14 February: Boreham on Valentines Day

St Valentines Day
This is St. Valentine's Day. Mr. George Beale, who has just retired from the London postal department, after a lifetime of service, claims to be the only postman living who can remember when, on the fourteenth of February, the post offices were piled with valentines which saturated everything and everyone with their perfume, and when every postman needed two or three assistants to help him carry and deliver his load. In those days all the resources of art, and all the craftsmanship of the most skilful workmen, were annually requisitioned in order that the new season's valentines might be a little more romantic, or a little more dainty, or a little more fragrant than any that had previously appeared. The custom faded out: one wonders why. Mr. Beale thinks that it is because humanity has lost all ideas of sentiment. He is mistaken. From generation to generation, the outward forms change. Feelings express themselves in new ways. But romance survives. The emotions that inspired the valentines are as strong as ever.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most penetrating philosopher of all time, declared that human nature is made up of intelligence, will, and emotion; but life has taught us little unless we have learned that, in the great crises of human experience, when everything is at stake, it is by the emotions, rather than by the intelligence or the will, that men are guided and controlled. Oddly enough, however, this factor in our composition—the dominant factor—is the one quality that we hate to exhibit. The man has not yet been born who has any serious doubt about the presence of Kant's first two ingredients—intelligence and will—in the complex mechanism of his being. Yet one seldom finds a man—and never a Scotsman—who is prepared to confess that very much in the way of emotion has entered into his heterogeneous temperament.

Sentiment As Creative Force In History
The average man is a palpitating bundle of emotion, but he cannot bear to be suspected of such weakness. He will force a laugh or make a jest to conceal the fact that his heart is breaking. We resemble animals that like to endure their pain in silence and in secrecy. Cowper likens himself, during one of the emotional crises of his strange career, to the stricken deer that leaves the herd, its panting side transfixed with many an arrow. And reverting to the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, it is intensely significant that whilst, of all men on the face of the earth, Scotsmen are most eager to appear rugged, passionless, and stern, the richest vein of sentimental literature which has appeared in our time is that which reveals the life and character of Scotland. Sir James Barrie is merely one case among many.

If, however, no man will believe that he himself is sentimental, every man will believe it of every other man. And, strong in that conviction, every man knows that, in the last resort, it is by sentiment that the world is swayed. "How limited," exclaims Lord Beaconsfield in "Coningsby," "how limited is the force of human reason! We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy. It was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world. It was not reason that inspired the Crusader and established the monastic orders; it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It is by sentiment that men live, and it is by sentiment that they are bound together. All legal and formal bonds are in danger of becoming, sooner or later, tiresome, galling, and irksome. The ties that are imposed by sentiment, on the other hand, are as soft as silk and as flexible as elastic; they can never, in any circumstances, convey an impression of tyranny, yet in their strength and effectiveness they are incomparable.

The Garb Decays: The Spirit Lasts For Ever
Sentiment is the mainspring and nerve centre of our humanity. The novelist has no doubt about it, for he knows that there is no date in the history of English literature more epoch-making than the date on which Samuel Richardson discovered that fiction would be amazingly more popular if suffused with the spirit of romance. The statesman knows it, for experience has taught him that there is no appeal quite as effective as a sentimental appeal. The barrister knows it, for he has addressed too many juries to be ignorant of their susceptibilities. The actor knows it: has not Dame Sybil Thorndike told us that the supreme moment in an actor's life is the moment at which he feels himself and his audience caught in the swirl of a tremendous gust of emotion? We all recognise when we come to think of it, that love, hate, pity, shame jealousy, sympathy, revenge—the great master passions that sway us and make us what we are—are all of them matters of sentiment and that sentiment governs mankind.

The story of the Church herself is written in chapters of profound emotional experiences. "Speak ye home to the heart of Jerusalem," was the Divine command to an ancient prophet. The Hebrew words indicate, Sir George Adam Smith tells us, that the preacher is to stir the soul of the people as a lover stirs the heart of a lass when he makes his passionate appeal and wins her. It is the spirit of St. Valentine sublimated. In describing the effect of the evangelism of Whitefield on the Western continent, Whittier says that:—

"The flood of emotion deep and strong
Troubled the land as it swept
along,
But left a result of holier lives."

The trappings and drapery of St. Valentines Day may decay and disappear, but its spirit is as immortal as man, and endures to the end of time.

F W Boreham