The kiss of love is the exultant message of the longing of love, love eternally young, the burning prayer of hot desire, which is born on the lovers’ lips, and “rises,” as Charles Fuster has said, “up to the blue sky from the green plains,” like a tender, trembling thank-offering.

The love kiss, rich in promise, bestows an intoxicating feeling of infinite happiness, courage, and youth, and therefore surpasses all other earthly joys in sublimity—at any rate all poets say so—and no one has expressed it in more exquisite and choicer words than Alfred de Musset in his celebrated sonnet on Tizianello:

Thus even the highest work of art, yea, the loftiest reputation, is nothing in comparison with the passionate kiss of a woman one loves. This is what life has taught Musset, and a half melancholy sigh rings through his exultation over the omnipotence of love. In turning to the more naïve speech of popular poetry, we find in a German Schnaderhüpfel (Improvisation) a corresponding homage to the kiss as the noblest thing in the world:

And we all yearn for kisses and we all seek them; it is idle to struggle against this passion. No one can evade the omnipotence of the kiss, the best resolutions, the most solemn oaths, are of no avail. A pretty little Servian folk-song treats of a young girl who swore too hastily.

It is through kisses that a knowledge of life and happiness first comes to us. Runeberg says that the angels rejoice over the first kiss exchanged by lovers.

Only death weeps over the brief duration of human happiness, weeps because the bliss of the kiss endures not for ever. And likewise, even after death, lovers kiss. Jannakos and Helena, his plighted bride, die before their wedding day. They die in a kiss and are buried together; but over their grave grew a cypress and an orange tree, and the latter stretched forth its branches on high and kissed the cypress.

The happiest man is the man who has the kiss. In the Greek romance of Babylonika, which was attributed to Jamblicus, who lived in the second century of the Christian era, three lovers contend for the favour of a young maid. To one she has given the cup out of which she was wont to drink; the second she has garlanded with flowers that she herself has worn; to the third she has given a kiss. Borokos is called on as judge to decide as to which has enjoyed the highest favour, and he unhesitatingly decides the dispute in favour of the last.

The same subject is often the theme of folk-poetry, and the verdict never alters; the joy bestowed by a kiss surpasses all other joys. A Hungarian ballad runs thus:

The same idea is still more delicately expressed in the following Servian ballad:

In another Servian lay, the lover sings that he would rather kiss his sweetheart than be the Sultan’s guest. In Spain the lover wishes he were the water-cooler so that he might kiss his darling’s lips when she is drinking:

The Greeks say that the kiss is “the key to Paradise”; yea, it is Paradise itself, declares Wergeland:

The kiss is a preservation against every ill. “No ill-luck can betide me when she bestows on me a kiss,” sings the old trouvère, Colin Muset:

It gives health and strength, adds Heine:

It carries life with it; it even bestows the gift of eternal youth—if one can believe the words of the Duke of Anhalt the minnesinger:

The Persians, too, had the same idea. The jovial Hafiz laments that “sour wisdom added to old age and virtue” has laid waste his strength, but a remedy is to be found for these:

And if a kiss is no good, then nought avails. In another passage the same bard says, that were he suddenly on some occasion to feel himself tormented by agony and unrest, no one is to give him bitter medicine—for such he detests—but:

In the case of lovers a kiss is everything; that is the reason why a man stakes his all for a kiss. In Enthousiasme Aarestrup says:

And man craves for it as his noblest reward:

Thus runs a Servian ballad, and innumerable analogues to it are to be found in the folk-lore of other countries, in ballads as well as tales. It is, you know, for a kiss from the princess’s lovely mouth that the swine-herd sells his wonderful pan.

But women are aware, too, of the witchery that dwells on their lips, and the power that lies in their kiss. According to a remarkable saga which forms the subject of one of Heine’s poems, King Harald Hårfager sits at the bottom of the sea in captivity to a mermaid. The king’s head is reposing on her bosom; but, suddenly, a violent tremor thrills him, he hears the Viking shouts which reach him from above, he starts from his dream of love and groans and sighs:

Man is the slave of the kiss; by a kiss woman tames the fiercest man; by means of a kiss man’s will becomes as wax. Our peasant girls in Denmark know this, too, right well. When they want one of the lads to do them a service they promise him “seven sweet kisses and a bit of white sugar on Whitsunday morning.” “But he will get neither,” they say to themselves.

Now, as we have discussed the kiss and its importance as the direct expression of love and erotic emotions, we will pass over to certain more special aspects of its nature.

In the very first place, then, we have the quantitative conditions.

It is a matter of common knowledge that lovers are liberal in the extreme in the question of kisses, which are given and taken to infinity, and these have likewise continually the same intoxicating freshness as at the first meeting. Everything in love is, you know, a reiteration, and yet love is a perpetual renewing. How inspiriting are the words of Tove to King Waldemar, as J. P. Jacobsen gives them:

What has a love kiss to do with the law of renewal? That one does not arrive at anything by one kiss is expressed with sufficient plainness in an Istro-Roumanian proverb: Cu un trat busni nu se afla muliere (with a single kiss no woman is caught).

This maxim holds good besides in the case of both men and women. But how many kisses are necessary then?

There is a little Greek folk-song called “All good things are three.” It runs as follows:

But, nevertheless, we may assume without a shadow of a doubt that he was not satisfied with these three kisses—lovers are not wont to be so easily contented. The Spaniards and many other nations besides say of lovers that “they eat each other up with kisses;” but more than three are certainly required for that purpose:

sings Aarestrup, but Catullus outbids him, however, in one of his songs to Lesbia:

As we see, Catullus’ love has no trifling start over Aarestrup’s, and so a later poet seems likewise to think that even his demands are quite ridiculously small. “Nay,” says Joachim du Bellay to his Columbelle, “give me as many kisses as there are flowers on the mead, seeds on the field, and grapes in the vineyards, and so that you shall not deem me ungrateful, I will immediately give you as many again.”

Du Bellay, moreover, bitterly upbraids the poet of Verona for asking for so few kisses that they can, when taken together, be counted:

I must, however, take Catullus’ part to a certain extent; he is not so precise in his demands of Lesbia as Du Bellay makes out; in another poem he asks her:

And the answer runs:

This being the case, it is a divine blessing that, according to the Finnish saying, “the mouth is not torn by being kissed, nor the hand by being squeezed”:

But even if the mouth is not exactly torn, yet much kissing may be almost harmful; but there is only one remedy to be found for this—“you must heal the hurts by fresh kisses.”

Dorat, who may be regarded as a high authority on philematology, expressly says:

And Heine, whose authority in these questions should hardly be inferior, holds quite the same theory:

I make use of the last of the verses quoted as a transition to the next question we have to investigate, viz., the qualitative aspect of kissing, as I regard it apart from its merely gustative qualities, which have already been considered.

The love kiss gleams like a cut diamond with a thousand hues; it is eternally changing as the sun’s shimmer on the waves, and expresses the most diverse states and moods, ranging from humble affection to burning desire.

The love kiss “quenches the fire of the lips,” quells and stills longing and desire, but it also burns and arouses regret. Margaret sits at her spinning-wheel, and, in tremulous longing, calls to mind Faust’s ardent kiss:

Numberless poets have varied the theme of the quenching yet burning kisses of love.

sings Waldemar at his meeting with Tove, and Aarestrup laments:

This “burning sweetness” seems to be an indubitable characteristic of a genuine love kiss; we even find it again in Heine:

The emotions consequent on the first kiss have been described in the old naïve, but, nevertheless, exceedingly delicate love-story, of Daphnis and Chloe. As a reward Chloe has bestowed a kiss on Daphnis—an innocent young-maid’s kiss, but it has on him the effect of an electrical shock:

“Ye gods, what are my feelings. Her lips are softer than the rose’s leaf, her mouth is sweet as honey, and her kiss inflicts on me more pain than a bee’s sting. I have often kissed my kids, I have often kissed my lambs, but never have I known aught like this. My pulse is beating fast, my heart throbs, it is as if I were about to suffocate, yet, nevertheless, I want to have another kiss. Strange, never-suspected pain! Has Chloe, I wonder, drunk some poisonous draught ere she kissed me? How comes it that she herself has not died of it?”

Impelled, as it were, by some irresistible force, Daphnis wanders back to Chloe; he finds her asleep, but dares not awake her: “See how her eyes slumber and her mouth breathes. The scent of apple-blossoms is not so delicious as her breath. But I dare not kiss her. Her kiss stings me to the heart, and drives me as mad as if I had eaten fresh honey.” Daphnis’ fear of kisses disappears, however, later on, directly his simplicity has made room for greater selfconsciousness. That a kiss is like the sting of a bee, or pains like a wound, is a metaphor which many poets have used, and the metaphor comes undoubtedly near the truth. With growing passion, kisses become mad and violent:

and such kisses leave marks behind them. Aarestrup’s mistress has beautiful plump shoulders:

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:

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:

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.

The question of feet or mouth is threshed out minutely by the two contending parties, who at last agree in the opinion that one ought to kiss both parts, beginning with the feet and ending with the mouth.

It cannot be denied that Thibaut de Champagne has a far better insight into the matter than Von Logau, and yet even the old French poet’s point of view must be characterised as being somewhat narrow.

All the other poets, you must know, teach us that not only the mouth, but every part of our sweetheart’s body says, “Kiss me.”

So sings Aarestrup, and he returns again and again to the same idea in his ritorneller:

Allow me also to call your attention to a pretty little myth which Dorat composed about a “kiss in the bosom’s Alpine snow.” The kiss is a fair rose, and roses bloom everywhere in these tracks; through witchcraft two vigorous rosebuds sprouted forth on woman’s white bosom:

But if the object of one’s affection is not within reach, and oscula corporalia are, for that reason, practically impossible, her image may be kissed, as a French song naïvely says:

But if one is not fortunate enough to possess an image of the object of one’s affection, then anything that has in any way been associated with, or is reminiscent of, him or her may be kissed. Tovelille exults to King Volmer:

But F. Rückert sings with pain and mockery:

Such oscula impropria are often mentioned by ancient as well as modern poets. Propertius (I. 16) says:

Eighteen hundred years afterwards Dorat writes:

Lovers often send each other kisses through the air, as in Béranger’s well-known song on the detestable Spring:

But should the distance be too great for such a platonic interchange of kisses, certain small, obliging postillons d’amour are employed Heine uses his poems for that purpose:

While the young girl in Runeberg has recourse to a rose that has just blossomed:

But however much poets may clothe with grace such kisses sent and received by post—and it cannot be denied that many of them are extraordinarily charming from a poetical point of view—they are, and must be, nevertheless, in reality only certain mean substitutes with which lovers in the long run cannot feel fully satisfied. “The kiss,” says the practical Frenchmen, “is a fruit which one ought to pluck from the tree itself” (Le baiser est un fruit qu’il faut cueiller sur l’arbre). Kisses ought to be given, as they should be taken, in secret; only in such case have they their full freshness, their intoxicating power. Heine says of such:

No profane eyes should see them: they only concern the pair of lovers—none other in the whole world. Secrecy and silence must rest over these kisses, as over all else that regards the soul of love, so that the butterfly’s wings may not lose their delicate down.

The strait-laced Cato degraded a senator of the name of Manilius for having kissed his wife in broad daylight and in his daughter’s presence. Plutarch, however, considers the punishment excessive, but adds: “How disgusting it is in any case to kiss in the presence of third parties.” Clement of Alexandria, one of the Fathers of the Church, endorses this opinion, and exhorts all married people to refrain from kissing one another before their servants.

All delicate-minded persons must undoubtedly sympathise with the ancient ascetic conception in proportion as they unconsciously follow it in practice. A kiss to or from a woman we love is a far too delicate pledge of affection to bear the gaze of strangers.

How many engaged couples would, do you suppose, find favour in Cato’s eyes? How often do they not by their behaviour offend the commonest notions of decency? Their kisses and caresses, which ought to be their secret possession, they expose quite unconcernedly to the sight of all. One evening at a large party I saw a young girl ostentatiously kiss on the mouth the gentleman to whom she was engaged. Cato would certainly turn in his grave if he knew that such immodest behaviour was actually tolerated by people of refinement and position; and how disgusted and indignant he would be—unless, indeed, he preferred to smile—at the sight of the duty-kisses after dinner, which are often exchanged between man and wife at dinner-parties. Ah, yes, when the belly’s full ...! How warranted is Kierkegaard’s satire on the conjugal domestic kiss with which husband and wife, in lack of a napkin, wipe each other’s mouth after meals. On the lips of youth alone you reap the sweetest harvests: