Excuses for kissing; how all nature justifies the practice—The childish and the humorous excuse—Kissing casuistry—The gluttony of kissing; unaccountable osculatory demands—Excuses for not kissing—Kissing experiences—Dominie Brown’s first kiss—The kiss of the Spanish girl, the nurse, the mother—A curious German custom.

It must be remembered that the only animal that knows how to kiss is man. Dogs lick their masters and bears their ragged cubs; cats their kittens, while donkeys and the Esquimaux rub their noses; cows and horses fondle each others’ necks and heads; love-birds, pigeons, and other birds, nestle together and have methods of their own of showing affection peculiar to each; but none of these creatures kiss. Even low-class savages do not kiss like other men; so that we may take this habit to be an evidence of intellect and civilization.

Various excuses have been made for kissing. Shelley draws his excuses from Dame Nature herself:

A poet of later days has carried out the same conceit in very happy fashion:

There is a poem about a father lying beside his little child, Daisy, as she is being put to bed, and asking the foolish question that wife and lover ask over and over again:

A humorous excuse was that given by the defendant in a case of breach of promise. The defendant was allowed to say a word in his own behalf. “Yes,” he said, “I kissed her almost continually every evening I called at her house.” Lawyer for plaintiff: “Then you confess it?” Defendant: “Yes, I do confess it, but I had to do it.” Lawyer: “You had to do it! What do you mean?” Defendant: “That was the only way I could keep her from singing.”

The casuistry of kissing has been set forth in these lines:

There is a certain gluttony of kissing of which many examples might be given. There was once a jovial vicar who was such a glutton for kisses, that when he obtained the wished-for kiss, far from being satisfied he asked for a score; and

There is a proverb which says: “When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of favor;” and gorse blossoms always, year in and year out. This matter of countless kisses has been the theme of many a poet. Catullus averred that though his crop of kissing were thicker than the dry ears of the corn-field, he would not have enough. Another ancient poet starts off with a thousand kisses, adds a hundred thousand, repeats the process (in rhyme, of course) twice, and urges that he and his sweetheart shall purposely confuse their memories as to the number and begin all over again. Another poet wants kisses equal in number as the grains of sand on the seashore, as the stars in the heavens.

The poet exclaims that love was never satisfied with numbers, and argues that no one would dream of counting each blade of grass, each ear of ripening grain, or to a scanty hundred would confine the clustering bunches of grapes. Who would ask for a thousand bees and no more, or regulate the number of rain-drops that should fall on some parched pasture-land? One of our modern poets, John G. Saxe, has expressed this ancient desire, and from much of our modern poetry we should imagine the sentiment was still in favor:

Old Ben Jonson said that it would be his wish that he might die kissing, and it is said so grave a philosopher as John Ruskin once invited a young lady to kiss him—“not sometimes, but continually.”

A young lady reading in a newspaper of a girl having been made crazy by a sudden kiss, called the attention of her uncle, who was in the room, to that singular occurrence, whereupon the old gentleman gruffly demanded what the fool had gone crazy for. “What did she go crazy for?” archly asked the ingenuous maiden; “why, for more, I suppose.”

And, in rhyme, we have the same sentiment.

Some curious excuses are recorded for not kissing. In a certain Methodist church the young people were in the habit of playing games whose forfeits were kisses, but a pious old deacon was much troubled about it; he said he was not opposed to kissing if they did not kiss with “an appetite.” A woman in trying to express her contempt for a certain female friend, said: “If I was a man I would no more kiss such a woman than I would kiss a pair of tongs that had been left out over night in a snow-bank.”

Kissing experiences vary. A country damsel, describing her first kiss, told her female friend that she never knew how it happened, but the last thing she remembered was a sensation of fighting for her breath in a hot-house full of violets, with the ventilation choked by blush-roses and tu-lips.

A Western man relates his experience. “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.”

We read of a king’s kiss that “fell like a flame,” sending through every vein love’s joy and pain. And Shakespeare speaks of two lovers whose lips were “four red roses on a stalk, and in their simple beauty kissed each other.” A country girl insisted on taking a stamp instead of a stamped envelope at the post-office. “My beau,” she said, “doesn’t like stamped envelopes. He lives away out in Colorado, and he says he never gets a chance to see me; but if I lick the stamp and stick it on, he can chew it, and it is the next thing to kissing me.” The fact is, that a young lady’s first love-kiss has the same effect on her as being electrified; it’s a great shock, but it’s soon over.

Almost every one has heard of the first kiss given by Dominie Brown to his sweetheart Janet, after a courtship of seven years. One evening, as they sat together in the customary solemn silence, Mr. Brown summoned courage and said: “We have been acquainted now for seven years, and I’ve ne’er gotten a kiss yet. D’ye think I might tak’ wan, my bonnie girl?”

“Just as you like, John, only be becoming wi’ it.”

“Surely, Janet, we’ll ask a blessing. For what we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful.”

The kiss was taken, and the worthy divine, overpowered by the blissful sensation, rapturously exclaimed: “Oh! Janet, it is gude. We’ll return thanks.” Six months afterwards they were married.

There is a poetic account of the kiss of that black-eyed Spanish girl who first kisses with her glances, practicing for the coming encounter:

And there is what may be called the apropos experience, equally interesting:

And there is another kind of good-night kiss. A certain swain, after having escorted his sweetheart to and from a New England forfeit party, where the poor girl, the belle of the evening, had been kissed, as he expressed it, “slobbered over by all, and sundry,” of course kissed her good-night at the gate. He declared in that one chaste salute he could discriminate nine distinct and separate flavors, viz., onions, tobacco, brandy, peppermint, gin, lager-beer, checkerberry, musk, and camphor.

With some of us a kiss is our earliest recollection:

In that old-fashioned youthful game, “Kiss in the Ring,” a favorite manoeuvre of some of the boys was to keep out of a place in the ring till they had kissed all the pretty girls in succession. Those who grow up with the same fondness for osculatory attentions would probably like the custom in some parts of Germany, which requires a young man who is engaged to a girl, to salute, upon making his adieu for the evening, the whole of the family, beginning with the mother. Thus, in a family circle embracing half-a-dozen girls, each having a lover, no less than forty-eight kisses would have to be given on the occasion of a united meeting; and when we consider that each lover would give his own sweetheart ten times as many kisses as he gave her sisters, the grand total would outnumber a hundred.

We must not omit the mother’s kiss. Her good-bye kiss has been the charm which has kept many a schoolboy in the right path when he has got free from home influences. Tom Brown, en route for Rugby, made a bargain with his father, before starting, that he was not to be subjected to the indignity of a paternal kiss; not so, however, with his mother, whose last kiss all the racket of public school life could never efface from his memory. Benjamin West, the artist, once said: “A kiss from my mother made me a painter.”