ST. VALENTINE'S DAY 39 



the half-way house and, after that, of the quarter- 

 way house. If the ideal is midsummer, we are 

 half-way there at Christmas. We are down at the 

 bottom of the hill below which there is no other 

 deep, and, as we turn our faces upward, there is 

 a paean of rejoicing that the darkest day is past. 

 At Easter we are within sight of the end of the 

 journey, and in possession of half the sweets of 

 summer. There is no longer any hurry. We 

 should not mind keeping the flowers of May till 

 it was time for winter again, so that for many 

 people the happy land is reached at Easter, and 

 St. Valentine's Day becomes the real half-way 

 house. 



In Rome the Lupercalian Feast was a kind of 

 Saturnalia, a feast of love founded, as it appeared 

 to the Christians, on a purely material and carnal 

 base, and so we established the Feast of St. Valen- 

 tine as a prophylactic. The wine to be put in the 

 old bottle must not be too new. There must be 

 jollity of a slightly more secular flavour than the 

 austerity of confirmed Christianity required, in 

 order to attract the young people who had found 

 joy in the Lupercalia. And the result has been 

 that the Feast of St. Valentine was always more 

 secular than ecclesiastic, and has to-day lost nearly 

 all its appeal. 



The slipping out of the calendar of eleven days, 

 whereby all our dates are shifted back towards 

 Christmas, and therefore become colder, has also 

 helped to kill the day of St. Valentine, May-day, 



