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 original idiom, a manner of speech which has been recognised even by his detractors as entirely his own.

His style is as pungent and unmistakable as Grieg’s, and far less limited in its variety. Hearing certain melodic turns, certain harmonic formations, you recognise them at once as belonging to MacDowell, and to none other. This marked individuality of speech, apparent from the first, became constantly more salient and more vivid, and in the music which he gave forth at the height of his creative activity, in, say, the “Sea Pieces” and the last two sonatas, it is unmistakable and beyond dispute. This emphatically personal accent it was which, a score of years ago, set MacDowell in a place apart among native American music-makers. No one else was saying such charming and memorable things in so fresh and individual a way. We had then, as we have had since, composers who were entitled to respect by virtue of their expert and effective mastery of a familiar order of musical expression, who spoke correctly a language acquired in the schools of Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing to say that was both important and new. They had grace, they had dexterity, they had, in a measure, scholarship; but their art was obviously derivative, without originality of substance or a telling quality of style. It is not a needlessly harsh asseveration to say that, until MacDowell began to put forth his more individual works, our music had been palpably, almost frankly, dependent: an undisguised and naïve transplantation, made rather feeble and anæmic in the process, of European growths. The result was admirable, in its way, praiseworthy, in its way and wholly negligible.

The music of MacDowell was, almost from the first, in a wholly different case. In its early phases it, too, was imitative, reflective. MacDowell returned to America, after a twelve years’ apprenticeship to European influences, in 1888, bringing with him his symphonic poems, “Hamlet and Ophelia” and “Lancelot and Elaine,” his unfinished “Lamia,” his two orchestral paraphrases of scenes from the Song of Roland, two concertos, and numerous songs and piano pieces. Not greatly important music, this, measured beside that which he afterward put forth; but possessing an individual profile, a savour, a tang, which gave it an immediately recognised distinction. A new voice spoke out of it, a fresh and confident, an eloquent and forceful, voice. It betrayed Germanic influences: of that there was no question; yet it was strikingly rich in personal accent. Gradually his art came to find, through various forms, a constantly finer and weightier expression. For orchestra he wrote the “Indian” suite music of superb vigour, fantastically and deeply imaginative, wholly personal in quality; for the piano he wrote four sonatas of heroic and passionate content indisputable masterworks and various shorter pieces, free in form and poetic in inspiration; and he wrote many songs, some of them quite flawless in their loveliness and their emotional veracity.

It will thus be seen why the potent and aromatic art of MacDowell impressed those who were able to feel its charm and estimate its value. It is mere justice to him, now that he has definitely passed beyond the reach of our praise, to say that he gave to the art of creative music in this country (I am thinking now only of music-makers of native birth) its single impressive and vital figure. His is the one name in our music which, for instance, one would venture to pair with that of Whitman in poetry.

An abundance of pregnant, beautiful, and novel ideas was his chief possession, and he fashioned them into musical designs with great skill and unflagging art. That he did not undertake adventures in all of the forms of music, has been said. There is no symphony in the list of his published works, no large choral composition. Yet he was far from being a miniaturist, he was, in fact, anything but that. His four sonatas for the piano are planned upon truly heroic lines; they are large in scope and of epical sweep and breadth; and his “Indian” suite is the most impressive orchestral work composed by an American. He wrote two piano concertos, early works, not of his best inspiration, a large number of poetically descriptive smaller works, and almost half a hundred songs of frequent loveliness and character. The three symphonic poems, “Hamlet and Ophelia,” “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “Lamia”; the two “fragments,” “The Saracens,” and “The Lovely Alda,” and the first orchestral suite, o which he might have entitled “Sylvan” complete the record of his output, save for some spirited but not very important part-songs for male voices. The list comprises sixty-two opus numbers and one hundred and eighty-six separate compositions, not a remarkable accomplishment, in point of quantity, yet notable and rare in quality.

He suggested, at his best, no 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 freshness, by an abounding vitality, by a constantly juxtaposed tenderness and strength, by a pervading nobility of tone and feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not brooding or hectic, and it is seldom intricate or recondite in its psychology. It is music curiously free from the fevers of sex. And here I do not wish to be misunderstood. This music is anything but androgynous. It is always virile, often passionate, and, in its intensest moments, full of force and vigour. But the sexual impulse which underlies it is singularly fine, strong, and controlled. The strange and burdened winds, the subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir at times in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, are not to be found here. In Wagner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, as Pater felt in William Morris’s “King Arthur’s Tomb,” the tyranny of a moon which is “not tender and far-off, but close down the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish,” and the presence of a colouring that is “as of scarlet lilies”; and there is the suggestion of poison, with “a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things.” In the music of MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded, but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he is like Brahms. The passion by which he is swayed is never, in its expression, ambiguous or exotic, his sensuousness is never luscious. It is difficult to think of a single passage from which that accent upon which I have dwelt the accent of nobility, of a certain chivalry, a certain rare and spontaneous dignity is absent. Yet he can be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply impassioned, with a sharpness of emotion that is beyond denial. In such songs as “Deserted” (o; “Menie” (o; “The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree,” “The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees” (o; “The Swan Bent Low to the Lily,” “As the Gloaming Shadows Creep” (o; “Constancy” (o; “Fair Springtide” (o; in “Lancelot and Elaine”; in “Told at Sunset,” from the “Woodland Sketches”; in “An Old Love Story,” from “Fireside Tales”: in this music the emotion is the distinctive emotion of sex; but it is the sexual emotion known to Burns rather than to Rossetti, to Schubert rather than to Wagner.

He had the rapt and transfiguring imagination, in the presence of nature, which is the special possession of the Celt. Yet he was more than a mere landscape painter. The human drama was for him a continually moving spectacle; he was most sensitively attuned to its tragedy and its comedy, he was never more potent, more influential, indeed, than in celebrating its events. He is at the summit of his powers, for example, in the superb pageant of heroic grief and equally heroic love which is comprised within the four movements of the “Keltic” sonata, and in the piercing sadness and the transporting tenderness of the “Dirge” in the “Indian” suite.

In its general aspect his later music is not German, or French, or Italian its spiritual antecedents are Northern, both Celtic and Scandinavian. MacDowell had not the Promethean imagination, the magniloquent passion, that are Strauss’s; his art is far less elaborate and subtle than that of such typical moderns as Debussy and d’Indy. But it has an order of beauty that is not theirs, an order of eloquence that is not theirs, a kind of poetry whose secrets they do not know; and there speaks through it and out of it an individuality that is persuasive, lovable, unique.

There is no need to attempt, at this juncture, to speculate concerning his place among the company of the greater dead; it is enough to avow the conviction that he possessed genius of a rare order, that he wrought nobly and valuably for the art of the country which he loved.