Art of Kissing 987 Wood

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO
Edited by £. Haldeman-Julius 987
The Art of Kissing

Clement Wood
LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. QO7
Edited by .E. Haldeman- Julius S O /
The Art of Kissing

Clement Wood
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1926,
Haldeman-Julius Company
PRINTED IN THJ3 UNITED STATK8 OF AMERICA

CONTENTS
Chapter page
1. The Origin of Kissing 5
Defining a Kiss [
Roots of Kissing ?
The Two Kinds of Kisses 9
2. The History of Lip Kissing
In Antiquity 13
The Spread of Kissing 1?
3. The Technique of the Kiss
The First Kiss 24
. The Sophisticated Kiss
A Girl's Kiss
* 4. Special Problems
Size of Mouth
Kissing Relatives
Kissing Your Own Sex 37
The Kiss Complete 3S
5. Kissing Customs 4*
The Religious Kiss 41
On Special Occasions 42
Kissing Games and Sports 44
Kissing Devices 47
6. Celebrated Kisses 51
Kissing the Blarney Stone 51
The Poets on Kissing 53
The Octopus Kiss 55
The Kiss of Death 56
The Kiss and Love 58
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, hy general gossip, de-
scended 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 Ba-
varian bussen, to kiss, and may be related to
the Spanish and Portuguese buz, a kiss of rev-
erence, 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,
6 THE ART OF KISSING
that Paradise of osculation, to distant Lap-
land, 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 oscirfum, 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 salva-
tion, 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
Mke 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
- meaning, the dictionary says that a kiss
13 "a salute or caress, given with the lips."
What an incredible understatement! Imagine a
drowning man describing a life-buoy as a float-
ing 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 \rsry good. As old poet
came closer than the dictionary, when he wrote:
What is a kiss? alacke ! at worst,
A single drop to quench a thirst,
Tho' oft itsweet
The first proves
dropin of
happier hourshower.
one long
THE ART OF KISSING 1
Roots of Kissing. — Havelock Ellis, in Appen-
dix A to volume IV of his Studies in the Psy-
chology of Sex, has done most toward estab-
lishing the origins of kissing. The kiss as we
know it, the tactile or touch kiss (as dis-
tinguished 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 cf
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, during1
their active mating, caress each other with
their antennae. Among birds, the bills are used
for touches
nature of the and caresses which mammals
kiss. Many partake ofhave
the'
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 hie
most reliable witness, in every case, as hie
tongue. Anything that his tongue can reach, or
g THE ART OF KISSING
that can be carried up to his tongue, is prompt-
ly tasted and, if found agreeable, licked. Ani-
mals far below the mammals share this trait
with the human infant. Especially among the
mammals, including man, the trait is promi-
nent: and it traces back to the infant's plea-
sure in sucking the maternal nipple. The low-
est mammal, it may be remembered, which is
the intermediate stage to the forms of life be-
low 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 com-
mand to touch and suck the nipple for the
same purpose. Out of this grows the trait
among children of kissing and licking every-
thing 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 in-
clined 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 uni-
versal 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 em-
phasis 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 CEdipus
complex, are found in this fact. Now we learn
thr.t 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 Tiro Kinds of Kisses. — Throughout the
world there are two main varieties of kisses:
the touch, taatile, or lip kiss, osculus Europea-
and thfc nose or olfactory kiss, osculus
ist of this study will be devoted
: 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 essay-
ing 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. In-
deed, 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 inci-
dents where a little more knowledge on your
part would have caused the love incident to be-
come 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 woe-
fully 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 exten-
sion, 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 tra-
dition, 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 dis-
tributed 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
s cheek.
' 2. He drawsas if inin a the
longextremity
nasal inspiration,
of bliss. lowering
The lips give a slight smack, without touching
ill's cheek.
Kisses similar to this are the staple product
in China, India, Ceylon, much of Africa. The
oisseur in kisses might try this variety:
rompared to many of the Occidental varie-
ties, 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 in-
elegant 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.
II
THE HISTORY OF LIP KISSING
In Antiquity. — The antiquity of lip kissing

may be traced, in no very pronounced form,
to the Aryan and Semitic peoples. Among the
ancient Arabs, and their Semitic relatives, the
Hebrews, the kiss had many uses, most of
these being related to religion. The kiss was
used as a direct method of worship of some
gods: "Let the men that sacrifice kiss 'the
calves'* (Hosea xiii 2). Similarly the Lord
said to Elijah: "Yet I have left me seven thou-
sand in Israel, all the knees which have not
bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath
not kissed him" (I Kings xix 18). A stranger
relierious rite is referred to by Job (xxxi 27)
when he refers to kissing his hand to the moon
or sun, as a symbol of worship.
The kiss of salutation, especially among
men, was common. Thus Jacob kissed his
father Isaac; Joseph kissed all his brethren,
hiB sons, and his father; Aaron kissed Moses,
and Moses in turn kissed his father-in-law
Jethro; Samuel, when he anointed Saul as
king, kissed him; David kissed Jonathan, and
later his son Absalom; and Absalom kissed all
who came to see him, in order to win their
allegiance by this grant of near-royal favor.
Later all the Macedonian Christians kissed
Paul, as he was leaving them. This kiss was
extended, among the early Christians, to in-
14 THE ART OP KISSING
elude women as well: the perfect Christian
greeted both man and women with a "holy
kiss," or a "kiss of charity." There are some
Christians whom it would indeed be charity to
kiss — but the custom had its advantages.
David's kiss to Absalom betokened reconcil-
iation with the rebel; and the king's command,
in the Psalms, was that all should kiss the
king, the Lord's Son, or be genially wiped out
for omitting the kiss of subjection.
The kiss among relatives was not unknown:
Laban eldered Jacob for not permitting Laban
to kiss his sons and daughters, and Elisha asked
permissionTheof kiss
mother. Elijah to kissapprobation
betokened his father also:
and ~~
"Every man shall kiss his lips that giveth a
right answer" (Prov. xxiv 26). This is a cus-
tom we are glad has passed. Indiscriminate
kissing from many men in public life, for in-
stance, we would regard as a punishment be-
yond any that savage ingenuity could devise.
The woman who had sinned kissed the feet of
Jesus, in token of her reformed adoration. And
there was the kiss of treachery, given by an
enemy, warned against in Proverbs, and used
by Joab in murdering Amasa, and by Judas in
delivering Jesus to the posse that sought him.
So far, we have not had the kiss of love,
between man and woman. Naomi's kisses to
her daughters-in-law were not quite the love
that we mean, but we find it, too, sparsely
scattered through the Bible. Thus, upon their
first meeting, we read: "And Jacob kissed
Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept" (Gen.
;*2ix 11). The kiss is understandable, for
Rachel is said to have been a young and at-
tractive damsel; but why the weeping? Some-
thing must be left out of the story: perhaps
she would let him kiss her but once. And, in
the great love song of the Old Testament, we
find what we are seeking: "Then let him kiss
me with the kisses of his mouth" (Song of
Solomon i 2). We can overlook countless kiss-
ings of the dust, to show humble subjection, for
one real description of the kiss of love like this.
The Old Testament worthies were on the right
track, after all. The other kisses made us feel
like the British soldier in Kipling's Mandalay:
An' I seed her first a-smokin'
cheroot, of a whackin* white
An* a-wastin'
foot: Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's
Bloomin' idol made o' mud,
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd —
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed
'er where she stud !
But we have arrived at last at a real kiss, and
with this we can pass onward.
We learn that Arabian women and children
kiss the beards of their husbands and fathers,
which must be about as thrilling as kissing a
shredded wheat biscuit or a clothes brush. The
Mohammedans, on their pious pilgrimage to
Mecca, kiss the sacred black stone, which was
worshipped long before Mohammed was born.
In Egypt, the inferior kisses the hand of a
superior, generally on the back, but sometimes
on the palm; the son kisses the hand of his
father, the wife that of her husband, the slave
and servant that of their master. Here the
kiss spells subjection. We know that, among
the Greeks, Homer scarcely knew the kiss, aud
later poets mentioned it only rarely.
When we come to Rome, the kiss has* a r
varied practice. There was the religious kiss,
similar who
atheists to Job's: persons
would not were hands
kiss their treated as
when
they entered a temple. In early Roman ages,
the kiss was given by inferiors to superiors;
in the pre-Caesarean republic, this fell into die-
repute. The emperors restored the practice of
kissing hands, which gradually was etherealized
until the crowd had to kiss their hands to the
emperors, as one would to a god. Solomon
spoke of the same custom among the Hebrews,
and Cortez found it among the Mexicans whom
he pillaged. A strange custom in Rome was
to give the dying a last, kiss, in order, as they
thought, to catch the dying breath. As for
kissing among men, let Martial, the old satirist,
speak for Rome:
Every neighbor, every hairy-faced farmer presses
on you with a strongly scented kiss. Her-
weaver assails you, there the fuller and the cob-
bler, who has just been kissing leather ; here the
owner of a filthy beard, and the one-eyed gentle-
man ; there one with bleared eyes, and fellows
whose mouths are defiled with all marnv
abominations.
He gives the other side of the picture, when
he describes the kisses of his favorite:
The fragrance of balsam extracted from
matic trees ; the ripe odor yielded by the teeming
saffron; the perfume of fruits mellowing in their
winter repository ; the flowery meadows of spring ;
timber warmed by the hand of a maiden ; a grsr^ten
tfhat attracts the bees.
That Roman love-kisses were not frigid is in-
dicated by many lines in the poets. Thus
Catullus wrote:
Whom wilt thou for thy lover choose?
Whose will they call thee, false one, whose?
Who will thy darted kisses sip,
While thy keen love-bites scar his lip?
Horace, in one of his odes, refers to the same
nibbling propensity of Roman women and men:
Or on thy lips the fierce, fond boy
Marks with his teeth the furious joy.
The Spread of Kissing. — With this good start,
the admirable custom of kissing spread over
the world: but its progress was slow. It did
not conquer the Orient: Japan, China, India,
still have small use for it. Among nearly all
the black races of Africa, not only is the kiss
between lovers unknown, but the mother's kiss
is usually unknown. Among the American
Indians, the lip kiss was not found, although
the mouth might be used in the love episode.
The Fuegians, in South America, have the cus-
tom of lovers rubbing their cheeks together.
The present limited kissing among Australia©
natives may be due to white lessons.
Today, the kiss is known through Europe,
and among Europeans everywhere, with the
single exception of Lapland. Yet, even i»
Europe, it is a comparatively modern disco
spreading first to the higher classes, and then
down. One medieval ballad has the lady ot
the castle discover that a varlet has substitute d
himself for the absent lord during the nigh,,
by remembering that the varlet embraced *
out kissing. The Celtic tongue, as Rhys found
out, has no word for kiss, but uses the Latin
pax, which means literally "peace," because it
occurs in the religious phrase osculum pads,
kiss of peace. Yet the Welsh Cymri early
learned kissing. Its religious use is widespread.
Among European pagans, house gods were
greeted, on entering and leaving, with a kiss. •
The Eastern and Western churches have de-
rived from this such customs as kissing the
relics of saints, the foot of the pope, and the
hands of bishops. The surviving custom of
kissing the Testament, on administering an
oath in many of our courts, is a vestige of the
dying religious usage.
Yet the kiss made its way slightly into the
East. The Arabic Perfumed Garden recom-
mends the kiss, especially on the inside of the
mouth. In feudal times in Europe, the vassal
kissed the hand of his superior, or some symbol
of the lord. Pliny may have been facetious
when he said that the custom of kissing women
originated in Rome, as a method of the hus-
band's to test whether his wife had been drink-
ing liquor or not. The custom, when extended
to other women, justified itself. In France,
the good girl is supposed to save her lips for
her husband. This is so true, that Mme.
Adam wrote that, when she first let a man
kiss her as a girl, she thought she had parted
with her virtue, and was sure that a child
would follow the kiss. A similar misconcep-
tion prevails among writers for and censors of
American movies, if we are to judge by their
product.
THE ART OP KISSING *9
But in France the custom was once far more
liberal. When the gallant cardinal, John o*
Lorraine, was presented to the Duchess of
Savoy, she gave him her hand to kiss. The
indignant
Am I to bechurchman
treated in exclaimed, "How, I madam?
this manner? kiss the
queen, my mistress, who is the greatest queen
in the world; and shall I not kiss you, a dirty
little duchess?" Without more words, he
caught hold of the princess and kissed her
three times on the lips. France, alas, retains
the custom of kissing among men. During the
World War, every decoration given by a French
general was accompanied by a hearty smack
upon both cheeks. In an army of Amazons n©
one might object to this; but deliver me from
formal masculine osculation!
In Russia, the Easter salutation is a kiss.
Everybody kissed everybody, under the old
regime, on this occasion. The Czar, who must
have been a glutton for punishment, had to kiss
his family, retinue, court, attendants, officers
on parade, the palace sentinels, and a select
party of private soldiers. In any part of Rus-
sia the poorest serf, meeting a high-born dame
on the street, had only to say "Christ is risenl"
to receive "Christ is truly risen" in reply, ae«
companied by a resounding kiss. Today it is
probable that one of the old serfs is not above
^kissing a duchess who salutes him with the
old sesame. It was the great Catherine of
Russia who instituted assemblies of men and
women, to aid the cultivation of manners. One
of her rules for maintaining decency
"No gentleman should force a kiss from, or
strike a woman, in the assembly, under pain
of execution." If manners were, as this rule
indicates, a trifle crude under Catherine, under
her husand, Peter the Great, who preceded her,
they were a wee mite rougher. In the charm-
ing Peter the Czar, by Klabund, Peter's love
technique is described:
The Grand Elector of Brandenburg led the Polo-
naise. The Czar led the Duchess of Mecklenburg, a
delicate blonde. When the Polonaise had come to
its end in the Hall of Mirrors the Czar and his
partner were nowhere to be found.
He had drawn her into a side apartment and had
violated her behind a portiere. And he was so
powerful that she neither could nor would defend
Xierself.
And then he left her.
She drowns herself in the river outside the
palace.
But the Czar had already forgotten her ....
Then he fell asleep and dreamed of a mouse of the
steppes. She had a face like the Duchess of Meck-
lenburg and squeaked softly.
He bit off her head and flung the tiny carcass
upon the fields.
Peter's technique
haps, if he had read was this
a bithandbook
too crude.
of Per-
love
and kissing, he might have loved the duchess
with more diplomacy and more general enjoy-
snent.
In Norway, one perplexing and, at times, de-
lightful salute is furnished by one's hostess.
The good woman always tucks her guest into
bed for the night, and then gives him a re-
sounding kiss upon the lips. As a rule, how-
ever, there is no second kiss. The kiss is known
in Finland, but it is frowned upon as some-
thing tending upon the immoral. Iceland —
thus does a frigid climate affect current stand-
ards of morality! — has elaborate penalties J: or
most forms of kissing, including exclusion from
the country for kissing another's man's wife,
and a heavy fine for even a permitted kiss from
an unmarried woman. Far to the south, in
Paraguay, the custom requires you to kiss
every lady you are introduced to. Since, at
one time, all the females above thirteen
chewed tobacco, this is a mixed blessing, even
with maidens as attractive as South America
produces.
In England, the story is that the kiss was
introduced by Rowena, the beautiful daughter
of Hengist the Saxon marauder. At a banquet
given by King Vortigern to his Saxon allies,
the princess is said to have kissed the delighted
monarch upon the lips. By the time of Edward
IV, a guest was expected, upon arrival and
departure, to kiss his hostess and all the ladies
of the household. In 1497, when Erasmus was
in England, the practice was at its height; the
good reformer approved:
If you go to any place, you are received with a
y all ; if you depart on a journey you ar-
1 with a kiss ; you return, kisses are ex-
changed; people come to visit you — a kiss the first.
thing:; they leave you — you kiss them all around.
Do they meet you anywhere? — kisses in abundance.
. wherever you m< is nothtnsr but.
— and if you had once tasted them ! ho\*
are! how fragrant! on my honor you would
ish to reside here for ten years only, but for
life !
John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's I
writing over a hundred years later, viewed
the spectacle more sourly: he abhorred "the
common salutation of women," and punctured
the arguments of those who called these "holy
kisses" thus:
But then, I have asked them why tney make
balks? why they did salute the most handsome, and
let the ill-favored ones go?
The kiss at the point of death is not un-
known in English chronicles. When Nelson
was dying on bdard his flagship, he turned to
his faithful friend at his side: "Kiss me,
Hardy!" These were the last words he ut-
tered. Sir Walter Scott, when dying, took
leave of his friend Lockhart in the same
fashion. The kiss among men, once popular in
England, came over when England aped French
notions of chivalry. Germany has the same cus-
tom: in 1888, when the Emperor William met
the Czar at St. Petersburg, the two rulers em-
braced and kissed several times. As the kiss
among men entered England, the general kiss-
ing of women declined — all due to the innova-
tions of the "old goat," Charles II, at the time
of the Restoration. Even canny Scotland has
widespread kissing chronicled in several pe-
riods.
The state of kissing in the United States
today is generally well known: it is a far cry
from our liberality to the old Blue Laws of
Connecticut, with a heavy penalty for kissing
< *ie's wife on Sundays or fast days, and, for all
we know, boiling in oil for kissing the wife of
another. It is still unlawful to kiss a girl
against her will: the courts awarding damages
to the girl varying from $750 in Pennsylvania
and $2,500 in New York, to $1.15 in New Jersey,
And while there are Anti-Osculation Leagues,
with stern medical warnings of the danger of
kissing, the custom shows no evidence of dimi-
nution. The kissing of children on the mouth,
even by parents, is liable to be harmful; if
the medicos are to be believed, diphtheria, mal-
aria, scarlet fever, colds and pulmonary taints,
blood poison, and at times death, lurk in the
kiss. Let the children, then, remain unkissedl,
except for the cheek: but, with the proper girl,
we would brave ten million germs for one tasto
of what the old Georgia farmer described as
"sucking sugar."
$4 THE ART OF KISSING
III
THE TECHNIQUE OF THE KISS
The First Kiss. — The desire of a man to kiss

a girl, and of a girl to be kissed by a man, and
to kfss him in return, assumes a heightened
form when adolescence is reached by each.
Kissing, from the standpoint of its biological
function, is a prelude to the ultimate flove mat-
ing. From the standpoint of inexperienced kiss-
ers, it is a temporary substitute for the love
hunger, — a substitute which may be all that
the man or girl demands for weeks or months
ar years. Prom the standpoint of experienced
kissers, it is a prelude to the mating; and.
where the kissers have not previously mated,
la a sort of preliminary test, to see if they
are suited.
The immediate object of kissing is mutual
pleasure. If you who read this, whether man
or woman, ask me whom you are to kiss, I can
only answer that you alone can give . the
answer. No general rules can be laid down.
Many men prefer a girl shorter than them-
selves: yet the ideal mating might conceivably
mean equal height, and there are men who
prefer a girl taller. As to whether you wish
the girl younger or older than yourself, that
too depends upon your inclination at the mo-
ment. As a rule, the young man often desires
an older woman, who is more experience and
— and, in brief, comes closer to his ideal woman,
THE APwT OF KISSING 25
based largely upon his mother. As the man
grows older, in proportion as his head remains
hollow he desires a younger and younger girl.
This is partly because he finds an experienced
woman superior to himself: and the average
'lordly" male, in all sadness I must confess,
prefers an inferior woman to one the man's
equal or superior. The choice of age for youth
has another meaning as well: the older person,
consciously or not, wants to restore his own
lost youth in the kisses and caresses of a
younger person. This, from the standpoint of
the older person, is admirable. Some dark men
prefer blonde girls, some prefer girls of their
own coloring; and in every case generalities
cannot be stated with certainty. If you want
to kiss a girl or woman, set about doing it,
or, at least, finding out if it will be well re-
ceived.
The immediate object of kissing, mutual
pleasure, as distinguished from the ultimate
object, the love embrace, requires that both
man and girl be willing. There is no pleasure,
except in a man slightly perverted, in kissing
a girl entirely against her will. So the man's
first task is to find out whether the girl wishes,
or is ready, for him to kiss her. How can he
find out? The one safe rule is, not by asking
directly. The girl rightly assumes that the
man who asks for a kiss lacks the experience
that will make the act worthwhile to her.
The indirect methods vary enormously. It's all
right to talk about kissing, and get the girl to
agree that a kiss isn't any harm, when people
really like each other. She will see through
the subterfuge, of course, but, unless she de-

spises its obviousness too much, she will not
resent it. Another way is to progress by tenta-
tive caresses — touching her hand as if by acci-
dent, holding it, sitting close and closer to her,
kissing (as if shyly) her shoulder, and the like.
If the man's caress is clearly distasteful to the
girl, the world is tremendously full of other
girls. One or more of the others will bring
you more happiness in love, be sure of that.
Give the unpleased miss up as a bad job, and
move on.
But a pretended resistance is another thing.
There are many girls who say "No!" to every
approach, and yet thereby intend to invite fur-
ther and further pursuit on the man's part.
How can you tell the real from the sham?
Rather than miss a good kiss, if there is any
doubt in your mind, proceed on the assumption
that the girl really wants a kiss. The .very
feminine girl frequently pretends this resis-
tance: perhaps to entice you on, perhaps be-
cause she has been taught that such things are
wrong, and does not yet know that they are
right; and perhaps because her temperament
requires her to be forced every step of the way.
If you can stand the shouldering of the tempo-
rary responsibility, in other words, if you
enjoy the chase of the victim who pretends un-
willingness, stick to her until you have kissed
her thoroughly. Surprisingly enough, the girl
who seems very masculine often has the same
trait. Her pretended masculinity may be a
sham; and she may long all the time for your
kisses and caresses. The only way to find out
is to go ahead: never believe the spoken word
in such cases, and believe her actions of rejec-
tion only when repeated the Biblical seventy
times seven times.
Let us assume that the man has ascertained
that the girl is willing to be kissed. If she is
to keep up her pretense of opposition, any
legitimate surprise kiss is permissible. For my
own part, I prefer to leave the protesters to
others; the world has enough girls who do not
fake this opposition. There is no reason why
the protesters should not be left kissless, except
for men who enjoy overcoming a struggling
faked opposition.
For the girl who is willing to be kissed, the
technique of the first kiss requires unusual
care and artistry. Don't hurry, as if you had a
train to catch. Don't stumble over yourself, and
find yourself kissing her ear or hair instead of
her mouth — which she will regret as much as
you. Take it slowly, in somewhat the following
fashion:
If the girl is really being kissed for the first
time, or is unused to kissing from men, or
shams feeble resistance, it is well to hold
her so that she cannot avoid the meeting of
lips, when it is finally offered. If you and she
are standing, either press her body firmly
against your own, or hold one arm so that it
can catch and hold her at a moment's indica-
tion of squirming away on her part. This with
one arm: have the other placed around her
shoulder, at the back of her head, so that,
if need arises, it can grasp her head and hold
it in place for the bestowal of the kiss. If you
are seated, the same rule applies for the two
arms; unless you are so sure of your ground
that you can place the two hands respectfully
on her two cheeks, thereby tilting her face to
the proper angle. Then without hurrying, bring
your lips un until they meet hers. Keep your
lips closed: make the kiss chaste, respectful,
and not too long. Its purpose, in other words,
is not to frighten the timid unkissed darling.
Even if you are bored with these slow pre-
liminaries, remember what is in store for you,
and let your face register intense pleasure. Let
your expression say, either that this is the first
kiss you have ever had, and that you already
feel transported to Paradise; or that, if you
ever kissed before, you have forgotten every-
thing in the universe except this particular girl
and her particular kiss. Actually act, at the
moment that the kiss is completed, as if that
is all you expected from the girl. For the
moment that is what she will actually feel.
Quickly enough, she will feel differently.
Only in the rarest cases is it wise to stop
with one kiss. Better let both of you miss a
trip to Europe, than stop at this point. Normal-
ly» you will still continue to let your arms and
hands touch her as intimately as possible. A
reassuring pressure of your fingers upon her
arms, a head bowed, and, in cases, a murmured
"I'm sorry, darling! I didn't really mean to — "
. . . anything to restore her confidence in you,
all these come in handy. Then artistically begin
to lose control of yourself. Her cheeks next —
they must be kissed — oh, so respectfully! A lit-
tle kiss-nibble at the corner of her mouth tastes
inexpressibly sweet, and continues to restore
her confidence in you. It lulls her suspicions,
and makes her think that all you wished was
the one small kiss.
An important next step comes in well here,
and may indeed be used as a prelude, in cases
where the girl seems absolutely unwilling.
Gently bend down her head, and kiss her on the
eyelids. If this is the beginning of the whole
matter, you may even explain reassuringly what
you are about to do. While you are feasting on
this kiss, by accident, as it were, you can so
tilt her face that the lips are yours. Stray to
the ears, for a kiss and a little nip; and then
come down to the neck. This is a warm comfy
kiss, and, if the girl wears a dress even mod-
erately low-cut, is especially thrilling to her.
Now, for the first time, you can begin to put
some soul, some unconstraint, in the caress.
Holding her body tightly to yours, kiss her
passionately on the neck. The touch is intimat?
and at the same time not calculated to rouse
suspicion. It will rouse her insensibly. Keep
this up, until you feel her body relaxing in your
arms. Now is the time to return triumphantly
to the lips; if she tries to get away, use a
reassuring "Just one, darling! Just one tiny
little one — " What you say makes no differ-
ence; the thing to do is to get there. Once
you have rearrived at the lips, you may kiss
her as passionately as she is able to stand.
Kissing passionately means kissing with
more th?u the closed lips, in general. The
Persian Perfumed Garden recommends kissing
with the whole *.nsicle of the mouth. Let your
lips now surround hers, as if they were going
to engulf them. The electric tingling sensa-
tion is hers as well as yours. Sooner or later,
she will follow your example, and open ner
lips slightly. Now is the time to let your
tongue speak wordlessly for you. After a long
and intense kiss, accompanied by a definite
hug or squeeze, you can sit back for a mo-
unkissed: ment'sshe
breathing-space.
has reached Your the
girl class
is no of
longer
the
kissed girl, the experienced girl.
The Sophisticated Kiss. — The kissing of an
experienced girl is a different matter. Again,
it is the man's task to decide, from all the
evidence furnished by the girl's reception of
his tentative approaches, just how experienced
she is, and just how she expects to be kissed.
A girl only slightly experienced must be
kissed, at the beginning, as slowly and only a
bit less respectfully than the sweet unkissed;
a girl fully experienced in love will regard
such tardiness as a proof that the man i
use the elegant slang, as slow as a train on
the Erie. The general rule is to give as much
as you are expected to give: and, if you are
not too much of a blunderer, it is better to
err on the side of giving too much, than too
little. Women may forgive an excess of pas-
sion in the 'kiss: for, after all, they too uncon-
sciously desire to be roused into passion. A
woman rarely forgives the man who under-
kisses her, who gives her less than she de-
sires.
A girl's kiss is self-revealing to a man. If
the lips are kept closed and the kiss is deeo-
THE ART OP KISSING 31
rous, this is a warning to go comparatively
slow. If the girl's lips are opened, this says
that the track is clear. If the mouth is fully
opened, and the girl kisses as actively as the
man, it might not be a bad idea to cancel all
your engagements for the next week or so, and
give the girl all the kissing she wants!
With a girl who is experienced, the hug, or
body embrace, is very important. This should
be more determined now. The first variety is
where the man's arm, around the girl's back,
presses her bosom against his: and a pressure
that temporarily stops the breathing of both
of them, at times, is relished by both. A later
technique is for the arm to fall at least as
low as her waist, and thus lock the two bodies
together, while the lips complete the com-
munion. The poet describes it:
Then will people passing
By the lit place
See our shadows marry
In a gray embrace.
The lip kiss now lasts longer than with the
inexperienced girl, of course: and tends gradu-
ally to become what is called the soul kiss. It
need only stop short of the astonishing kiss
Mrs. Browning describes in Aurora Leigh, a
kiss —
As long and silent as the ecstatic night.
We are not amphibious enough to endure such
a kiss. We would have to come up to breathe
from time to time. But, to those who are able,
this sort of sheik buss is recommended. To-
ward the North Pole, where the night is six
32 — THE ART OF KISSING
months long, the kiss described has distinct
possibilities.
Yet the soul kiss, as the exclusive method,
would grow wearisome. The bird peck variety
of kiss, which flits tantalizingly all over the
girl's face, and strays down to the neck and
its environs, is a pleasant intermission be-
tween longer osculatory sessions. The three
varieties of the soul kiss might be described
as (1) that in which the two tongues involved
perform a sort of hand wrestle with each
other; (2) that in which the girl's tongue is
withdrawn inward as far as possible, giving
the man the maximum of territory to explore,
and (3) that in which the girl does the explor-
ing. Fancier variations of this will suggest
themselves. And, of course, in all varieties of
the kiss, the thrill is immediately communi-
cated throughout the entire body.
A Girl's Kiss. — Although, as we have seen,
the female kissed first in the shape of the
maternal lick followed by the maternal kiss
— in the ordinary intercourse between man
and woman, the man kisses first. The reverse
is true, when the girl is more experienced,
and is perhaps a woman with a younger man.
Then she may with propriety assume the role
of the man, gently initiate the unkissed youth,
as in our description of the initiation of th»
unkissed girl; and thereafter lead him up the
long path to osculatory sheikdom.
In any kissing, where the man has sta
first, the one wrong thing is for the girl to
remain passive, unless this be merely as an
intermission. She should lag, in ideal ki^
THE ART OF KISSING 3?
a little behind the man; but only a little be-
hind him. As the fire of the kiss tingles
throughout the veins of both, it is her cue to
respond almost as ardently, and never be mere-
ly negative throughout the experience. Few
men like the continuing sensation of kissing
the stone image on top of a sarcophagus. Nor
does the girl secure her greatest pleasure by
utter passivity. "It is better to give than to
receive'' applies to both parties in a kissing
episode.
The proper interruption for a spell of kisses
given by the man to the girl is for her to
reciprocate, and return the kisses. This advice
is almost unnecessary, for women are disposed
to return with interest the kisses given them.
Love, to man. is leaping fire,
Dying with its fed desire.
But, in woman, it will glow
Most, when man would have it go.
Hope no more of man than this.
Maiden, when you take his kiss:
That his loving will be done
When its victory is won.
Do not scold her drowsy ardor,
Lover; she will cling the harder,
Taught that your love, even at ending.
Lights a life for her long tending.
This is as good a place as any to say a.
word about the actual significance of the
Pleasant as it is, its indiscriminate use is an*
abuse. Its proper function is as a prelude, nM
as a goal achieved. Men and women who play;
at kissing, intending to stop there, are play-
ing with a fire that easily becomes uncon-
trolable. Iwan Bloch, in The Sexual Life of
Our Time, says that there is a quantitative dif-
ference only, and not a qualitative difference,
between the chaste stroking of the hair and
the first timid kiss, on the one hand, and the
ultimate love rapture. Someone has said that
the first intentional touching of the skin of
the beloved one is a mating half achieved.
The Perfumed Garden ends its description of
loving:
And the most intimate embrace
Leaves the heart cold and unsatisfied
If the rapture of the kiss is wanting.
Goethe describes the ultimate kiss thus:
Eagerly she sucks the flames out of his mouth;
Each is conscious only of the other.
His final word is that it is a true saying that
the woman who permits a man to kiss her will
ultimately grant him complete possession. In-
deed, a sensitive woman values her kiss as
highly as the last favor. Unless a kiss be ex-
changed merely as a test of mutual attraction,
it is well to recall that chastity was accurately
described by Lester Ward as selection, and not
abstinence: and to select with great care those
whom you admit to the gate of kissing, which
is almost invariably, with men and women of
any maturity, the last locked gate upon the
way to the earthly Eden,
IV
SPECIAL PROBLEMS
Size of Mouth-. — In any kiss, the attitude
must be of complete abandonment to the par-
ticular kiss involved. It is almost suicidal to
go to a kiss with any distaste in the mind —
suicidal, that is, to the full pleasure of the
kiss. You must make yourself believe that the
girl you are kissing, or the man you are kiss-
ing, is the most desirable person in the world.
For the moment she or he must be: otherwise,
it is better to postpone or abandon the kiss.
Kiss with your whole heart, or not at all.
When approached in this mood, the problem
of the particular geography of the girl's mouth
(or the man's, on the part of the girl) be-
comes, not a matter of taste or distaste, but a
matter of engineering. The excessively small
mouth is easily kissed, and at times is far less
satisfying than a good mouth-filling pair of
lips. The medium-sized mouth, in normal
cases, gives the greatest pleasure. When the
man is confronted with a mouth whose general
stretch, if laid on the ground, would apparently
reach from Ft. Desbrosses, Alaska, to the cor-
ner of Main Street and Zenith Avenue, Skanea-
teles, New York, the matter is purely one of
measuration in applied physics. The safest
way is to start at one corner, and gradually
progress toward the center, covering ground as
effectively as possible in the process. The
foolhardy at times make a dive for the very
center at the beginning, and may encounter
the emotion of having stepped off of a neck-
high stretch in the river into a pool . of im-
measurable depth. If this is definitely the
case, the only thing to do is to paddle toward
one side or the other, in the hope of reaching
firm ground once more.
Something as to the kissability of a girl is
taught, ordinarily, by the external appearance
of her teeth. We are indebted to Freud for
the discovery that protruding teeth, while they
may be esthetically a blemish, are at the same
time an advertisement of a passionate nature.
Such teeth'
while usually
an infant and derive
a smallfrom
child,theof girl's habit,
continuing
to suck at pacifiers, fingers or any object
handy, until she has pulled her teeth out of
normal alignment. This continuing at sucking
indicates a strong sexual nature: and the lack
of flawless beauty in such girls is more than
made up for by their ample passion. The girl
with prominent teeth is usually made love to
and mated far before her sister, who is built
more on the L>ues of a Grecian baby grand
Venus.
Kissing Relatives. — The matter of seJec
ness determines what kind of kiss you give to
your relatives. In the South, the custom of
discovering that you and any pretty girl you
meet are "kissing cousins" is an enjoyable
one; and, needless to sav, having selected such
cousin with proper discrimination, you treat
the kiss as the means to enjoyment as great
as that with any girl who measures up to
your particular standard of female attractive-
ness. With relatives in general, especially with
homely aunts, mothers-in-law, and esteemed
grandmothers, the cheek is always handy, and
is recommended, unless you are fond of the
taste of vinegar or peppermint-drops, if the
old lady is partial to that Victorian comfit.
The girl, in letting male relatives kiss her,
had best be guided in similar fashion. Let her
prize her lips, as a medium of osculation, so
highly that she does not let them be sampled
by any whom accidents of blood give a par-
tial right to. If the young man is attractive, or
the old man either, and you want the sensation
of the kiss, this is your privilege; but a deft
movement will always suffice to substitute a
cheek for the more intimate lip smack.
Kissing Tour Cwn Sex. — Physical love be-
tween women and vvomen, or between men and
men, is looked upon with repugnance by the
normally
Far from developed among form
being the highest civilized" people.
of love, as
Socrates and Sappho respectively described it, >
we know today that this is an innately sterile N
type of embrace, and is hence to be avoided
by the normally matured.
The custom of men kissing each other, still
found in certain countries among our civilized
brothers, originated in a time when Socratie
love was not essentially uncommon. It has
largely passed out as a social custom among
us. If a man feels much pleasure in it, it is a
matter for self-investigation and understanding,
and points toward the perverse. It may be
largely disregarded in this study.
The custom of women kissing each other is
far more common. It h ^deniable that the
SS THE ART OF KISSING
kiss is, at times, a disease-spreader; lovers
willingly run the risk of this contagion. Indeed,
modern wisdom holds that germs of many dis-
eases are constantly present in the organisms
of all of us; and, if we- continue in normal
health, with normal care of the body and
plenty of fresh air and as much outdoor life
as is possible, the body protects itself from
yielding to these diseases. Thus lovers, other-
wise healthy, may kiss with hardly any fear
of contagion. Kissing among women, where
there is no such overpowering love interest, is
on a differenc footing. If the woman receives
excessive pleasure from it, this is a matter
for self-investigation and understanding, and
points toward a perversion. If it be taken and
given merely as a formal courtesy, this is a
matter to be determined by individual prefer-
ence, and by the customs of the social group
in which you move.
The Kiss Complete. — When the love relation-
ship has moved a stage beyond mere lip kiss-
ing, it is on the road toward that ultimate
enjoyment, in which the whole body of each
lover is a viand for the other's delectation.
Shakespeare hints such a kiss for us, in Venus
and Adonis, where he describes the experi-
enced goddess with the callow youth:
Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tired with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone,
Even so she she
And where kiss'd
ends his
she brow,
doth his
anewcheek,
begin.his. .chin,
.
"Fondling,"
here she saith, "since I have hemm'd thee
THE ART OF KISSING 3$
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll
Feedbe where
a park,
thouandwilt,
thouon shalt be myor deer
mountain ; ;
in dale
Graze on my lips ; and if those hills be dry-
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. . . ,
A thousand kisses buys my heart from me ;
And pay them at thy leisure, one by one.
What is ten hundred touches unto thee?
Are they not quickly told and quickly gone?
Say, for non-payment that the debt should
double,
Is twenty thousand kisses such a trouble?"
Alas, Adonis was not a soul-kiss sheik: and
preferred to be slain by a boar, rather than
be loved by a goddess. Something was wrong
with that boy.
The caresses and kisses that mark the height
of love's ecstasy, in many cases, have no lim-
itation of time or place. The most intimate
kisses, as Freud points out, are not perver-
sions, if used as proper preludes to the ulti-
mate mating: they are perversions only when
they substitute for the mating. The kiss itself,
as he shows, may be a perversion — the lip
kiss, that is. So great is its thrill, that there
are men and women who use it instead of the
mating, to secure love's thrill: and this is not
normal. The stern biological compulsion to
normal men and women, that they mate fully
and reproduce their kind, worded in the old
book of Genesis:
And God blessed them, and God said to them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,
still stirs within us: and there is a price to
pay, if it be ignored. Those who flee from
kissing and love for a lifetime, through some
delusion that they have chosen a higher way,
are afflicted with all the morbidities of in-
growing love, which is quite as unnatural and
painful as an ingrowing toenail. If man or
woman is so unfortunate as never to be ap-
proached in love, or as not to find a woman
or man who will reciprocate to his or her
approaches, why, that is as unfortunate as the
lot of the eagle, caged matelessly away from
the sky. But such cases are so rare as to be
almost negligible. If you want to love, you
can, and you can find somewhere your ade-
quate mate. And when the mate is found, and
the love rapture grows like the crescent moon
toward its full, you will discover .the complete
kiss, and the ineffable delight that it brings.
This is the time to forget all false reticences,
all teachings that thus and so is not done by
nice people, and all the rest of the shoddy
that masquerades as truth. It is love's hour,
and your share in it is to yield yourself wholly
to the golden spell whose physical rapture is
the crest of man's physical existence. In one
of the Eagle Sonnets, the lover sings:
You called me, a fantastic architect,
To build you airy and enduring towers
Above a dream-world rudely torn and wrecked,
In the sweet gossip of unhurried hours.
And then the transition:
And now you have another word for me ,
A singing cry out of your hungering
That ends the tease of golden fantasy. . . .
And I am altered to a simpler thing,
Only quick lips to summon rapture near,
And a young body like a lifted spear.
In this high mood of utter giving and receiving,
love at its finest comes, and stays, if the lovers
have chosen well.
THE ART OF KISSING 4t
V
KISSING CUSTOMS
The Religious Kiss. — We have already re-

ferred to the religious usages concerning kiss-
ing, 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 ofTheimages
paganism. and the
Egyptians had Pope's toe Assyrians,
it of the is eastern
the Greeks of the Egyptians. •and we of the Romans,
whose Pontifex Maximus (high priest) had his toe
i during the Empire. The Druid's kissed their
High Priest's toe a thousand years before Christ.
A variant of this crept into England. An-
ciently the kings and queens of England cere-
moniously 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 cere-
mony bein~ called Maundv-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 sov-
ereign 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 those
days, to require a man to kiss his own wife.
On Special Occasions. — Among the most pop-
ular 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 whc 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
Fair kiss
Maidis highly
of Perthin has
order.a full
Sir account
Walter Scott's
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
History of New York. Diedrich
In the Knickerbocker's
broad old days
the good burghers of New Amsterdam, with
their wives and daughters, dressed themselves
in all their finery, and repaired tc the gov-
ernor'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
♦ very 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
<nit and the new year in. at the stroke of mid-
night 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 yoK
have ever encountered, given you by an anony-
mous 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,
whk-h 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
' to
in op.k
kiss and datesother trees.
to the Its use
Druids: as a license
a branch of the
plant is suspended from the ceiling, and any
one ftf the fair sex who. by accident or inten-
tion passes beneath the plant, incurs the pen-
alty of a hearty kiss from any man quick
enough or audacious enough to take advantage
of the opportunity. When natural mistletoe
pears — it is growing rarer now — you can
rest assured that inventive man will popularize
an artificial mistletoe, so that the lips of all
maidens
tide cheer.may be warmed by the kiss of ~s
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 re-
plied icily. "I have several friends from there."
Kissing games are popular chiefly among
children df the former generation, or those
living in more backward sections of the coun-
try. 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. "Post
office," in essence, consisted simply in girls
and boys calling each other out, one at a
time, for a kiss in the hall. "Drop the Hand-
kerchief" 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 pon:
of view. The games are pleasant enough for
the very young; the more serious game ot
will come in due time.
At old-fashioned country dances, in back-
woods sections of America, the fiddlers who
furnished the music used to break the monot-
-XC THE ART OF KISSING
cuy )y 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 fes-
tivals. On an Easter Monday not lone 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 accom-
plished petter: "necking" is the name given to
the osculatory pyrotechnics. The petters stop
somewhere short of the complete love experi-
ence: 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 trans-
mited 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
Xissing 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 in-
satiable nature of certain actresses. A dra-
matic 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 man-
agement, our comedian might now be in heaven.
Tt 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 sal-
aries. 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 beg-
ging for more. Brunnhilde, in Die Walkiire, is
put to sleep by a kiss strong enough to make
her sleep
kiss of the twenty years.
old bottle in theRip Van Winkle's
Catskills was not
more efficacious in inducing slumber. And in
Wagner's Siegfried, the hero fastens his lipj? 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 Lim-
ited; 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 dark-

ened 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 pleas-
urable. There is only one more delightful ex-
perience, and that is to be doing the kissing
yourself.
THE ART OF KI&SING 51
VI
CELEBRATED KISSES
Kissing the Blarney Stone. — About 1445

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 prom-
ising to surrender the fort to an English gar-
rison. Day after day his lordship looked for a
fulfilment of the agreement; day after day the
Irish chieftain temporized with honeyed prom-
ises, 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, per-
suasive, 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:
cobmAc \k carthy fortis me fterifectt.
a. d. 1446
For those who are skeptical as to the aerial
journey clinging to a rope, there is another
stone on the summii, 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 Ms desired lady. Any trans-
oceanic ticket li&z will quote the price of ac-
com odations toCounty Cork and return.
A different kind of blarney is evidenced in
the kiss for political purposes. You may re-
member 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 re-
turned 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
youug 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 u 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 Con-
gres man, a3 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 con-
scription, 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 mem-
orable occasion, the Duchess of Devonshirt
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
truetalk about "poetess
the kiss:of passion," uttered this
The lips that have been innocent of passion*. -
kissNever
frequently
to have ooze
beenwith gossip's
kissed poison.
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, apos-
trophized the kiss thus:
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another ;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother ;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea :
What are all these kissings worth.
If thou kiss not me?
5* THE ART OF KISSING
A Western congressman, not otherwise
known as a poet, delivered this tribute to his
favorite kiss — and who shall say that his dithy-
rambs ^ack the true poetic flair?
Talk about kissing ! Go away ! I have kissed in
the North, I have kissed in the South ; I have re-
peated 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 cus-
toms 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
throrgh the soles of your feet, from your boots,
that's kissing, that is.
Yiiis 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 dis-
cussion 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 im-
mediately 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
y»ars. 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 he gave to me,
Kisses three —
One was in the restless dusk,
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.
Then he kissed me once again,
Prisoning my doubtful lips
.In a long eclipse. . . .
And
Over the night's
us with vast power,
urgent rhythms beat
And each whitening,- tardy hour
Lingered sweet, sweet. . . .
Once again he kissed me, now
In the pale and furtive dawr,
All distrait, his soul withdraw* :
And his slow lips chilled my brow.
Shall no other night be mine,
When the throbbing hours shine?
Kisses three, he gave to me,
Kisses three
The Octopus Kiss. — There are countless pas-

sionate kisses recorded in literature; the octo-
pus 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 bach
.ough she aswere
He felt goinga to
though faint on
monster of Ulysses'
the same bi «
is those in the tank, but much larger — a gigantic
>ctopus from the oceanic depths — must have slipped
treacherously behind him and was clutching nil
jne of its tentacles. He could feel the pressui
ts 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 approach-
ing 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, dom-
inating, painful. Ulysses realized that he had never
before been kissed in this way. The water from
that mouth, surging across her row of teeth, dis-
charged 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 wou'd never be able to
tree h'mself from these deadly and caressing lips
with tneir faint savor of cinnamon, of incense, of
Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and in-
trigue.
And he let himself be dragged down by the
<*aress of this wild beast, with thought lost and
body inert and resigned, like a castaway who de-
scends 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 sen-
tence of death, and his faithful sweetheart.
The girl secured permission from the prison
authorities to kiss the condemned man good-
bye. 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 memo-
randum 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 free-
dom, 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 Oc-
tavius 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
freedoin.
Then there was the tremendous climax of
the Haymarket riots in Chicago. Seven an-
It THE ART OF KISSING
archists, 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, tak-
ing 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 af-
fection between the sexes. A second meaning
grew up — to express subjection: somehow af-
fection was alchemized into subjection. Usu-
ally 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 imag-
ined, appropriate gestures were few: bowing
the head to the ground or kissing with head
THE ART OF KISSING 5£>
bent being the chief ones: The mouth, con-

taining 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 il
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 sub-
jection.
The kiss, as a token of subjection, has de-
clined among us. The reason is not too ob-
scure: 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 kiss-
ing of lips or hands or great toes, and when
we see certain religious shrines taking no
chances, but wiping the relic with some germi-
cide 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 fina'.
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 ac-
cepts 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 sortcompatibility,
physical of test of compatibility,
has its value. especially
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 son-
nets. 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:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action ; and, till action, lust
Is perjur'd,
Savage, murderous,
extreme, bloody,notfullto oftrust,
rude, cruel, blame,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised
Past reason hunted, and no sooner hadstraight,
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 bjiss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe ;
Before, a joy
All this the propos'd ; behind,
world well knows a ; dream.
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: .
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
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 taken.
worth's unknown, although his height be
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within alters
Love his bending
not withsickle's compass
his brief hourscomeand; 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 re-
main 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.
62 OTHER LITTLE BLUE BOOKS
Books of Love and Passion :
344 Don Juan ; A Passion in the Desert. Balzac.
675 Sarah Bernhardt's Philosophy of Love
66 Crimes of the Borgias. Balzac
319 Comtesse de Sainte-Geran. Alexander Dumas
178 One of Cleopatra's Nights. Theophile Gautier
345 Clarimonde: A Supernatural Passion. Theo-
phile Gautier
230 Fleece of Gold. Theophile Gautier
.">40 Stories of Many Hues. Remy de Gourmont
377 A montNight in the Luxembourg. Remy de Gour-
541 Brightly Colored Tales. Remy de Gourmont
582 Philosophic Nights in Paris. Remy de Gour-
mont
379 The King Enjoys Himself (Drama). Victor
Hugo
21 Carmen. Prosper Merimee
314 Short Stories. Alphonse Daudet
196 The Marquis. George Sand
87 Love : An Essay. Montaigne
85 The Attack on the Mill. Emile Zola
S88 Memoirs of Madame de Stael
871 Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise
438-439 Secret Memoirs of Madame de Pompadour
(2 vols.)
355 Aucassin and Nicolete : Famous French Lovers.
Andrew Lang
107 Dream Woman ; Yellow Tiger. Wilkie Collins
595 The Happy Hypocrite. Max Beerbohm
285 Euphorian in Texas. George Moore
307 A Tillyloss Scandal. J. M. Barrie
577 The Lifted Veil. George Eliot
58 Tales from the Decameron. Boccaccio
672 Illicit Love and Other Tales. Boccaccio
673 Tales of Love and Life. Boccaccio
909 Amorous Tales of the Monks
123 Madame
enor du Barry: A King's Mistress. Tieh-
395 Cellini : Sculptor, Lover, Debauchee
236 Heart Affairs of Henry VIII
747 The True Story of Eleonora Duse's yLove Af-
fair with D'Annunzio. Luigi del Riccio
363 Miggles, and Other Stories. Bret Harte
659 Two Short Stories. Theodore Dreiser
OTHER LITTLE BLUE BOOKS 63
698 Tales of Chicago Streets. Ben Hecht
745 Montes: Matador and Lover. Frank Harris
746 A Daughter of Eve. Frank Harris
866 Main Street Tales. Sherwood Anderson
By Guy de Maupassant:
6 Love and Other Stories
199 The Tallow Ball (La Boule de Suif)
292 Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories
887 The Necklace and Other Stories
886 The Piece of String and Other Stories
915 Mad and Other Stories
916 A Night in White Chapel and Other Stories
917 Room Number Eleven and Other Stories
918 The Man with the Blue Eyes and Other Stories
919 The Clown and Other Stories
920 A Queer Night in Paris and Other Stories
921 Madame
Stories Tellier's Establishment and Other
922 A Wife's Confession and Other Stories
By Clement Wood:
712 Shelly and the Women He Loved
98 How to Love
800 Sex in Psycho-Analysis
172 The Evolution of Sex
717 Modern Sexual Morality
128 Julius Caesar: Who He Was and What He
Stood For
147 Oliver Cromwell and His Times
718 Great Women of Antiquity
824 Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition
714 Emerson : The Man and His Works
708 An Introduction to Philology
715 Auction Bridge for Beginners
481 The Stone Age
91 Manhood: The Facts of Life Presented to Mej*
126 A History of Rome
627 A Short History of the Jews
716 Mother Goose Rhymes (Edited)
626 An Anthology of Negro Songs (Edited)
719 Poetry of the Southern States (Edited)
628 The Making of the Old Testament
709 Sociology for Beginners
711 Sociology of Lester Ward
64 OTHER LITTLE BLUE BOOKS
710 Botany for Beginners
983 The Truth About Christian Science-
077 Pope Alexander VI and His Loves
976 Casanova and the Women He Loved
975 Cleopajtra and Her Loves
^y Rudyard Kipling:
151 The Man Who AVould Be King: Without Bene
fit of Clergy
331 The Finest Story in the World and Other
Stories
332 The Man Who Was and Other Stories
333 Mulvaney Stories
336 The Mark of the Beast; The Head of the
District
357 The City of Dreadful Night
912 The God from \he Machine and Other Stories
913 Black Jack and Other Stories
914 On the City Wall and Other Stories
222 The Vampire and Other Poems
783 Mandalay and Other Poems
795 Gunga Din and Other Poems
Russian Literature (English Translations) :
105 The Seven That Were Hanged. Leonid An-
dreyev
100 The Red Laugh. Leonid Andreyev
24 "The
389 Kiss andTraveler.
My Fellow Other Stories.
Maxim Leonid
Gorki And;
386 Creatures That Once Were Men. Maxim Gorki
385 Chelkash. Maxim Gorki
239 Twenty-six Men and a Girl. Maxim Gorki
45 Short Stories. Leo Tolstoy
,131 Redemption (Drama). Tolstoy
947 Queen of Spades; Postmaster. Pushkin
These titles are selected from a large list
now available; a complete catalogue of Little
;Blue Books may be obtained, on request, from
THE HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY,
Girard. Kansas.

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LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO

Edited by £. Haldeman-Julius 987

The Art of Kissing

The Art of Kissing

PRINTED IN THJ3 UNITED STATK8 OF AMERICA

Defining a Kiss. — The most helpful dictionary,

In Antiquity. — The antiquity of lip kissing

The First Kiss. — The desire of a man to kiss

the subterfuge, of course, but, unless she de-

The Religious Kiss. — We have already re-

with the aggrieved toes: "You know, I'm a

Yet many a thrill is provided, in the dark-

Kissing the Blarney Stone. — About 1445

The Poets on Kissing. — Ella "Wheeler Wilcox,

The Octopus Kiss. — There are countless pas-

bent being the chief ones: The mouth, con-

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