finite programme and then withholding the programme, is
indicated by this passage from a lecture on Beethoven which he
delivered at Columbia: "If it [Beethoven's music] is absolute music,
according to the accepted meaning of the term, either it must be
beautiful music in itself,--that is, composed of beautiful sounds,--or
its excuse for _not_ being beautiful must rest upon its power of
expressing emotions and ideas that demand other than merely beautiful
tones for their utterance. Music, for instance, that would give us the
emotion--if I may call it that--of a series of exploding bombshells
could hardly be called 'absolute music'; yet that is exactly what the
opening of the last movement of the so-called 'Moonlight' Sonata meant
to Miss Thackeray, who speaks of it in her story, 'Beauty and the
Beast.'... If this is abstract music, it is bad. We know, however,
that Beethoven had some poetic idea in his mind as he wrote this; but
as he never gave the clew to the world, the music has been swallowed
as 'absolute music' by the modern formalists"--a comment which would
apply almost word for word, with a change of names and titles, to a
certain tumultuous and "unbeautiful" passage in MacDowell's "Lancelot
and Elaine." This passage is intended to express the rage and jealousy
of Guinevere; but MacDowell has given no indication of this fact in
his score, and only occasionally does the information find its way
into the programme-books. Yet in his own copy of the score he wrote a
complete and detailed key to the significance of the music at every
point. Such are the ways of the musical realist!

He was, in an extraordinarily complete sense, a celebrant of the
natural world. His imagination was enslaved by the miraculous pageant
of the visible earth, and he sought tirelessly to transfix some moment
of its wonder or its splendour or its terror in permanent images of
tone. The melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of
quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or
the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty
of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged
him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and
sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland
places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt
spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in its voicing of that
indefinable and evanescent sense