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is cold in the North in February. On the other side
of the forty-ninth parallel the snow comes from a gray
and silent heaven about the latter part of November,
and after that we do not see the earth again until April.
There are days of brilliant sun, and nights of marvellous
moonlight, of dazzling white and muffled evergreen,
but, although the grip of frost may be relaxed for a
few days, his hold upon the land is not altogether loosened
until the migrating birds come back and the year is
past the equinox. In all these five months of snow you
will never once set foot on the bare ground.
And
yet these winter days are not all alike. The progress
of the gray season has been [Page 275] gradual;
the oncoming season of leaves is gradual, too. It is
a period of ebb in the tide of time, but there is a
certain point, a certain date, in that period, when
the outgoing currents of warmth and light and summer
cease to diminish, and begin slowly to return. All through
December and January the sombre world seems to have
forgotten the wonder of June and the bravery of October,
and to have settled sullenly down to endurance. Then
on a certain day the ebbing tide seems to halt and turn.
The aspect of earth and sky is different, brighter,
larger, bluer. And we say in our hearts, “There
is hope once more, and by and by it will be spring!”
This day, I have noticed, this birthday of the natural
year, falls about the eighth or tenth of February.
An
old custom has pitched upon the feast of St. Valentine
as the festival of first love, and made him, willing
or unwilling, the patron saint of youthful ardours.
Popular supposition, which knows little of the true
origins [Page 276] of our immemorial
habits and traditional observances, says that Valentine’s
day was chosen because it happened to fall about the
time of the mating of birds, and was therefore an appropriate
date for celebrating the first choice of the human lover,
— the awakening of innocence at the touch of desire.
The truth is, we know very little of these racial usages
which have been passed on to us from remote antiquity;
we can only guess that they must have had their beginnings
as sacred rites, commemorating this or that essential
need or joy of the mysterious heart of man. In no other
way could they have attained so unbreakable a hold upon
us, surviving as living traditions even in our own incredulous
age. They are often not sanctioned by the simpler and
more austerely spiritual religion which Christianity
inculcates, and have nothing to do with its gracious
ministrations. They are merely survivals from old pagan
forms of worship, beautiful and significant, but long
since fallen into [Page 277] desuetude,
and ineffectual for our modern wants. They have no actual
sway over the mind, and yet we allow them to live on
among our children with an easy tolerance, as if the
race remembered its own childhood and smiled at the
memory.
Of
the good Valentine, whose patronage we make so light
of in our pleasantries, not much is known, and nothing
at all that would justify his choice as the especial
guardian of adolescence and successor of Cupid. The
sainted man was a priest and bishop of Rome during the
Claudian persecutions in the third century. In those
strenuous times they made short work of any who demurred
at authority or ventured down the alluring alleys of
novelty in religion. Valentine, like so many others
of a nameless and unnumbered multitude, was thrown into
prison for the faith that possessed him; and like them
he gave up the breath of life most cheerfully in exchange
for his stubborn predilections, yielding his body to
be martyred with clubs. The only other [Page
278] tradition of him declares that, while
in jail, he cured his keeper’s daughter of blindness.
In
this scanty record of a devoted follower of the new
faith there is no hint of worldliness or loverlike infatuation.
Easily as one might build a romance about the incident
of his jailor’s daughter, there would be no foundation
for the story. To make of her another Heloise, and of
him a second (or rather a first) Abelard, might be a
pretty pastime for an idle fancy, but it would be a
fabrication without the tissue of truth. We must look
elsewhere for a reason for St. Valentine’s election
to the patronage of love, and we shall find it in the
most unexpected place. There is no glamour about it,
so far as Valentine is concerned, poor fellow. I almost
feel sorry that he must be robbed of any umbrage of
romance, and I can imagine that he himself in the realms
of innocence may have learned to look with tolerant
regard on his own unearned repute, now so many centuries
old, as the saint of lovers. [Page 279]
To
be the protector of sweethearts must surely add a sweetness
to life even in the heavenly dominions of bliss, and
when one has long since been divorced from all enchanting
earthly inclinations. Whether there be any traces of
our mortal desires, so pure in their origin, so blameless
in their passionate aspiration, still lingering about
our beings in that future state, I do not know. But
unless all human companionships are done away, all resemblance
to our human happiness superseded by some unguessed
and unimaginable kind of beatitude, there must surely
lurk in the heart of Valentine, bishop and martyr, sentiments
of generosity, of pity, of kindliness, for all the hopes
and agonies of mortal lovers. All the pretty observance
done in his name must come to his blessed cognizance
much as premonitions and feelings (as we call them)
come to ourselves, here in the meshes of our gross incarnation,
only more potently and vividly than here. If it moves
our human hearts to think upon the joys and trials of
[Page 280] lovers in their first infatuation,
how much more must it move the sympathy of one who is
now all sympathy, — the solicitude of one whose
kindly impulses are no longer parcelled and distracted
and obscured by the clamouring of a bodily existence!
If prayers be efficacious and the departed are permitted
to be at all aware of the progress of earthly affairs,
then I doubt not the good Valentine has cheerfully accepted
the duty laid upon him by our implicit trust. So unflinching
a martyr to the ideal could never find it in his heart
to regard our confidence in his power. He would feel,
I am sure, almost as truly bound to respond to the caprice
of fortune which has made him the vicar of love, as
he did to assent to the destiny which made him vicar
of Rome. I would as soon think of distrusting him as
I would St. Anthony of Padua, who guards our journeys
and recovers what is lost. But how came Valentine into
his unsought spiritual dominion?
In
early times, before the coming of the [Page
281] Christians, the Romans were accustomed
to hold their midwinter Lupercalia, or celebration,
in honour of Pan. Among other ceremonies observed at
this festival was a certain rite wherein the names of
young women were drawn by lot by the young men. To the
overseers of the early Christian Church fell the task
of attempting to eradicate the tenacious doctrines and
customs of heathendom. Often they were wise enough to
resort to gradual methods of reform, and in the case
of the Lupercalia they managed to substitute the names
of saints for those of women. Each participant in the
lottery would thus find himself under the protection
of a certain saint, as his lot happened to be drawn.
The older usage, however, was the more interesting,
and we cannot believe that the saints held precedence
over the ladies for very long. Old customs are not easily
discredited, and human nature is not to be etherealized
offhand by any theology. Many centuries later the old
superstition was still alive, surviving from [Page
282] the ceremonies of the Lupercalia, and
St. Francis de Sales tried to inhibit the use of valentines.
Still
the benighted custom would not be downed, and English
literature for centuries is full of rhymes and verses
for St. Valentine’s Day. Drayton, the Elizabethan,
for example, writes:
“Muse,
bid the morn awake,
Sad winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate,
The day’s Saint Valentine’s.
“For
that good bishop’s sake
Get up, and let us see
What beauty it shall be
That
fortune us assigns.”
As
if chance had not already too large a share in our precarious
destiny, we must invoke its gratuitous interference!
Would you not suppose that men would be too discouraged
at the grand lottery of life to invent any game still
more haphazardous or entrust their [Page 283]
destinies to the turn of a ballot? Surely it
is perilous enough to make choice in love when caution
and judgement are enlisted in the cause! Must we imperil
our happiness and stake our future on a chance meeting
of a certain frosty morning in February? “Nay,”
says the wisdom of the ages, “ye are already in
the hands of fate. Your most carefully considered choice
is already enmeshed by unseen conditions, and your freedom
only runs the length of the leash of your destiny.”
So it is. We grow infatuated with danger and court peril
with a cheerful daring, as venturesome boys grow familiar
with firecrackers on the Fourth of July, or skim over
the thin ice with a breathless speed, flouting courage
in the face of catastrophe.
What
the exact rites of the Lupercalia were is a matter of
guesswork for the most part, and Pan, they say, is dead.
The power of Valentine, too is passing away with other
old customs and credences. The new faith obliterated
the old feasts from the calendar by [Page 284]
overwriting them with novel names. Our enlightenment
and rationalism are like to erase them altogether. Neither
Pan nor Valentine can survive the spread of the scientific
spirit; but, having returned all things to reason, may
we not find the world a very gray, monotonous place
of few joys and fewer hopes: Life is not wholly reasonable,
after all, and it must surely be the greatest folly
to fancy we can make it so. It is to be enjoyed as well
as to be studied and understood, — to be taken
with a thankful heart and not always probed for a meaning.
Therefore, if there is an unregenerate strain in you
that insists on still believing in old Lupercus of the
wild woods, may you have the reward of you belief! And
if you are pleased to render observance to times and
seasons, and count St. Valentine a personage, who shall
prove you mistaken?
We
ourselves are less ceremonious, less given to manners
and trivial elegances, even less polite than our sires.
The forfeits and [Page 285] gifts which
Valentine’s day used to impose are no longer in
vogue; yet we cannot quite escape the sentiment of the
feast. As in so many instances, we may impart new interpretations
to old forms. Is not life itself as we have to live
it merely the art of expressing ourselves in fresh ways
in the old customs already at hand? All our daily avocations
may be as true as the alphabet itself; it is always
possible to rearrange them in new and alluring and articulate
combinations.
The
day of St. Valentine may well stand, even for us common,
sensible folk, for the festival of friends and lovers.
On this morning when first the reviving sun comes back
to gray streets and snowly fields, we may well encourage
tender thoughts, — resolve and hope and aspire.
The touch of the warm sunlight on our shoulder may well
seem like a hint to bestir ourselves about the greatest
business of the universe, the old, engrossing, imperishable,
never-ended affair of love. It will remind us of the
perennial goodness of [Page 286] living,
the unaging wholesomeness of earth, the fond yet delightful
infatuations of the world, and all the entrancing possibilities
which lie hidden in the path of adventure. Tainted with
the madness of the lover, we may even embrace that supremest
of human follies, the delusion that heights of excellence,
of unselfishness, of kindness, and devotion have never
yet been exemplified as we shall practise them. Is not
that a generous aspiration worth experiencing, even
though we should not realize a tenth of it? Will you
not join the light but not frivolous band of St. Valentine’s
followers, bethink you of your youth to-day with all
its radiant expectations, and resolve to make some one
more happy by your love? It may be a sweetheart or a
child or an old lady; love is good for everybody; and
it is good for us to love, for in loving we are only
giving free play to the soul in its natural occupation.
Make your vows on St. Valentines’s morn, gentlemen
and friends! I promise you great joy from [Page
287] their fulfillment. You may not be able
to keep them with all the nobility of intention in which
they are made, but in the effort there will be exaltation
and sober gain. For once day more the youthful poet
within you may walk the earth in gay supremacy, to better
this life for the beloved with a gift of verses or violets
and renewals of gentle friendship. See to it that some
fresh joy takes up its lodging in the heart of the little
friend, and sorrow and weariness and disappointment
be turned from the door. Take care that laughter comes
back to her lips and the flush of delight to her cheeks,
for perhaps you have been a neglectful Valentine, and
your vows sadly need to be renewed. Be not ashamed,
therefore, of the fanatical enthusiasms of love, and
make your penance for sins of negligence, of thoughtlessness,
of unkindness, preparatory to the golden hours of spring.
For
on St. Valentine’s morning, if you will take my
word for it, our venerable Mother Nature goes to her
closet and takes [Page 288] down her
green cloak, which before many weeks she will resume
for the festivals of April. Had we not better look over
our own wardrobe of the heart, also? The dust of familiarity
and the moth of doubt play sad havoc with the soul’s
garment of love. And when the appointed day arrives,
and the feast of Spring-time is instituted once more,
— when the sap comes back to the hills, and the
madness of love to the heart of man, — we must
not be found unprepared. Every heart must have in readiness
its scarlet tunic and its golden coat, for how more
appropriate can it be clothed than with love and joy?
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