第46章

The sect of Pietists, wishing to imitate the early Christians, to-day give each other kisses of peace on leaving the assembly, calling each other " my brother, my sister "; it is what, twenty years ago, a very pretty and very human Pietist lady avowed to me.The ancient custom was to kiss on the mouth; the Pietists have carefully preserved it.

There was no other manner of greeting dames in France, Germany, Italy, England; it was the right of cardinals to kiss queens on the mouth and in Spain even.What is singular is that they had not the same prerogative in France, where ladies always had more liberty than anywhere else, but "every country has its ceremonies," and there is no usage so general that chance and custom have not provided exceptions.It would have been an incivility, an affront, for an honourable woman, when she received a lord's first visit, not to have kissed him, despite his moustaches."It is a displeasing custom,"says Montaigne (Book III., chap.v.), " and offensive to ladies, to have to lend their lips to whoever has three serving-men in his suite, disagreeable though he be." This custom was, nevertheless, the oldest in the world.

If it is disagreeable for a young and pretty mouth to stick itself out of courtesy to an old and ugly mouth, there was a great danger between fresh, red mouths of twenty to twenty-five years old; and that is what finally brought about the abolition of the ceremony of kissing in the mysteries and the agapae.It is what caused women to be confined among the Orientals, so that they might kiss only their fathers and their brothers; custom long since introduced into Spain by the Arabs.

Behold the danger : there is one nerve of the fifth pair which goes from the mouth to the heart, and thence lower down, with such delicate industry has nature prepared everything ! The little glands of the lips, their spongy tissue, their velvety paps, the fine skin, ticklish, gives them an exquisite and voluptuous sensation, which is not without analogy with a still more hidden and still more sensitive part.Modesty may suffer from a lengthily savoured kiss between two Pietists of eighteen.

It is to be remarked that the human Species, the turtledoves and the pigeons alone are acquainted with kisses; thence came among the Latins the word columbatim, which our language has not been able to render.There is nothing of which abuse has not been made.The kiss, designed by nature for the mouth, has often been prostituted to membranes which do not seem made for this usage.One knows of what the templars were accused.

We cannot honestly treat this interesting subject at greater length, although Montaigne says: "One should speak thereof shamelessly : brazenly do we utter 'killing,' ' wounding,' ' betraying,' but of that we dare not speak but with bated breath."Philosophical Dictionary: Languages LANGUAGES THERE is no complete language, no language which can express all our ideas and all our sensations; their shades are too numerous, too imperceptible.

Nobody can make known the precise degree of sensation he experiences.One is obliged, for example, to designate by the general names of love and hate a thousand loves and a thousand hates all different from each other;it is the same with our pleasures and our pains.Thus all languages are, like us, imperfect.

They have all been made successively and by degrees according to our needs.It is the instinct common to all men which made the first grammars without perceiving it.The Lapps, the Negroes, as well as the Greeks, needed to express the past, the present and the future; and they did it: but as there has never been an assembly of logicians who formed a language, no language has been able to attain a perfectly regular plan.

All words, in all possible languages, are necessarily the images of sensations.Men have never been able to express anything but what they felt.Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders.Among all peoples the infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of measure.It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages, as well as all our ideas.

The least imperfect are like the laws : those in which there is the least that is arbitrary are the best.The most complete are necessarily those of the peoples who have cultivated the arts and society.Thus the Hebraic language should be one of the poorest languages, like the people who used to speak it.How should the Hebrews have had maritime terms, they who before Solomon had not a boat? how the terms of philosophy, they who were plunged in such profound ignorance up to the time when they started to learn something in their migration to Babylon? The language of the Phoenicians, from which the Hebrews drew their jargon, should be very superior, because it was the idiom of an industrious, commercial, rich people, distributed all over the earth.

The most ancient known language should be that of the nation most anciently gathered together as a body of people.It should be, further, that of the people which has been least subjugated, or which, having been subjugated, has civilized its conquerors.And in this respect, it is constant that Chinese and Arabic are the most ancient of all those that are spoken to-day.

There is no mother-tongue.All neighbouring nations have borrowed from each other: but one has given the name of " mother-tongue "to those from which some known idioms are derived.For example, Latin is the mothertongue in respect of Italian, Spanish and French: but it was itself derived from Tuscan; and Tuscan was derived from Celtic and Greek.

The most beautiful of all languages must be that which is at once, the most complete, the most sonorous, the most varied in its twists and the most regular in its progress, that which has most compound words, that which by its prosody best expresses the soul's slow or impetuous movements, that which most resembles music.