A long chapter of instances might be penned on the habits of work of musical composers; such as Gluck's habit of betaking himself with his harpsichord on a fine day into some grassy field, where the ideas came to him as fast again as within doors.
Handel, on the contrary, claims to have been inspired for his grandest compositions by the murmurous din of mighty London,—far from mighty as the London of George the Second may seem to those with whom the nineteenth century is waning.
Sarti composed best in the sombre shadows of a dimly-lighted room.
The Monsieur Le Maître commemorated in Rousseau's autobiography typified a numerous section in his constant recourse, en travaillant dans son cabinet, to a bottle, which was replenished as often as emptied, and that was too often by a great deal. His servant, in preparing the room for him, would no more have thought of omitting son pot et son verre than his ruled paper, ink, pens, and violoncello; and one serving did for these,—not so for the drink.
The learned artist Haydn could not work except in court-dress, and used to declare that, if, when he sat down to his instrument, he had forgotten to put on a certain ring, he could not summon a single idea. How he managed to summon ideas before Frederick II. had given him the said ring we are not informed.
Charles Dibdin's method of composition, or, rather, the absence of it, is illustrated in the story of his lamenting his lack of a new subject while under the hair-dresser's hand in a cloud of powder, at his rooms in the Strand, preparing for his night's "entertainment." The friend who was with him suggested various topics, but all of a sudden the jar of a ladder sounded against the lamp-iron, and Dibdin exclaimed, "The lamp-lighter, a good notion," and at once began humming and fingering on his knee. As soon as his head was dressed he stepped to the piano, finished off both music and words, and that very night sang "Jolly Dick, the Lamplighter," at the theatre, nor could he, we are assured on critical authority, well have made a greater hit if the song had been the deliberate work of two authors—one of the words, another of the air—and had taken weeks to finish it, and been elaborated in studious leisure instead of the distraction of dressing-room din.
XIII.
The Hygiene of Writing.
Edward Everett Hale gives the following description of his mode of life, which at the same time is full of advice to authors in general:—
"The business of health for a literary man seems to me to depend largely upon sleep. He should have enough sleep, and should sleep well. He should avoid whatever injures sleep.