Just so with the sense of touch. A sweetheart’s veil fluttering in a Hottentot’s face would only annoy him. A squeeze of the hand would leave him cold; and would he refrain from putting his arm round her waist if that gave him any pleasure? Obviously, then, the reason why the art of kissing is unknown to him is because his senses are too callous, his imagination too sluggish.
Kissing, like every other fine art, has its sensuous and its imaginative or intellectual side. Of all parts of the visible body the lips are the most sensitive to contact. Here the layer in which the nerves and blood-vessels are contained is not covered over, as elsewhere on the skin, by a thick leathery epidermis, but only thinly veiled by a transparent epithelium; so that when lips are applied to lips, the blood-vessels which carry the vital fluid straight from the two loving hearts, and the soul-fibres, called nerves, are brought into almost immediate contact: whence that interchange of soul-magnetism—that electric shock which makes the first mutual kiss of Love the sweetest moment of life—
“What words can ever speak affection
So thrilling and sincere as thine?”—Burns.
Yet herein the imagination plays a much more prominent rôle than it appears to do at first sight. The real reason why a savage cannot enjoy a kiss is not so much because his lips are deficient in tactile sensibility, as because he has no imagination to invest labial contact with the romance of individualised passion. If a lover’s pleasure lay in the mere labial contact, he would as soon exchange a kiss with any other girl. But should a sweetheart, on being asked for a kiss, refer him, say, to his sister or her sister; though the latter be a hundred times more beautiful, he would chide his love for offering a stone where bread was wanted. His imagination has so long painted to him the superior ecstasy of a kiss from her that, when he finally gets it, the long-deferred gratification ensures the unparalleled rapture anticipated.
ANCIENT KISSES
As the ancient civilised nations were much more addicted than we are to gesture language, it seems natural that so expressive a sign as kissing should have been used for a variety of purposes—for indicating not only family affection, sexual passion and friendship, but general respect, reverence, humility, condescension, etc. Among idolatrous nations, as M‘Clintock and Strong remark, “it was the custom to throw kisses towards the images of the gods, and towards the sun and moon.” Kissing the hand appears to be a modern custom, but many other parts of the body were thus saluted by the ancients: “Kissing the feet of princes was a token of subjection and obedience, which was sometimes carried so far that the print of the foot received the kiss, so as to give the impression that the very dust had become sacred by the royal tread, or that the subject was not worthy to salute even the prince’s foot, but was content to kiss the earth itself near or on which he trod.” A similar observance is the kissing of the Pope’s toe, or rather, the cross on his slipper—a custom in vogue since the year 710. Among the Arabs the women and children kiss the beards of their husbands or fathers. Among the ancient Hebrews, “kissing the lips by way of affectionate salutation was not only permitted, but customary among near relatives of both sexes, both in patriarchal and in later times.” The kiss on the cheek “has at all times been customary in the East, and can hardly be said to be extinct even in Europe.”
Among the ancient Greeks, Jealousy prompted the husbands to “make their wives eat onions whenever they were going from home.” And in the Roman Republic, “Among the safeguards of female purity,” says Mr. Lecky, “was an enactment forbidding women even to taste wine.... Cato said that the ancient Romans were accustomed to kiss their wives for the purpose of discovering whether they had been drinking wine.”
Breath-sweetening cloves and cachous were evidently unknown in the good old times.
The Romans had special names for three kinds of kisses—basium, a kiss of politeness; osculum, between friends; suavium, between lovers. If a man kissed his betrothed, she gained thereby the half of his effects in the event of his dying before the celebration of the marriage; and if the lady herself died, under the same circumstances, her heirs or nearest of kin took the half due to her, a kiss among the ancients being a sign of plighted faith. So seriously, indeed, was a kiss regarded by the ancient Romans, that a husband would not even kiss his wife in presence of his daughters.