hullin, etc., you will easily perceive from the music that
something extremely unpleasant is happening. Joking aside, I will
confess to a certain fascination the subject has for me. So much
so that my 'motto' [the original motto--the verses which I have
quoted above] spread beyond the music; therefore I am going to
make a different work of the former, and for the sonata I adopted
the modest quatrain that is printed in it.... Like the third,
this fourth sonata is more of a 'bardic' rhapsody on the subject
than an attempt at actual presentation of it, although I have
made use of all the suggestion of tone-painting in my power,--just
as the bard would have reinforced _his_ speech with gesture
and facial expression."

He aimed to make his music, as he says, "more a commentary on the
subject than an actual depiction of it"; but the case would be stated
more truly, I think, if one were to say that he has penetrated to the
heart of the entire body of legends, has imbued himself with their
ultimate spirit and significance, and has bodied it forth in his music
with splendid veracity and eloquence. He has attempted no mere musical
recounting of those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at which he
hints in his brief motto. It would be juster to say, rather, that he
has recalled in his music the very life and presence of the Gaelic
prime--that he has "unbound the Island harp." Above all, he has
achieved that "heroic beauty" which, believes Mr. Yeats, has been
fading out of the arts since "that decadence we call progress set
voluptuous beauty in its place"--that heroic beauty which is of the
very essence of the imaginative life of the primitive Celts, and which
the Celtic "revival" in contemporary letters has so signally failed to
revive. For it is, I repeat, the heroic Gaelic world that MacDowell
has made to live again in his music: that miraculous world of
stupendous passions and aspirations, of bards and heroes and great
adventure--the world of Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and
Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdre the Beautiful, and Fergus, and
Connla the Harper, and those kindred figures, lovely or greatly
tragical, that are like no other figures in the world's mythologies.

This sonata marks the consummation of his evolution toward the acme of
powerful expression. It is cast in a mould essentially heroic; it has
its moods of tenderness, of insistent sweetness, but these are