Lit2Go

There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in the lives of sick folk.  A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive–yards within earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf—idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change.  These were certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its softness.  Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death.  There was a lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.  And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these appreciations.  The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.  For even Winter has his  ‘dear domestic cave,’ and in those places where he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.

Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived, after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the southern sky.  It is among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest livelihood.  There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew his life.  Instead of the bath–chair, the spade; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick–room – these are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self–respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none but an invalid can know.  Resignation, the cowardice that apes a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect.  The man can open the door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all and not merely an invalid.

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains.  We cannot all of us go farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the old.  Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on his window.  The mere fact is tonic to his nerves.  His choice of a place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill.  He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought.

A long straight reach of valley, wall–like mountains upon either hand that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels; a world of black and white—black pine–woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the pine–woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice–rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the hotel—and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.  A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it; and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness.  It is a river that a man could grow to hate.  Day after day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley.  From end to end the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal.  Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour.  It were hard to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that delicate, long–lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows.  By noon the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour—mild and pale and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of purple blue.  What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos.  An English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that ‘the values were all wrong.’  Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he might have lost his reason.  And even to any one who has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of insanity.  The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring dull–coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere.  Here there are none of those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings–on and spreadings–out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely.  A glaring piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter daytime in the Alps.

With the approach of evening all is changed.  A mountain will suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.  The latest gold leaps from the last mountain.  Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.

But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally exempt from changes.  The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snow–flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry–rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.  Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain valley.  Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently recognises the empire of the Föhn.