Kissing a Profanation
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KISSING A PROFANATION.—
Perhaps some of our readers may have noticed the alarming increase of late years in the custom of kissing among ladies. It has rapidly usurped, indeed, every other mode of salutation or parting ceremonial. A lady writer in a well known weekly paper, gets off a very opportune and witty protest against this wilful waste of the good things of life. She says—
“This is emphatically an age of kissing. Everybody kisses everybody. Since the anti-fastidious days when the old woman saluted her cow, such a time of promiscuous and inordinate lip-service was never known. That last evening at the W—’s, the last stout woman in the file of leave takers had well nigh finished me. Zeus and Juno! what an expressionless, cavernous mouth yawned over mine! Nectar and ambrosia! what a moist explosion! For the next six weeks I will not kiss a friend. A kiss should have a voiceless eloquence, an electric tranquility, an electric reserve. It has no such thing. It pops a good morning, it sputters a good evening; it whizzes and fizzles on the right hand, on the left, here, there and everywhere. We are kept constantly on the defensive. At last, marked, cornered, and set upon, we plant our teeth hard and abide the shock as best we can.”
A good deal of truth in that! A kiss should not be deemed a mere unconsidered trifle to be rudely filched, especially by those who in the nature of things cannot be expected properly to appreciate it. As Mary Forester says: “If we would preserve this gift a sweet and holy token, beautified and sanctified to the beloved, we must use it wisely, with a noble chariness.”