God they saw survives only as a bogey-man, a theory, an
uneasy and vexatious ghost. A race of traders and sharpers? Bosh a third
time! The Jews are as poor as the Spaniards. But a race of poets, my
lords, a race of poets! It is a vision of beauty that has ever haunted
them. And it has been their destiny to transmit that vision, enfeebled,
perhaps, but still distinct, to other and lesser peoples, that life
might be made softer for the sons of men, and the goodness of the Lord
God--whoever He may be--might not be forgotten.

IX

THE COMSTOCKIAN PREMISS

It is argued against certain books, by virtuosi of moral alarm, that
they depict vice as attractive. This recalls the king who hanged a judge
for deciding that an archbishop was a mammal.

X

THE LABIAL INFAMY

After five years of search I have been able to discover but one book in
English upon the art of kissing, and that is a very feeble treatise by a
savant of York, Pa., Dr. R. McCormick Sturgeon. There may be others, but
I have been quite unable to find them. Kissing, for all one hears of it,
has not attracted the scientists and literati; one compares its meagre
literature with the endless books upon the other phenomena of love,
especially divorce and obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering
bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the
thing he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium of
mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous
gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like
imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the
lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation
inclines me to hold that the opposite is true, that the lungs are
actually collapsed in a pseudo-asthmatic spasm. Again, what is the
ground for arguing that the lips are "full, ripe and red?" The real
effect of the emotions that accompany kissing is to empty the
superficial capillaries and so produce a leaden pallor. As for such
salient symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of
respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs.
Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate
treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and
Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning.
Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four
volumes. Ellis