Break heart, and fling yourself on the bier, and kiss her cold lips, and press her hand! It falls back dead on the cold breast again. The beautiful lips have never a blush or a smile.”
“He took a little slim white hand and laid it down on his brown palm, where it looked all the whiter: he cleared the grizzled mustachio from his mouth, and, stooping down, he kissed the little white hand with a great deal of grace and dignity. There was no point of resemblance, and yet a something in the girl’s look, voice, and movements, which caused his heart to thrill, and an image out of the past to rise up and salute him.”
“The sisters-in-law kissed on meeting, with that cordiality so delightful to witness in sisters who dwell together in unity.”
“He would not even stop and give his Ethel of old days his hand. I would have given him I don’t know what, for one kiss, for one kind word; but he passed on and would not answer me.”