in enchanted woods; but for
him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but
the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the
transfiguring mirror of his music, the moods and events of the natural
world, and of the drama that plays incessantly in the hearts of men,
are vivified into shapes and designs of irresistible beauty and
appeal. He is of those quickened ministers of beauty who attest for us
the reality of that changeless and timeless loveliness which the
visible world of the senses and the invisible world of the imagination
are ceaselessly revealing to the simple of heart, the dream-filled,
and the unwise.

MacDowell presents throughout the entire body of his work the
noteworthy spectacle of a radical without extravagance, a musician at
once in accord with, and detached from, the dominant artistic
movement of his day. The observation is more a definition than an
encomium. He is a radical in that, to his sense, music is nothing if
not articulate. Wagner's luminous phrase, "the fertilisation of music
by poetry," would have implied for him no mere aesthetic abstraction,
but an intimate and ever-present ideal. He was a musician, yet he
looked out upon the visible world and inward upon the world of the
emotions through the transforming eyes of the poet. He would have
none of a formal and merely decorative beauty--a beauty serving no
expressional need of the heart or the imagination. In this ultimate
sense he is to be regarded as a realist--a realist with the
romantic's vision, the romantic's preoccupation; and yet he is as
alien to the frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as
he is to the academic ideal. Though he conceives the prime mission of
music to be interpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, in
its function as an expressional instrument, it shall concern itself
with essences and impressions, and not at all with transcriptions.
His standpoint is, in the last analysis, that of the poet rather than
of the typical musician: the standpoint of the poet intent mainly
upon a vivid embodiment of the quintessence of personal vision and
emotion, who has elected to utter that truth and that emotion in
terms of musical beauty. One is, indeed, almost tempted to say that
he is paramountly a poet, to whom the supplementary gift of musical
speech has been extravagantly vouchsafed.

He is a realist, as I have said--applying the term in that larger
sense which denote