The Art of Kissing/Chapter 5
V
KISSING CUSTOMS
The Religious Kiss.—We have already referred to the religious usages concerning kissing, as revealed by the Bible and the records of classical nations. One of the apocryphal books of the New Testament supplements this account, by stating that John the Baptist was conceived in a chaste kiss of his parents. The kissing of holy relics, of the pope's foot and the bishop's hand, are all relics of heathen customs. Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth gives the ancestry of some Christian kisses:
Kissing of images and the Pope's toe is eastern paganism. The Egyptians had it of the Assyrians, the Greeks of the Egyptians, and we of the Romans, whose Pontifex Maximus (high priest) had his toe kissed during the Empire. The Druid's kissed their High Priest's toe a thousand years before Christ.
A variant of this crept into England. Anciently the kings and queens of England ceremoniously washed the feet of beggars, and kissed them, thereby imitating Jesus, who washed the feet of his disciples. Moreover, the monarch had to kiss as many feet as the years in his or her age; presenting a gift to each, called a maunday; the day of the ceremony being called Maundy-Thursday. When she was thirty-nine, Queen Elizabeth performed this rite: that is, she smacked the feet of thirty-nine commoners. James II, in 1731, his forty-eighth year, was the last English sovereign to pretend the humility of this public osculation. In 1530, Cardinal Wolsey, then fifty-nine, kissed the feet of as many poor men, and presented to each twelve pence in money, three ells of canvas to make shirts, a pair of new shoes, a cask of red herrings, and three white herrings. Thus do the pagan rites blossom in advanced religions.
The betrothal and nuptial kiss have origins partly religious. The nuptial kiss in church, at the end of the marriage service, is strictly by the York Missal and the Sarum Manual. Evidently it took a church law, even in these days, to require a man to kiss his own wife.
On Special Occasions.—Among the most popular of fairy tales is that of the Sleeping Beauty, who was aroused out of her years of slumber by the kiss of the handsome prince. Passing by the obvious symbolism in the story, it is interesting that a custom developed throughout Europe, perhaps as a result of the story, which permitted a man who found a woman asleep to kiss her awake. The same right, even in those days, was given to a woman who found a man asleep. In both cases, the wakened must also pay, as forfeit, to the awakener, a pair of gloves.
St. Valentine's Day is another occasion when the kiss is highly in order. Sir Walter Scott's Fair Maid of Perth has a full account of the osculatory practices on this holiday.
New Year's Day, however, is the heyday of the promiscuous kissers. The antiquity of this custom is vouched for by Washington Irving, in his entertaining Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York. In the broad old days the good burghers of New Amsterdam, with their wives and daughters, dressed themselves in all their finery, and repaired to the governor's house, where the chief official went through the rite of kissing all the women a happy new year. The head usher would follow suit:
Embracing all the young vrouws, and giving every one of them that had good teeth and rosy lips a dozen hearty smacks, he departed, loaded with their kind wishes.
The same usher later was the first to require a kiss from all women who passed Kissing Bridge, on the old highway that led to the troubled water of Hellgate. The custom of New Year kissing in New York has survived with undiminished fervor to today. At proper Watch Parties, gathered to watch the old year out and the new year in, at the stroke of midnight it is expected of every man present that he shall offer the proper osculatory salute to every woman present. When the watch party takes place in one of the prominent restaurants of the Tenderloin district, the results are piquantly surprising. You may go away with the memory of the most entrancing kiss you ever encountered, given you by an anonymous pair of lips whom you may never meet again. The custom is a good one, and is spreading to other parts of the country.
And Christmas brings in the mistletoe. The old belief was that, unless a maiden was kissed under the mistletoe at Christmas, she would not be married during the ensuing year. Since married ladies may be kissed as well, it is not quite clear what will happen to them if they are kissed. The old Scandinavian tradition concerning the mistletoe dealt with the death of Balder, fairest of the gods. To assure his life, every tree had given its word that it would not kill him. Then Loki, the mischief-maker of the gods, made an arrow of mistletoe, which had given no oath, and gave it to blind Hoder to shoot, the fatal shot slaying the god. Balder was restored to life, and the mistletoe was given into the care of the goddess Friga, and was never to be an instrument of evil until it again touched the earth. Hence it is always suspended in air, growing as a parasite high in oak and other trees. Its use as a license to kiss dates to the Druids: a branch of the plant is suspended from the ceiling, and any one of fair sex who, by accident or intention, passes beneath the plant, incurs the penalty of a hearty kiss from any man quick enough or audacious enough to take advantage of the opportunity. When natural mistletoe disappears—it is growing rarer now—you can rest assured that inventive man will popularize an artificial mistletoe, so that the lips of all maidens may be warmed by the kiss of Yuletide cheer.
Kissing Games and Sports.—If we had headed this section "kissing sports," it might have been misunderstood, somewhat like the alibi of the awkward dancer, to his fair partner with the aggrieved toes: "You know, I'm a little stiff from polo."—"Is that so?" she replied icily. "I have several friends from there."
Kissing games are popular chiefly among children of the former generation, or those living in more backward sections of the country. The modern youngsters scorn them as childish, so engrossed are they in more mature kissing and petting parties. Yet such games as "Postoffice," "Drop the Handkerchief," "Pillow," and "In a Well" were tremendous favorites in my youth—among the girls, that is, who had already reached their adolescence; and were endured, and in precocious cases liked, by the boys who participated. "Postoffice," in essence, consisted simply in girls and boys calling each other out, one at a time, for a kiss in the hall. "Drop the Handkerchief" had the wild thrill of the chase added—a chase in which the girls pretended very hard to try to get away, in order to yield more completely.
Many of the English folksongs, such as "The Farmer in the Dell," "King William Was King James's Son," and "The Needle's Eye" are used as ring-games for children, with kissing as an integral part. Certain "nice" children are forbidden to play these games, and thus get started in life with a false Victorian point of view. The games are pleasant enough for the very young; the more serious game of love will come in due time.
At old-fashioned country dances, in backwoods sections of America, the fiddlers who furnished the music used to break the monotony by a well-recognized squeaking of their fiddles, which was a signal for the couples to smack each other soundly. There have been outright "kissing bees" held in some of the western states; and even New England has been accused of holding "electric kissing parties," in which men and women rubbed their feet on the rugs until they were charged with electricity, and then kissed in the dark, to the amusement of bystanders who watched the sparks leap from lip to lip—if the accounts are to be believed. In any case, the good old husking bees are well authenticated, where the finding of a red ear of corn gave a young man the right to kiss every girl present; and gave a girl the right to call out her beau and kiss him before the crowd. So society blundered along toward giving its youth some practical knowledge of the opposite sex, to aid in right choice.
In modern England, bank holidays are the signal, in certain localities, for kissing sports quite as general and indiscriminate. The young men and women gathered there would form a rude ring, and then a girl—any girl—would suddenly go up to a young man, and slip a chip into his hand. She would at once run across the green as fast as she was able, or willing; the man thereupon would give chase, run her down, bring her back with his arm around her waist, and kiss her half a dozen times before the onlookers. At times the man gave the chip, and the girl did the chasing.
In Ireland there are occasional kissing festivals. On an Easter Monday not long ago several hundred young people of the town and neighborhood of Potsferry, County Down, put on their best attire and gathered at a pleasant walk nearby. The sport consisted in the men's kissing the women, married or single, as often as they cared to. Hardly a single woman returned from the festival without having had at least a dozen good hearty smacks.
For the modern expression of this energy, the petting party, so popular among the flapper generation and young college circles, is the chief outlet. Only, the earlier kissing sports and games consisted only of kissing: and the petting party hardly starts with this. Every variety of kissing is indulged in by the accomplished petter: "necking" is the name given to the osculatory pyrotechnics. The petters stop somewhere short of the complete love experience: but they have usually come so close to the ultimate, that there is, to use Byron's phrase brought up to date, not little mystery left for the nuptial night, but none.
Kissing Devices.—The kiss sent by mail is the constant way that love letters are ended. A row of crosses or x's ordinarily represents the kisses; but the more astute miss has a better way. Lips well rouged, or rouged over cold cream, when pressed to the page of the letter, leave a perfect impression as a token to send to the lover. Kisses are easily transmited over the telephone; and as easily over the radio.
The kiss for sweet charity's sake is well known. At many charity bazaars there is a kissing booth, where some attractive miss may be bussed at so much the smack, all to put panties on the little heathens of Patagonia, or to provide cream for indigent kittens in the Bid-a-wee Home. During the Boer war, Mrs. Potter, the noted actress, sold a kiss to a Hindu for twenty pounds, or about a hundred dollars; devoting the money to the South African War fund. Grace George looked at the matter reasonably, when interviewed on the subject. She reminded, the reporter that actresses were paid to allow actors to kiss them, where the play called for this display; and hence she saw no reason why the kiss could not be sold for patriotic reasons.
The stage kiss itself is often a mere feint, a pretended affair in which the actor and actress go through the motions of the kiss without touching lips. But it may be the very reverse, depending upon the actor and actress involved. There are many legends of the insatiable nature of certain actresses. A dramatic critic, writing in the old New York Press, said:
During the progress of her once famous kisses, Emma Abbott exhausted many tenors. After her first season in Carmen, Olga Nethersole bowled over her Don Jose, who began as a stalwart young Englishman, and ended as a mere shadow, and has since gone into consumption. In one of the Daly farces Ada Rehan and John Drew did some ecstatic kissing, and, if he had not removed to another management, our comedian might now be in heaven. It would appear that, in the theater at least, the ladies can stand more kisses than the men.
The critic goes on to point out that, in grand opera, expert kissers can command high salaries. In his musical version of Romeo and Juliet, Gounod makes Romeo hang on Juliet's lips for an interminable number of bars of music. The opening scene in Tannhauser shows the tenor exhausted by a kissing bout, while the lovely Venus is wide awake and begging for more. Brunnhilde, in Die Walküre, is put to sleep by a kiss strong enough to make her sleep twenty years. Rip Van Winkle's kiss of the old bottle in the Catskills was not more efficacious in inducing slumber. And in Wagner's Siegfried, the hero fastens his lips to Brunnhilde's with such perpetual fervor that the orchestra, says the critic, plays enough music to stock a comic opera, before the kiss is ended.
As for the movie kiss, that is of two distinct kinds. The good girl, played by any doll-faced moron, kisses as demurely as Victoria herself. But the siren, the vampire! Here we have the ultimate in extended kissing. Certain states, like Pennsylvania, have found it necessary to limit the number of feet of film that a kiss can last—two hundred feet being the Pennsylvania maximum. I once kissed a girl continuously for seven miles, on the Twentieth Century Limited; and I am sure that the record is infinitely longer than that. When it is remembered that the purified movies permit no display of any of the play of love beyond the kiss, and that on the screen the kiss is potent enough to cause a girl to be a "ruined woman," and to appear in the next reel with twins or triplets, you can see why an osculation of the Theda Bara type is efficiently and comprehensively done.
Yet many a thrill is provided, in the darkened movie auditorium, when the handsome hero and the wily siren or lovely heroine tangle themselves up in a long embrace. You cannot help seeing yourself as one or the other of the kissers; and the experience is highly pleasurable. There is only one more delightful experience, and that is to be doing the kissing yourself.