o one save himself. He was one of the most
individual writers who ever made music--as individual as Chopin, or
Debussy, or Brahms, or Grieg. His mannner of speech was utterly
untrammelled, and wholly his own. Vitality--an abounding freshness, a
perpetual youthfulness--was one of his prime traits; nobility--nobility
of style and impulse--was another. The morning freshness, the welling
spontaneity of his music, even in moments of exalted or passionate
utterance, was continually surprising: it was music not unworthy of the
golden ages of the world. Yet MacDowell was a Celt, and his music is
deeply Celtic--mercurial, by turns dolorous and sportive, darkly
tragical and exquisitely blithe, and overflowing with the unpredictable
and inexplicable magic of the Celtic imagination. He is unfailingly
noble--it is, in the end, the trait which most surely signalises him.
"To every man," wrote Maeterlinck, "there come noble thoughts, thoughts
that pass across his heart like great white birds." Such thoughts came
often to MacDowell--they seem always to be hovering not far from the
particular territory to which his inspiration has led him, even when he
is most gayly inconsequent; and in his finest and largest utterances,
in the sonatas, their majestic trend appears somehow to have suggested
the sweeping and splendid flight of the musical idea. Not often subtle
in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the
impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of
the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at the
dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty of
which we can see the end." He knew how to evoke a kind of beauty that
was both aerial and enchanted; but it was a clarified and lucid beauty,
even then: it was never dim or wavering. He would never, as I have
said, have comprehended the art of such a writer as Debussy--he viewed
the universe from a wholly different angle. Of the moderns, Wagner he
worshipped, Tchaikovsky deeply moved him, Grieg he loved--Grieg, who
was his artistic inferior in almost every respect. Yet none of these so
seduced his imagination that his independence was overcome--he was
always, throughout his maturity, himself; not arrogantly or
insistently, but of necessity; he could not be otherwise.

What are the distinguishing traits, after all, of MacDowell's music?
The answer is not easily given. His music is characterised by great
buoyancy and