ost spontaneous he has written. I do not mean to say that he does not
often achieve an ideal correspondence between the significance of his
text and the effect of his music; but when he does--as in, for
instance, that superb tragedy in little, "The Sea,"[16] or in the
still finer "Sunrise"[17]--one's impression is that it is the
fortunate result of chance, rather than the outcome of deliberate
artistic purpose. It is in songs of an untrammelled lyricism that his
art finds its chief opportunity. In such he is both delightful and
satisfying--in, for instance, the six flower songs, "From an Old
Garden"; in "Confidence" and "In the Woods" (op. 47); in "The Swan
Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid Sings Light," and "Long Ago" (op. 56);
and in the delectable "To the Golden Rod," from his last song group
(op. 60). This is music of blithe and captivating allurement, of grave
or riant tenderness, of compelling fascination; and in it, the word
and the tone are ideally mated. Yet even in others of his songs in
which they do not so invariably correspond, one must acknowledge
gladly the beauty and freshness of the music itself: such music as he
has given us in "Constancy" (op. 58), in "As the Gloaming Shadows
Creep" (op. 56), in "Fair Springtide"--which represent his ripest
utterances as a song writer. If he is not, in this particular form,
quite at his happiest, he is among the foremost of those who have kept
alive in the modern tradition the conception of the song as a medium
of lyric utterance no less than of precise dramatic signification.

[16] No. VII. of the "Eight Songs," op. 47.

[17] Op. 58, No. II.

CHAPTER VIII

SUMMARY

To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in American music it is
necessary to remember that twenty-five years ago, when he sent from
Germany, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, the earliest
outgivings of his talent, our native musical art was still little
more than a pallid reproduction of European models. MacDowell did
not at that time, of course, give positive evidence of the vitality
and the rarity of his gifts; yet there was, even in his early
music,--undeniably immature though it was, and modelled after easily
recognised Teutonic masters,--a fresh and untrammelled impulse. A new
note vibrated through it, a new and buoyant personality suffused it.
Thenceforth music in America possessed an artistic figure of
constantly increasing stature. MacDowell commanded, from the start,
an origi