and such kisses leave marks behind them. Aarestrup’s mistress has beautiful plump shoulders:
They curve, as of a goddess,
So naked and so bold.
I’ll brand your comely shoulders,
Such guerdon have they earned!
Look where my lips enfevered
Have scars of crimson burned.
W. F. H.
Hafiz’ mistress is afraid that “his too hot kisses will char her delicate lips.” With continually increasing desire kisses grow more and more voluptuous, and assume forms which have been celebrated by poets of antiquity and the Renaissance. Many burning, erotic verses have been composed on the subject columbatim labra conserere, or kissing as doves kiss.
Kisses at last grow into bites. Mirabeau, in a love-letter to Sophie, writes: “I am kissing you and biting you all over, et jaloux de la blancheur je te couvre de suçons”; and the classic poets often speak of the tiny red marks on cheeks or lips, neck or shoulders, which the lovers’ morsiunculæ have left behind.
Arethusa writes to Lycas: “What keeps you till now so long away from me? Oh, suffer no young girl to print the mark of her teeth on your neck.” The Italians use the expression baciare co’ denti (kiss with the teeth) to signify “to love.” We can only treat these kisses as a sort of transitional link, of shorter or longer duration, according to circumstances. They are, as it were, “a sea fraught with perils,” which in Mlle. de Scudéry’s celebrated letter (la carte de tendre), carries one to strange countries (les terres inconnues); but, as these countries lie outside the regions of pure philematology, I shall not pursue my investigations further. I will, however, first quote what old Ovid has written, although I am not at all prepared to assert that his opinion is entitled to have any special weight, more especially as it is far from being unimpeachable from a moral point of view:
Oscula qui sumpsit, si non et cetera sumet,
Hæc quoque quæ data sunt perdere dignus erit.
Quantum defuerat pleno post oscula voto?
Heu mihi rusticitas, non pudor ille fuit.[8]
After the foregoing it would seem superfluous to enter into a closer investigation of—if the term be allowed—the topographical aspects of kissing. The love kiss is, as you are aware, properly directed towards the mouth—a fact sufficiently known, and in testimony of which I have, moreover, brought forward a number of passages from respectable and trustworthy writers. I shall only add a German “Sinngedicht” of Friedrich von Logau:
If you will kiss, then kiss the mouth,
All other sorts are but half blisses,
The face—ah, no—nor hand, neck, breast,
The mouth alone can give back kisses.
W. F. H.
Von Logau’s vindication of the mouth as the only place that ought to be kissed is extremely logical, and, I take it, from a purely theoretical point of view, unobjectionable; but, practically, the case is quite the contrary. The royal trouvère, Thibaut de Champagne, treats in a lengthy poem—one of the so-called jeux-partis—the question whether one should kiss one’s mistress’s mouth or feet. Baudouin’s opinion is in favour of kissing her on the mouth, and he gives his reasons for it at some length; but Thibaut replies, that he who kisses his darling on the mouth has no love for her, because that is the way one kisses any little shepherdess one comes across; it is only by kissing her feet that a lover shows his affection, and it is by such means alone that her favour is to be won.