Editor's Preface
The Question of Kisses

And if a kiss is no good, then nought avails.
--Colin Muset
(13th C. trouvère and composer.)*

Christopher Nyrop, author of The Kiss and Its History,** expresses a curious and high regard for the kiss. It is a greeting, a sign of respect, an act of affection, and erotic love; kisses of various kinds "illustrate the celebrated power a kiss may have over human beings." (ix)

Nyrop considers it a duty to caution his readers emphatically as to the dangers of even reading about kissing, and goes on to warn them against pursuing the subject.

With much delicacy--compared to graphic images of present-day cultural anthropologists--he wonders in 1901:

He is puzzled, for he has had his share of kisses too.

Nyrop finds this language in the poets he quotes: Heine, Byron, Catullus.

In speculating on the origin of the kiss, Nyrop links it to taste and smell, observing (as all social scientists have) that kissing has not been the practice in all cultures. But once the natives encountered the custom, their rubbing of noses (e.g., the Malay kiss), was virtually abandoned.

Superstitions about the kiss abound. "The happiest man is the man who has the kiss." The Greeks say, "Kissing is the way to paradise." A kiss can also ward off misfortune, carries the gift of life, even eternal youth. Runeberg says that angels rejoice over the first kiss exchanged by lovers. And even after death, lovers kiss (Jannakos and Helena).

According to Nyrop, you don't want the wrong kind of kiss. It could be fatal. One Cypriot folksong begins: "At the time of the world's creation, kisses were created and cruel love." (29)

It does not escape Mr. Nyrop or the poets he quotes, that there can never be enough kisses: ". . . lovers are liberal to an extreme in the question of kissing." (40) He is not staid either, but rather, candid, when he quotes Mirabeau writing to Sophie: "Kisses at last grow to bites." The Finnish saying, in this context, is useful guidance: "The mouth is not torn by being kissed, nor the hand by being squeezed."

In this month's collection, there are many kinds of kisses. I have read elsewhere that the kiss originated as a way to bring the dead back to life. That's the kind of kiss I want; that's the kind of kiss I want to give. It has to do with breath, with spirit, a baiser rouge.

[*] The trouvères patterned themselves on the troubadours of southern France. Muset wrote in Champagnois dialect, often humorously, especially in his parodies of courtly love, a devotion of chaste kisses. "The châtelain de Coucy's love was so deep, no one has ever endured such pain for love. I too will recite my lament and resume his singing. I think mine be no less. . . . No sorrow compares with mine, for indeed I know I shall never see her again. Alas, unfortunate one! Where should I go? What should I do? If I do not die now, my days shall be unending pain. . . . I care for nothing, not beauty or youth, not gold or silver, nor anything that I see." (In fact, Muset was quite insistent about receiving his fee.) For Swinburne's Rosamond, a life of love assures salvation, and she knows the power of kisses: "God has no plague so perilous as love,/ And no such honey for the lips of Christ." (mh)

[**] Nyrop, Christopher, The Kiss and Its History (Williams Frederick Harvey, trans., London, Sands & Co., 1901).