50) bears the legend "Flos regum Arthurus."
It is also in G minor. The spirit of King Arthur dominates the work
ideally, and justifies not only the ferocious and warlike first
subject with its peculiar and influential rhythm, but the
old-fashioned and unadorned folk-tone of the second subject. In the
working out there is much bustle and much business of trumpets. In the
reprise the folk-song appears in the tonic minor, taken most
unconventionally in the bass under elaborate arpeggiations in the
right hand. The coda, as in the other sonata, is simply a strong
passage of climax. Arthur's supernatural nature doubtless suggested
the second movement, with its elfin airs, its flibbertigibbet
virtuosity, and its magic of color. The third movement might have been
inspired by Tennyson's version of Arthur's farewell to Guinevere, it
is such a rich fabric of grief. The finale seems to me to picture the
Morte d'Arthur, beginning with the fury of a storm along the coast,
and the battle "on the waste sand by the waste sea." Moments of fire
are succeeded by exquisite deeps of quietude, and the death and
apotheosis of Arthur are hinted with daring and complete equivalence
of art with need.

Here is no longer the tinkle and swirl of the elf dances; here is no
more of the tireless search for novelty in movement and color. This is
"a flash of the soul that can." Here is Beethoven _redivivus_. For
half a century we have had so much pioneering and scientific
exploration after piano color and tenderness and fire, that men have
neglected its might and its tragic powers. Where is the piano-piece
since Beethoven that has the depth, the breadth, the height of this
huge solemnity? Chopin's sensuous wailing does not afford it.
Schumann's complex eccentricities have not given it out. Brahms is too
passionless. Wagner neglected the piano. It remained for a Yankee to
find the austere peak again! and that, too, when the sonata was
supposed to be a form as exhausted as the epic poem. But all this is
the praise that one is laughed at for bestowing except on the graves
of genius.

The cautious Ben Jonson, when his erstwhile taproom roisterer, Will
Shakespeare, was dead, defied "insolent Greece or haughty Rome" to
show his superior. With such authority, I feel safe in at least
defying the contemporary schools of insolent Russia or haughty Germany
to send forth a better musicwright than our fellow townsman, Edward
MacDowell.

_Edgar Stillman Kelley