aries. In his musical version of Romeo and Juliet, Gounod makes Romeo hang on Juliet's lips for an interminable number of bars of music. The opening scene in Tannhauser shows the tenor exhausted by a kissing bout, while the lovely Venus is wide awake and begging for more. Brunnhilde, in Die Walküre, is put to sleep by a kiss strong enough to make her sleep twenty years. Rip Van Winkle's kiss of the old bottle in the Catskills was not more efficacious in inducing slumber. And in Wagner's Siegfried, the hero fastens his lips to Brunnhilde's with such perpetual fervor that the orchestra, says the critic, plays enough music to stock a comic opera, before the kiss is ended.
As for the movie kiss, that is of two distinct kinds. The good girl, played by any doll-faced moron, kisses as demurely as Victoria herself. But the siren, the vampire! Here we have the ultimate in extended kissing. Certain states, like Pennsylvania, have found it necessary to limit the number of feet of film that a kiss can last—two hundred feet being the Pennsylvania maximum. I once kissed a girl continuously for seven miles, on the Twentieth Century Limited; and I am sure that the record is infinitely longer than that. When it is remembered that the purified movies permit no display of any of the play of love beyond the kiss, and that on the screen the kiss is potent enough to cause a girl to be a "ruined woman," and to appear in the next reel with twins or triplets, you can see why an osculation of the Theda Bara type is efficiently and comprehensively done.
