The fashion of universal kissing appears to have gone out about the time of the Restoration.
MODERN KISSES
The history of kissing, thus briefly sketched, shows that among primitive men this art is unknown because they are incapable of appreciating it. To the ancient civilised nations its charms were revealed; but as usual in the intoxication of a new discovery, they hardly knew what to do with it, and applied it to all sorts of stupid ceremonial purposes. The tendency of civilisation, however, has been to eliminate promiscuous kissing, and restrict it more and more to its proper function as an expression of the affections. And even within this sphere the circle becomes gradually smaller. Although in some parts of Europe men still kiss one another as a token of relationship, friendship, or esteem, yet the habit is slowly dying out, the example having been set in England, where it was abandoned toward the close of the seventeenth century. The senseless custom which women to-day indulge in of kissing each other on the slightest provocation, often when they would rather slap one another in the face, is also doomed to extinction. The witticism that women kiss one another because they cannot find anything better to kiss, differing herein from men, was not perpetrated by a woman. The practice of kissing little children has been often enough condemned on medical grounds, which also hold good in the case of adults. That contagious diseases are thus often conveyed from one person to another was already known to the ancient Romans, one of whose emperors issued a special proclamation in consequence against promiscuous kissing.
From a sentimental point of view, the most objectionable of modern kisses are those which are allowed between cousins. As long as a man may become a suitor for the hand of his cousin he should, both for the sake of his own love-drama and in justice to a possible rival, be debarred from this privilege. Imagine the feelings of a lover who knows that his rival has been permitted to steal the virgin kiss from the lips of his adored one simply because his father happens to be her uncle! Family kisses should, therefore, be allowed only within that degree of relationship which precludes the idea of Love and marriage. Cousins will have to be satisfied in future with a warmer grasp of the hand and an extra lump of sugar in a maiden’s smile.
LOVE-KISSES
The happiest moment in the life of the happiest man is that when he is allowed for the first time to “steal immortal blessing” from the lips of her who has just promised to be his for ever. No wonder the poets have grown eloquent over this supreme moment of pre-heavenly rapture—
Tennyson—
“O love[“O love], O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”