LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
SANATORIUM STUDENTS
SIR,—Owing to wandering, the Spectator of March 25th reached me belatedly. I opened it in the Roman Forum, and in the beautiful spring silence of that dead world read Mr. Derek Lindsay's article, Sanatorium Students, on the Undergraduate Page. I have been watching the Editor's experiment with much interest and some disappointment. Where are the young Macaulays to provoke, with their sudden appearance, an editor's blood pressure ? Mr. Lindsay's admirable and moving con- tribution raises one's hope.
It had for me a certain poignancy. Over forty years ago I bankrupted myself for a month by purchasing a small book of poems. Moved by intense enthusiasm, I wrote to its author. There followed a correspond- ence from a Montana sanatorium. " I am surrounded by gloomy firs, very different from pines," wrote James Elroy Flecker, and I was happy later to think that a boy's praise had given pleasure to one for whom Fame had not arrived and the Dark Angel was waiting. I did not foresee then that I was destined to follow around a friend in his brave pilgrimage, to become familiar with X-ray photographs, discussions on pneumo-thorax operations, and witness the quiet gallantry of an army waging war with incredible high spirits. Rollier's noble experiment in heliotherapy at Leysin, the sanatoria of Switzerland, France and England, all these passed in review, with the same lesson of high courage every- where. " The Swiss are so dull," says someone. Let him spend a few weeks on that defiant range above the Rhone Valley and learn what cheerful, indomitable fighters they are, and have been since De Bello Gallico.
Mr. Lindsay's comments on the international atmosphere of his sanatorium emphasise a thought often with me in these days of squabbling statesmen, endless conferences and committees whose result seems to be the progressive reduction of the Five Freedoms to none at all. If only they would spend an hour in the admonishing silence of the Roman Forum, and learn what Horace told us two thousand years ago: " Quo pater Aeneas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus,
Pulvis et umbra SWIMS.
Quis stir, an adiiciant hoditarae crastina summae
Tempora di superi ?"
Better perhaps than an hour in the Roman Forum would be a bed in a Swiss sanatorium. There our peripatetic disputants might learn the accommodating spirit and gallant unselfishness found by Mr. Lindsay ; in life se little, near death so large.—I am, Sir, yours truly,
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