The Art of Kissing/Chapter 1
THE ART OF KISSING
I
THE ORIGIN OF KISSING
Defining a Kiss.—The most helpful dictionary, before attempting the tough task of defining a word, gives us the names of its father and mother, and often of its grandparents, as well as something of the history of its wanderings. We shall take our cue from the dictionary, and see what kiss and its synonyms came from. Kiss, that enchanter's magical wand conjuring up the entrance to the temple of the highest physical pleasure, comes from the Anglo-Saxon coss, a kiss; and is, by general gossip, descended from the Gothic kustus, a proof or test, which in turn is a close relative of the Latin gustus, a taste. It is also kin to the Anglo-Saxon coesan, to choose. We have so far, then, a test, a taste, and a choice, all involved in the pleasant idea of a kiss.
There are only a few other words in English with the same meaning. The antiquated buss is of uncertain origin, a byblow of unknown race; although it is clearly close to the Bavarian bussen, to kiss, and may be related to the Spanish and Portuguese buz, a kiss of reverence, which seems to have come from the Turkish bus, Persian busa, and Hindu bosa, a kiss. Some words, you see, roam further than the distance from Lake Kissimmee, Florida, that Paradise of osculation, to distant Lapland, the only spot in Europe where kissing is not known. Osculation, the more highbrow word, has a prettier parentage, coming from the Latin osculari, to kiss, which developed from Latin osculum, a little mouth, the pretty mouth, this being the diminutive of os, mouth. Smack, defined as "a kiss, especially in a coarse or noisy manner," is akin to the German schmatzen and schmacken, to knock, or to smack the lips. Salute, the courtly word for kiss, comes from the Latin salus, safety, which grew out of salvus, from which we get salvation, and also a salvo of guns. Here we must quarrel with the word's parents: a kiss does not, as a rule, spell safety—it should rather be a glorious peril; the salvation it brings is at least not of the religious kind; and, if it sounds like a salvo of guns, we should ask the lady to put on a Maxim silencer thereafter, in order to avoid waking the neighbors.
So much for the family tree of kissing. As to its meaning, the dictionary says that a kiss is "a salute or caress, given with the lips." What an incredible understatement! Imagine a drowning man describing a life-buoy as a floating contrivance stuffed with cork! We much prefer Sam Slick's definition or description, that a kiss is like creation, because it is made out of nothing, and is very good. An old poet came closer than the dictionary, when he wrote:
A single drop to quench a thirst,
Tho' oft it proves in happier hour
The first sweet drop of one long shower.
Roots of Kissing.— Havelock Ellis, in Appendix A to volume IV of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, has done most toward establishing the origins of kissing. The kiss as we know it, the tactile or touch kiss (as distinguished from the more widespread olfactory or smell kiss) is a specialized development of the sense of touch. The same is largely true, as Ellis points out, of the whole expression of physical love: the sexual embrace itself may be spoken of as a method of obtaining, through a specialized organization of the skin, the most exquisite and intense sensations of touch. The tactile kiss is confined to man, and largely to the civilized European man; but its roots go far below him, in the long upward climb of life.
Even as low as the insects, as Ellis points out, manifestations resembling the kiss are found. Thus snails and other insects, during their active mating, caress each other with their antennæ. Among birds, the bills are used for touches and caresses which partake of the nature of the kiss. Many mammals have touches and lickings, during the love episode, which are of kindred nature. Dogs, especially, smell, lick, and gently bite their mates. Yet too much significance must not be seen in these phenomena, since all our senses are merely extensions and specializations of the primitive sense of touch.
To travel closer to the immediate ancestors of our kiss, consider the baby. He regards his most reliable witness, in every case, as his tongue. Anything that his tongue can reach, or that can be carried up to his tongue, is promptly tasted and, if found agreeable, licked. Animals far below the mammals share this trait with the human infant. Especially among the mammals, including man, the trait is prominent: and it traces back to the infant's pleasure in sucking the maternal nipple. The lowest mammal, it may be remembered, which is the intermediate stage to the forms of life below the mammalian, has no breasts: the young lick the mother's entire body, which exudes milk at many places. Among mammals, the overpowering instinct to touch with the lips and tongue, that food may be found and life preserved, is specialized into the inner command to touch and suck the nipple for the same purpose. Out of this grows the trait among children of kissing and licking everything and everyone that they like, including people and pet animals.
On the mother's side, there is an impulse almost as strong to lick her young. The mother cat will commence licking her young almost at the moment of birth; other mammals share the trait. The world's leading scientists are inclined to find the immediate origin of the kiss as we know it in the kiss bestowed by the mother upon her child. Negative evidence is of value here. The maternal kiss is not universal throughout the human world; but it is much more widely distributed than the love kiss, as we know it. Furthermore, there is no locality in which the love kiss is found, where the maternal kiss is missing.
Freud, the psychoanalyst, has laid great emphasis on the close love tie uniting mother and child—a tie frequently too close for the good of either. We have pointed out what the great Viennese overlooked: that the first separate male among animals, appearing at about the stage of the barnacles, was produced as a pocket-husband by the much larger female; and that the first separate male thus mated with his own mother. The roots of this mother-and-son complex, horrendously named the Œdipus complex, are found in this fact. Now we learn that the love kiss originated in the maternal kiss, as we might have expected to find.
An old poser is, Which kissed first, the man or the woman? The answer is simple: the woman. The mother's kiss, in the history of the race, preceded the kiss of love, as it does in the case of each one of us.
Another element enters into the kiss as we know it—the impulse to bite, increased during active loving. The teeth are used widely among animals, to grasp the female mate more firmly during the love episode. Of course, with the spread of the feminist movement during the last century, women have taken over much of man's activity, in all lines. Thus when we read references to a "biting blonde" we do not understand a blond Nordic sheik, but one of the sex long libeled as gentler.
The Two Kinds of Kisses.—Throughout the world there are two main varieties of kisses: the touch, tactile, or lip kiss, osculus Europeanus, and the nose or olfactory kiss, osculus Asiaticus. Most of this study will be devoted to the lip kiss: but the first lesson in the art of kissing should be devoted to the exotic method called the nose kiss. This method may be stored for future reference by those essaying the kiss for the first time; but hardened veterans in love’s sweet practice may at once proceed to try it out, along the lines indicated below.
So far, we have assumed the necessity for a manual of osculation. This is as good a place as any to indicate the two essential reasons for this book.
First, kissing is an art, and not a gift. Indeed, the whole practice of love is one of the most charming of the applied arts. No man or woman is born a perfect kisser, or a perfect lover. The teacher may be experience—there is no more competent instructor. But unless you wish your Cupid’s Boulevard to be full of unnecessary ups and downs, of countless incidents where a little more knowledge on your part would have caused the love incident to become immeasurably more pleasurable both to the kisser and the kissed, you will not suffer from a few lessons given by an OO.D.—doctor of osculations. Society, as now constituted, is sadly lacking in proper facilities for learning the technique of love and kissing. A hundred years from now, every well-equipped school will contain departments of Erotology, teaching theory as well as laboratory experimentation. If I live that long, I expect to become at one leap a full-fledged professor in kissing. I may even rise higher.
Second, American men and women are woefully ignorant on the proper technique of love, and of the kiss. There is a Puritan tradition behind many of us, which forbids kissing any woman but one's wife (or, by grudging extension, one's fiancee): and which even forbids kissing one's wife on Sundays and holy days. The latter prohibition, some husbands hold, might well be broadened; but the very spice of love lies in kissing one who is not one's wife or husband, if popular belief is at all right. This Puritan tradition has had its weight; it has made women offer lips no more attractive than damp salt mackerel, and men try to kiss a human being as if she were the man's mother-in-law. Then there is the recoil from this tradition, which makes a man's first kiss like a vacuum cleaner, often alarming the girl for life; and a girl's first kiss so marvelous, that all proper sense of climax is lost. There is ample room for a little common science on the heavenly art of kissing.
Leaping away, then, from the European or lip kiss, we find that much more widely distributed throughout the world of men is the nose or olfactory kiss. As performed by the Japanese, this kiss involves three distinct stages:
- 1. The man lays his nose gently upon the beloved girl's cheek.
- 2. He draws in a long nasal inspiration, lowering his eyelids as if in the extremity of bliss.
- 3. The lips give a slight smack, without touching the girl's cheek.
Kisses similar to this are the staple product in China, India, Ceylon, much of Africa. The connoisseur in kisses might try this variety: but, compared to many of the Occidental varieties, it will seem as tepid and insipid as warmed-over buckwheat cakes, or campaign pledges a week after election. Yet, throughout most of the world, our kiss is regarded as inelegant to the highest degree; and the nose kiss as the height of human ecstasy. Similarly a man who had never eaten anything but hardtack might regard it as the height of culinary art.