The Art of Kissing/Chapter 6
VI
CELEBRATED KISSES
Kissing the Blarney Stone.—About 1446 Cormac McCarthy built the Castle of Blarney, in County Cork, Ireland. It is a fortification of immense strength, with walls more than eighteen feet thick. When besieged by the Lord-President, McCarthy temporized by promising to surrender the fort to an English garrison. Day after day his lordship looked for a fulfilment of the agreement; day after day the Irish chieftain temporized with honeyed promises, until at last the Englishman became the laughing-stock of the English court. From this comes the belief that "kissing the Blarney Stone" endows its kisser with a sweet, persuasive, and wheedling eloquence, which is in turn called blarney.
The real Blarney Stone, if you seek to kiss it, may be found only by allowing yourself to be lowered from the northern angle of the lofty castle for some score of feet. There you will find the stone with the Latin inscription:
cormac mc carthy fortis me fierifect,
a. d. 1446
For those who are skeptical as to the aerial Journey clinging to a rope, there is another stone on the summit, likewise called the real Blarney Stone, bearing the date of 1703. The person who has kissed the stone is henceforth irresistible, when he pours his soft pleadings into the ears of his desired lady. Any transoceanic ticket line will quote the price of accommodations to County Cork and return.
A different kind of blarney is evidenced in the kiss for political purposes. You may remember that when the young ensign, Richmond Pearson Hobson, almost successfully sank a boat in Santiago harbor, in the attempt to bottle up the Spanish fleet, and thereafter returned to the United States, he went upon the lecture platform, and at the first lecture was offered a kiss by first one and then all of the young ladies present. His lecture series was a great success from the osculatory standpoint, at least.
The Congressman's kissing the babies of his constituency is a silent blarney that never fails to work. As far back as 1888, McComas of Maryland reduced baby-kissing to a fine art. After pensively gazing at the infant, the Congressman, as if overcome by an overpowering burst of emotion, would seize the infant to his bosom, hold it for a moment with head bowed reverentially, then bring his supple moustaches close to the little face, and—Smack!—the deed was done. In 1912, Congressman Huddleston of Alabama went the Marylander one better, by achieving the record of kissing every child in his Birmingham constituency. Thereafter, he might oppose the corporations, denounce conscription, vote against the war, do what he pleased—he had the babies and their mothers, and they had their husbands: and he was sure of reelection as long as he desired the position. This is political blarney reduced to maximum efficiency with the least effort.
In England, political kissing depends for its blarney effect upon gold guineas in the mouth of the candidate, which he passes to the wives of the electors as he kisses them. A Norfolk member was expelled from the House for this ingenious method of vote-geting. On one memorable occasion, the Duchess of Devonshire gave a butcher a kiss in exchange for a vote. Many American candidates omit the kissing and let their campaign platform drip with blarney. This is as effective a vote-getter as the other way.
The Poets on Kissing.—Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the American "poetess of passion," uttered this truetalk about the kiss:
The lips that have been innocent of passion's kiss frequently ooze with gossip's poison.
Never to have been kissed is never to have lived. Perhaps it is a secret consciousness of this which renders the unkissed women of earth so bitter in their denunciation of the love-enlightened.
Shelley, who was no slouch as a lover, apostrophized the kiss thus:
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
A Western congressman, not otherwise known as a poet, delivered this tribute to his favorite kiss—and who shall say that his dithyrambs lack the true poetic flair?
Talk about kissing! Go away! I have kissed in the North, I have kissed in the South; I have repeated the soul-stirring operation East and West; I have kissed in Texas and away down in Maine; I have kissed at Long Branch and at the Golden Gate—in fact, in every State in the Union; in every language and according to the manners and customs of every nation. I have kissed on the Mississippi and all its tributaries; but, young man, for good sound kissing, give me a full-fledged Caribou girl. When you feel the pegs drawn right through the soles of your feet, from your boots, that's kissing, that is.
This tribute to the efficacy of the Indian kiss is increased, when we recall that this was a custom taught to the red by the white. There is less poetry but more piety in the discussion of a kiss by the Rev. Sidney Smith, the witty divine, who said:
We are in favor of a certain amount of shyness when a kiss is proposed, but it should not be too long, and when the fair one gives it, let it be administered with a warmth and energy; let there be soul in it. If she closes her eyes and sighs immediately after it, the effect is greater. She should be careful not to slobber a kiss, but give it as a humming-bird runs his bill into a honey-suckle, deep but delicate. There is much virtue in a kiss, when well delivered. We have the memory of one we received in our youth which lasted us forty years, and we believe it will be one of the last things we shall think of when we die.
The poetry is more obvious in a poem like Kisses Three:
Kisses three—
Soft and tentative and shy,
And I did not leave him. I,
Though his kiss was but a husk
Flung to starving lips, I waited,
Waited, while love hesitated,
Fearful it would pass us by.
Prisoning my doubtful lips
In a long eclipse. . . .
And the night's vast rhythms beat
Over us with urgent power,
And each whitening, tardy hour
Lingered sweet, sweet. . . .
In the pale and furtive dawn,
All distrait, his soul withdrawn:
And his slow lips chilled my brow.
Shall no other night be mine,
When the throbbing hours shine?
Kisses three———
The Octopus Kiss.—There are countless passionate kisses recorded in literature; the octopus kiss in Blasco Ibanez's Mare Nostrum, when the strange Freya kisses Captain Ulysses Ferragut in the Aquarium of Naples, is worth quoting:
"Ah!" sighed Freya, throwing herself back as though she were going to faint on Ulysses' breast.
He felt as though a monster of the same class as those in the tank, but much larger—a gigantic octopus from the oceanic depths—must have slipped treacherously behind him and was clutching him in one of its tentacles. He could feel the pressure of its feelers around his waist, growing closer and more ferocious.
Freya was holding him captive with one of her arms. She had wound herself tightly around him and was clasping his waist with all her force, as though trying to break his vigorous body in two.
Then he saw the head of this woman approaching him with an aggressive swiftness as if she were going to bite him. . . . Her enlarged eyes, tearful and misty, appeared to be very far off. Perhaps she was not even looking at him. . . . Her trembling mouth, bluish with emotion, a round and protruding mouth like an absorbing duct, was seeking the sailor's mouth, taking possession of it and devouring it with her lips.
It was the kiss of a cupping-glass, long, dominating, painful. Ulysses realized that he had never before been kissed in this way. The water from that mouth, surging across her row of teeth, discharged itself in his like swift poison. A shudder unfamiliar until then ran the entire length of his back, making him close his eyes.
He felt as if all his interior had turned to liquid. He had a presentiment that his life was going to date from this kiss, that with it was going to begin a new existence, that he would never be able to free himself from these deadly and caressing lips with their faint savor of cinnamon, of incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue.
And he let himself be dragged down by the caress of this wild beast, with thought lost and body inert and resigned, like a castaway who descends and descends the infinite strata of the abyss without ever reaching bottom.
So far, this octopus kiss is entered for the championship vampire kiss in all literature.
The Kiss of Death.—The kisses of Joab to Amasa, and of Judas to Jesus, stand forever exemplar of kisses of treachery. There is a romantic story of the great Irish rebellion, concerning an imprisoned patriot under sentence of death, and his faithful sweetheart. The girl secured permission from the prison authorities to kiss the condemned man goodbye. The kiss was given and received: and, at the moment of kissing, the clever girl passed to her lover, from her mouth to his, a memorandum containing full information of how to escape. Acting on the plan thus revealed, he made good his escape. May every kiss be as fortune-bringing!
There are other kisses which bring, not freedom, but death. Lucian tells the story of the death of Demosthenes. When the Greek had fallen into the hands of Antipater, he asked permission to enter a certain temple in the neighborhood, for a moment of worship. This was granted. As he entered the temple, he carried his hand to his mouth—the old gesture that Job referred to in moon and sun worship, and a common gesture in the Orient and the Mediterranean world. The guards thought that he was merely kissing his hand, as an act of religion. But in his hand he held poison, and in this kiss of death he found his release. Cleopatra, when the kisses of Pompey, Caesar and Antony had staled on her lips, when her castles of hope and aspiration lay in ruins about her, and when the coldly cynical Octavius paid no attention to her charms, placed the asp, the poisonous mud-viper of the Nile, at her breast, and let the snake's kiss give her freedom.
Then there was the tremendous climax of the Haymarket riots in Chicago. Seven anarchists, including Louis Lingg, were arrested for the protest bomb, flung upon unarmed strikers in answer to the wild charge of the police. Lingg had his sweetheart bring the materials for a final bomb to him in the jail. Some of these materials she smuggled in orange skins, disguised as fruits; some she may have given him in the midst of a kiss. The stern young anarchist—he was only twenty at the time—made four bombs, for the four leaders to use in taking their own lives, to show to the public at large that, if they held the lives of others cheap in their fanatic devotion to an ideal, they held their own lives more cheaply yet. Three of these bombs were discovered: somehow Lingg retained the fourth. He was not willing to injure his jailer, and sent the man, by a pretended excuse, to the far corner of the jail corridor. Then, taking the bomb in his own mouth, he closed his teeth upon it, and so died.
The Kiss and Love.—The tactile, touch, or lip kiss originated from the mother's kiss of her infant, an outgrowth of maternal licking of her young. It grew slowly to express affection between the sexes. A second meaning grew up—to express subjection: somehow affection was alchemized into subjection. Usually one of the parties to a love relationship takes an attitude of subjection to the other—an attitude theoretically far from ideal, but humanly comfortable. For an expression of utter humility, to man or the god man imagined, appropriate gestures were few: bowing the head to the ground or kissing with head bent being the chief ones: The mouth, containing the organs of taste and in part of breath, stands for the chief outer gate to the man's life and whatever of soul he has: if it kisses in humility its lord, or his hand, or his foot, there is utter symbolic subjection. Kisses of courtesy, as between men and men, grew out of formal expressions of medieval subjection.
The kiss, as a token of subjection, has declined among us. The reason is not too obscure: men and women today are increasingly growing to the point where they realize that they should not stand in subjection to any human lord or any fantasied deity, where they know that they can look the whole world in the face with level eyes. When, to the decline of servility, we add the ever-present fact of the danger of infection from promiscuous kissing of lips or hands or great toes, and when we see certain religious shrines taking no chances, but wiping the relic with some germicide between kisses, it is not hard to see why merely formal kissing is departing.
The kiss to express love is another thing. If we are to have physical love continued on the earth, this reaches its crest in a complete commingling and interweaving of the bodies of the loving ones, as well as a commingling and interweaving of their spirits. The final rapture lies elsewhere: but, after hand has touched hand, the next step is for lip to touch lip. This is the prelude to the fuller loving to follow later. When a man kisses a woman, it is an offer of his love, physically at least, in its completeness: an offer not hard for the average male to make. When a woman accepts a man's kiss, not passively, but actively, or when she kisses him, this is an acceptance of the man's offer, or an offer on her part of the ultimate intimacy.
Human relationships, in practice, provide little enough opportunity to know members of the opposite sex, before some religious or civil ceremony has bound the man and woman into a relationship too often irksome and tedious, and intricate and expensive to end. Some sort of trial love is needed, to prevent wreckage of the relationship later. As long as society makes no regular provision for this, the kiss as a sort of test of compatibility, especially physical compatibility, has its value. The man or woman, especially the young man or woman, would then kiss until the intangible emotion following some especial kiss was so powerful that the people concerned felt brave enough to dare the uncertain dangers of mating: or until they felt irresistibly drawn into mating.
The ultimate result of the kiss is shown from two angles in two of Shakespeare's sonnets. In the first, he gives the dark picture of physical desire, or lust, in action, which he says is the expenditure of spirit in a shameful waste:
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The other side of the picture—and the usual truth lies somewhere between them—is far brighter:
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is a star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Your kiss may lead to the first drab ending, to the second over-idealistic Eden, or to some pleasant place between. In any case, to remain unkissing and unkissed is to remain something less than man or woman. Your aim should rather be to blossom to your full stature in the gardens of mankind: and a mouth was made for more than words.