of association which is evoked by
certain aspects, certain phases, of the outer world--that sudden
emotion of things past and irrecoverable which may cling about a field
at sunset, or a quiet street at dusk, or a sudden intimation of spring
in the scent of lilacs.

But although such themes as he loved to dwell upon in his celebration
of the magic of the natural world were very precious to his
imagination, the human spectacle held for him, from the first, an
emotion scarcely less swift and abundant. His scope is comprehensive:
he can voice the archest gaiety, a naive and charming humour, as in
the "Marionettes" and in the songs "From an Old Garden"; there is
passion in the symphonic poems and in many of the songs; while in the
sonatas and in the "Indian" suite the tragic note is struck with
impressive and indubitable authority.

Of the specifically musical traits in which MacDowell exhibits the
tendencies and preferences which underlie his art, one must begin by
saying that his distinguishing quality--that which puts so
unmistakable a stamp upon his work--eludes precise definition. His
tone is unmistakable. Its chief possession is a certain clarity and
directness which is apparent no less in moments of great stress and
complexity of emotion than in passages of simpler and slighter
content. His style has little of the torrential rhetoric, the
unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, though it owns something of
his forthright quality; nor has it any of Debussy's withdrawals. One
thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the "broad
Shakespearian daylight" of Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not
inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing. He has few
reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of
harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line--which is far from
implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is.
His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at
once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive. It
is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single
passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty and character. He
had, of course, his period of crude experimentation, his days of
discipleship. In his earlier writing there is not a little that is
unworthy of him: much in which one seeks vainly for that note of
distinction and personality which sounds so constantly throughout the
finer body of his