CHAPTER III
AFFECTIONATE KISSES
A kiss can also express feelings from which the erotic element is excluded—feelings that are consequently less ardent and longing, but, most frequently, far deeper and more lasting.
A kiss is expressive of love in the widest and most comprehensive meaning of the word, bringing a message of loyal affection, gratitude, compassion, sympathy, intense joy, and profound sorrow. In the first place a kiss is the expression of the deep and intense feeling which knits parents to their offspring. At its entrance into the world the little helpless infant is received by its father’s and mother’s warm kiss. In the Middle Ages they kissed the new-born baby thrice in the name of the Holy Trinity. And the parent’s kiss follows the child through life. When Hector takes leave of his wife Andromache he lifts his little son up into his arms, but the child is afraid of his father’s helmet, “of the gleam of the copper and the nodding crest of horse-hair.”
And from his brow
Hector the casque removed, and set it down,
All glittering, on the ground; then kissed his child,
And danced him in his arms.[9]
The Evangelist Luke tells the story of the Prodigal Son’s return home. “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
The parent’s kiss is like the good angel which shields the child from all evil. When Johannes in Sören Kierkegaard’s Forførerens dagbog would describe the impression made on him by Cordelia he says, “She looked so young and fresh, as if nature like a tender and opulent mother had that very instant released her from her hand,” and he goes on to say: “It seemed to me as if I had been witness to this farewell scene; I marked how the loving mother once again embraced her and bade her farewell; I heard her say: ’Go out into the world now, my child; I have done all for you. Now take this kiss as a seal upon your lips; ’tis a seal the sanctuary preserves; no one can break it against your own will, but when the right man comes, you shall understand him.’ And she presses a kiss on her lips—a kiss which, not like a human kiss, takes aught, but a divine kiss that gives all.” The chaste purity, which is Cordelia’s halo and protection, is, as it were, the reflection of a mother’s kiss.
It is for this reason also that in the sagas a quite irresistible power is attributed to the parent’s kiss. When Vildering, the king’s son, quits Maid Miseri and journeys alone to his parents to tell them what has befallen him, she implores him to be especially careful not to let his parents kiss him, “for should that happen, you will forget me utterly.” In spite of his caution his mother kisses him, and oblivion covers the past; he forgets his betrothed, who is sitting and waiting for him in the depths of the forest.
Kisses of affection are exchanged not only between parents and children, but between all the members of the same family; we find them even outside the more narrow family circle, everywhere where deep affection unites people.