sleep produced by complete physical exhaustion.  These were one night when I had thrown myself down on some sheaves in a field near Ville-Juif; one day in a meadow in the neighborhood of Sceaux; once on the snow on the banks of the frozen Seine, near Neuilly; and lastly, on a table in the Cafe du Cardinal at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Richelieu, where I slept for five hours, to the terror of the garcons, who thought I was dead and were afraid to come near me.

It was on my return from one of these wanderings, in which I must have seemed like one seeking his soul, that my eyes fell on Moore’s ’Irish Melodies,’ lying open on my table at the song beginning “When he who adores thee.”  I seized my pen, and then and there wrote the music to that heart-rending farewell, which is published at the end of my collection of songs, ‘Irlande,’ under the title of ‘Elegie.’  This is the only occasion on which I have been able to vent any strong feeling in music while still under its influence.  And I think that I have rarely reached such intense truth of musical expression, combined with so much realistic power of harmony.

ON THEATRICAL MANAGERS IN RELATION TO ART

From the ‘Autobiography’

I have often wondered why theatrical managers everywhere have such a marked predilection for what genuine artists, cultivated minds, and even a certain section of the public itself persist in regarding as very poor manufacture, short-lived productions, the handiwork of which is as valueless as the raw material itself.  Not as though platitudes always succeeded better than good works; indeed, the contrary is often the case.  Neither is it that careful compositions entail more expense than “shoddy.”  It is often just the other way.  Perhaps it arises simply from the fact that the good works demand the care, study, attention, and, in certain cases, even the mind, talent, and inspiration of every one in the theatre, from the manager down to the prompter.  The others, on the contrary, being made especially for lazy, mediocre, superficial, ignorant, and silly people, naturally find a great many supporters.  Well! a manager likes, above everything, whatever brings him in amiable speeches and satisfied looks from his underlings, he likes things that require no learning and disturb no accepted ideas or habits, which gently go with the stream of prejudice, and wound no self-love, because they reveal no incapacity; in a word, things which do not take too long to get up.

SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

(1091-1153)