MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD N1CoLsON
ON the morning of St. Valentine I watched the birds below my window with special curiosity. They had had a rough night of it, these little Kentish birds, since the guns had thundered from east and west and the bombs had screamed among the wood- lands. The dawn was harsh, moreover, and the loam coated with frost. It seemed an inauspicious day on which to choose a nest- mate for a whole year. After so restless a night, upon so harsh a morning, how could they be expected tc exercise that discrimina- tion, that careful poise and thoughtfulness which St. - Valentine demands? During those eleven hours between sunrise and sunset on February 14th a decision is imposed upon them which will affect months of married happiness. The robin who for the last six weeks has watched with sympathy my endeavours to extract the celandine from among the tulips, who has gazed with awe at my unending battle with that most noxious of all weeds (pregnant as Diana of Ephesus) must now, before night comes, choose his wife. She will hop all careless into his territory, and he, after assuming all the attitudes of affronted pugnacity, will suddenly, at about 4 p.m., recognise in her his mate. And thereafter there will be two robins among the cabbages instead of one. It seems curious to me that the two St. Valentines who died on the same day under the Emperor Claudius and were both buried near the Via Flaminia, should have decreed that on February rath all birds in Europe and the United States should enter upon a contract of marriage. It seems even stranger that this happy festival, so rich in insinuation and opportunity, should have lost all hold upon our national habits. Gone are the. days when the young Victorians would send each other little missives of lace-paper enriched with simple verses. Gone are the days when our grandmothers would rise early on February 14th to empty the post-box before their parents were awake. The feast of St. Valentine today is honoured
only by the birds. And for them it is a day of deep perplexity. * * * * It was not always so. On consulting my table-book I find that Shakespeare dragged St. Valentine quite suddenly into Hamlet and in the simple lines : "And I a maid at your window To be your Valentine."
Donne was inspired by this festival to become almost gay: "Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is ; And all the air is thy diocese, And all the chirping choristers And other birds are thy parishioners ; Thou marriest every year The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove, The sparrow, that neglects his life for love, The household bird with the red stomacher."
And Charles Lamb devoted to the subject one of his most Elian passages :
"Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in- the rubric thou venerable Archflamen of Hymen! Immortal go-between ; Who and what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union? Or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on and decent lawn sleeves?"
We can answer only a portion of Charles Lamb's question. One of the two St. Valentines whose feasts are jointly celebrated upon February iath was a Roman priest ; the other was Bishop of Temi. But to our materialistic age the name of Valentine suggests a tank.
And not, it would seem, a very effective tank at that.
* * * * In London, on this feast of St. Valentine, the darkness descended early accompanied by gusts of rain which were as cold as snow. The traffic lights glimmered upon the wet pavements and the white topees of the United States military policemen shone like puff- balls in a wood. It seemed to me that the two St. Valentines had fixed theit festival prematurely, and that if we in England are to have our feast of the spring, we must fix it somewhat later,
in April, let us say, or May. Since although in our wet island the sloth of February is sometimes stirred by strange presages of warmth, we know that we have before us the four weeks of March when the vanes will remain fixed for days on end in the wind from the north-east. The "first warm days of March" which the poets have sung with such emotion seldom come to us before April, and even then we may find snowdrifts among the daffodils. It is for this reason, I suppose, that those who determine such matters have been for so long opposed to a fixed Easter. Let that festival remain as variable as our climate. And let us not be flattered into supposing that on any settled day the spring will come.
* * * * It is salutary, none the. less (it is, as the saying goes, good for public morale "), that there should be some fixed day on which the people can celebrate the end of winter and the coming of spring. We have our Saturnalia to tide us over the dark Christmas days ; the French have their first of January and all the visits and presents which it entails ; why should we not fix the fifteenth of April as the day on which we celebrate our victories, the change to double summer time, and the banishment of darkness by light?. I have often described the great spring festival of the Persians—the Festival of No Ritz. It remains for ever with me as the loveliest of all national feasts. For on that day in March the winter, in the Persian uplands, turns overnight to spring. The plums and cherries, the apricots and the peaches, burst, as it were, simultaneously into pink and white among the valleys of the Elburz, and in the arid wilderness which surrounds the cities and the gardens the frail and colourless iris pokes its soft nose among the stones. That is a great holiday for all the Persians. Old men and children, young men and maidens, put on new clothes to greet the New Year, and from the darkness of the cupboard they bring out small pots of wheat, showing thin blades of vivid green above the soil. The whole populatton streams out to the gardens above the town, sitting in gay groups together in the sunshine or under the plane trees, munching nougat and pistachio nuts all day, and intoning happily together the verses of Jalal-ad-din, of S'adi and Hafiz. And when the sun begins to drop behind the mountains and the great cone of Demavend flushes pink in the east, they stream back again towards the city and the dust rises above them as a pall of scarlet smoke.
* * * *
We have been accused of taking our pleasures sadly, and it is indeed true that a certain national self-consciousness precludes us from giving loud expression to such gaiety as we possess. It is true also that, whereas in more sunlit countries the songs which washerwomen or fishermen sing to themselves rise like fountains of gaiety up into the light, our own street-singers (and they are few enough) group miserably together and emit dirges while the pennies drop into a damp cloth cap. How rarely in England does some sudden song spring up from a backyard as in Andalusia or Sicily, bringing a smile of startled happiness to every mouth! I am pre- pared to believe that there was once a Merry England in which the villagers danced upon the green and sang choruses together in complete abandon. But when we seek to revive these gaieties a ghastly chill of artificiality comes to check our revelry. Only among the smoke and beer of music halls or in the great popular gusts which sweep football crowds do we find some breath of that breeze of common gaiety which once (we are repeatedly assured) was ours. It cannot all be a mere question of climate or of puritanism, since in the fun-fairs of Moscow and Leningrad we can hear laughter which is Andalusian in its happiness. Is it that we are in fact a re- served and unspontaneous folk? Perhaps when we have our Beveridge and all our municipal and rural delights we shall more readily forget the crushing need of respectability and laugh out loud. And perhaps in 1954, returning through lit streets on the feast of St. Valentine, I shall become aware that the youth of England have at last remembered that youth is a gay and perishable thing.
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