“The lips,” says Sir Charles Bell, “are of all the features the most susceptible of action, and the most direct index of the feelings.” No wonder that Cupid selected them as his private seal, without which no passion can be stamped as genuine.
For the expression of all other emotions, by words or signs, one pair of lips suffices. Love alone requires for its expression two pairs of lips. Could anything more eloquently demonstrate the superiority of the romantic passion over all others?
Steele said of kissing that “Nature was its author, and it began with the first courtship.” Steele evidently evolved this theory out of his “inner consciousness,” for the facts do not agree with it. The art of Kissing has, like Love itself, been gradually developed in connection with the higher stages of culture. Traces of it are found among animals and savages; the ancients often misunderstood its purport and object, as did our mediæval ancestors; and it is only in recent times that Kissing has tended to become what it should be—the special and exclusive language of romantic and conjugal love.
AMONG ANIMALS
Honour to whom honour is due. The Chimpanzee seems to have been the first who discovered the charm of mutual labial contact. In the description by Mr. Bartlett just referred to, the two Chimpanzees “sat opposite, touching each other with their much-protruded lips.” And in some notes on the Chimpanzee in Central Park, New York, by Dr. C. Pitfield Mitchell, published in the Journal of Comparative Medicine and Surgery, January 1885, we find the following: “That tender emotions are experienced may be inferred from the fact that he pressed the kitten to his breast and kissed it, holding it very gently in both hands. In kissing, the lips are pouted and the tongue protruded, and both are pressed upon the object of affection. The act is not accompanied by any sound, thus differing from ordinary human osculation.”
Dogs, especially when young, may be seen occasionally exchanging a sort of tongue-kiss; and who has not seen dogs innumerable times make a sudden sly dash at the lips of master or mistress and try to steal a kiss? The affectionate manner in which a cow and calf eagerly lick one another in succession may be regarded as quite as genuine a kiss as a human kiss on hand, forehead, or cheek; and it is probable that even in the billing of doves the motive is a vague pleasure of contact.
AMONG SAVAGES
we meet once more with the anomalous fact that they seem ignorant, on the whole, of a clever invention known even to some animals. Sir John Lubbock, after referring to Steele’s opinion that kissing is coeval with courtship, remarks: “It was, on the contrary, entirely unknown to the Tahitians, the New Zealanders, the Papuas, and the aborigines of Australia, nor was it in use among the Somals or the Esquimaux.” Jemmy Button, the Fuegian, told Darwin that kissing was unknown in his land; and another writer gives an amusing account of an attempt he made to kiss a young negro girl. She was greatly terrified, probably imagining him a new species of cannibal who had made up his mind to eat her on the spot, raw, and without salt and pepper.
Monteiro, in a passage previously quoted, says that in all the long years he has been in Africa he has “never seen a negro put his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side.”
Considering the general obtuseness of a savage’s nerves, it is no wonder that the subtle thrill of a kiss should be unknown to him. In many cases, moreover, Kissing is rendered physically impossible by the habit indulged in of mutilating and enlarging the lips. For instance, Schweinfurth, in his Heart of Africa, says that among the Bongo women “the lower lip is extended horizontally till it projects far beyond the upper, which is also bored and fitted with a copper plate or nail, and now and then by a little ring, and sometimes by a bit of straw, about as thick as a lucifer match.” Many other similar cases could be cited.