is a topic on which doctors disagree, the opinions of Darwin and Mr.
Spencer in particular differing as widely as their views regarding the
origin of music. Mr. Spencer traces the primitive delight in osculation
to the gustatory sense, Darwin to contact.
“Obviously,” says Mr. Spencer, "the billing of doves or pigeons, and the
like action of love-birds, indicates an affection which is gratified by
the gustatory sensation. No act of this kind on the part of an inferior
creature, as of a cow licking a calf, can have any other origin than the
direct prompting of a desire which gains by the act satisfaction; and in
such a case the satisfaction is that which vivid perception of offspring
gives to the maternal yearning. In some animals like acts arise from
other forms of affection. Licking the hand, or, where it is accessible,
the face, is a common display of attachment on a dog’s part; and when we
remember how keen must be the olfactory sense by which a dog traces his
master, we cannot doubt that to his gustatory sense, too, there is
yielded some impression—an impression associated with those pleasures of
affection which his master’s presence gives.
“The inference that kissing, as a mark of fondness in the human race,
has a kindred origin, is sufficiently probable. Though kissing is not
universal—though the negro races do not understand it, and though, as we
have seen, there are cases where sniffing replaces it—yet, being common
to unlikely and widely-dispersed peoples, we may conclude that it
originated in the same manner as the analogous action among lower
creatures.... From kissing as a natural sign of affection, there is
derived the kissing which, as a means of simulating affection, gratifies
those who are kissed; and, by gratifying them, propitiates them. Hence
an obvious root for the kissing of feet, hands, garments, as a part of
ceremonial.”
Darwin, on the other hand, holds that kissing “is so far innate or
natural that it apparently depends on pleasure from close contact with a
beloved person; and it is replaced in various parts of the world, by the
rubbing of noses, as with the New Zealanders and Laplanders, by the
rubbing or patting of the arms, breasts, or stomachs, or by one man
striking his own face with the hands or feet of another. Perhaps the
practice of blowing, as a mark of affection, on various parts of the
body may depend on the same principle.”
Has Mr. Spencer ever kissed a girl? Certainly, to one who has, his
theory of the gustatory origin of Kissing would seem like a joke were it
not stated with so much scientific pomp and circumstance. The billing of
doves and love-birds, in the first place, cannot be regarded as a matter
of taste, literally, because in birds the sense of taste is commonly
very rudimentary or quite absent, as their habit of swallowing seeds and
other food whole and dry would make a sense which can only judge of
things in a state of solution quite useless. The sense of touch, on the
other hand, is exceedingly delicate in the bill of birds, which is, as
it were, their feeler or hand.
That the motive which prompts cows and calves to lick one another is
likewise tactile rather than gustatory, I had occasion to observe only a
few days ago in a place worthy of so romantic a subject as the
experimental study of kissing. Scene: a green mountain-meadow above
Mürren, Switzerland. Frame of the picture, a semicircle of snow-giants,
including Wetterhorn, Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, Breithorn, etc. Cows and
calves in the meadow, not in the least disturbed by the avalanches
thundering down the side of the Jungfrau every twenty minutes. Cow licks
calf, and calf retaliates by licking the cow’s neck. Cow enjoys it
immensely, holding her head up as high as possible, with an expression
of intense enjoyment, just like a dog when you rub and pat his neck.
Ergo, as cow was not licking but being licked, her enjoyment must have
been tactile, not gustatory. To the cow her tongue is what the bill is
to a bird—her most mobile organ, her feeler, and hand.
Possibly Mr. Spencer was misled into his gustatory theory by a too
literal interpretation of a habit poets have always had of calling a
kiss sweet. Among the Romans a love-kiss was distinguished from other
kisses by being called a _suavium_ or sweet thing; and a modern German
poet boldly compares the flavour of kisses to wild strawberries (perhaps
she had just been eating some). Yet all this belongs to fancy’s
fairyland. Kisses are called sweet for the same reason that we speak of
the sweet concords of music, _i.e._ because the language of æsthetics is
so scantily developed that we are constantly compelled to borrow terms
from one sense and apply them to another, when their only resemblance is
that they are both agreeable or otherwise.
There is a very prevalent impression that the senses of savages are more
delicate than ours. In one way they are. A savage can often see an
object at a greater distance, and hear a fainter sound, than a white
man. But in what may be called æsthetic as distinguished from physical
refinement, savages are vastly our inferiors. A savage can hardly tell
the difference between two adjacent notes in the musical scale, while a
musician can distinguish the sixtieth part of a semitone. And why would
the wondrous harmonies of a Chopin nocturne seem a mere chaos of sound
to a savage? Because his ears have not been trained through his
imagination and intellect to discriminate sounds and sound-combinations,
or to follow the plot or development of a musical narrative or “theme.”
Just so with the sense of touch. A sweetheart’s veil fluttering in a
Hottentot’s face would only annoy him. A squeeze of the hand would leave
him cold; and would he refrain from putting his arm round her waist if
that gave him any pleasure? Obviously, then, the reason why the art of
kissing is unknown to him is because his senses are too callous, his
imagination too sluggish.
Kissing, like every other fine art, has its sensuous and its imaginative
or intellectual side. Of all parts of the visible body the lips are the
most sensitive to contact. Here the layer in which the nerves and
blood-vessels are contained is not covered over, as elsewhere on the
skin, by a thick leathery epidermis, but only thinly veiled by a
transparent epithelium; so that when lips are applied to lips, the
blood-vessels which carry the vital fluid straight from the two loving
hearts, and the soul-fibres, called nerves, are brought into almost
immediate contact: whence that interchange of soul-magnetism—that
electric shock which makes the first mutual kiss of Love the sweetest
moment of life—
“What words can ever speak affection
So thrilling and sincere as thine?”—BURNS.
Yet herein the imagination plays a much more prominent _rôle_ than it
appears to do at first sight. The real reason why a savage cannot enjoy
a kiss is not so much because his lips are deficient in tactile
sensibility, as because he has no imagination to invest labial contact
with the romance of individualised passion. If a lover’s pleasure lay in
the mere labial contact, he would as soon exchange a kiss with any other
girl. But should a sweetheart, on being asked for a kiss, refer him,
say, to his sister or her sister; though the latter be a hundred times
more beautiful, he would chide his love for offering a stone where bread
was wanted. His imagination has so long painted to him the superior
ecstasy of a kiss from her that, when he finally gets it, the
long-deferred gratification ensures the unparalleled rapture
anticipated.