I have already dwelt upon MacDowell’s preoccupation with the pageant of the natural world.  If one is tempted, at times, to praise in him the celebrant of the “mystery and the majesty of earth” somewhat at the expense of the musical humanist, it is because he has in an uncommon degree the intimate visualising faculty of the essential Celt.  “In all my work,” he avowed a few years before his death, “there is the Celtic influence.  I love its colour and meaning.  The development in music of that influence is, I believe, a new field.”  That it was a note which he was pre-eminently qualified to strike and sustain is beyond doubt:  and, as he seems to have realised, he had the field to himself.  He is, strangely enough, the first Celtic influence of genuine vitality and importance which has been exerted upon creative music—­a singular but incontestable fact.  As it is exerted by him it has an exquisite authenticity.  Again and again one is aware that the “sheer, inimitable Celtic note,” which we have long known how to recognise in another art, is being sounded in the music of this composer who has in his heart and brain so much of “the wisdom of old romance.”  With him one realises that “natural magic” is, as Mr. Yeats has somewhere said, “but the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which is brought into men’s minds.”  We have observed the operation of this impulse in such comparatively immature productions as the “Wald-Idyllen” and the “Idyls” after Goethe, in the “Four Little Poems” of op. 32, and in the first orchestral suite; but it is in the much later “Woodland Sketches” and “Sea Pieces,” for piano, that the tendency comes to its finest issue.

Music, of course—­from Frohberger and Haydn to Mendelssohn, Wagner, Raff, and Debussy—­abounds in examples of natural imagery.  In claiming a certain excellence for his method one need scarcely imply that MacDowell has ever threatened the supremacy of such things as the “Rheingold” prelude or the “Walkuere” fire music.  It is as much by reason of his choice of subjects as because of the peculiar vividness and felicity of his expression, that he occupies so single a place among tone-poets of the external world.  He has never attempted such vast frescoes as Wagner delighted to paint.  Of his descriptive music by far the greater part is written for the piano; so that, at the start, a very definite limitation is imposed upon magnitude of plan.  You cannot suggest on the piano, with any adequacy of effect, a mountain-side in flames, or the prismatic arch of a rainbow, or the towering architecture of cloud forms; so MacDowell has confined himself within the bounds of such canvases as he paints upon in his “Four Little Poems” ("The Eagle,” “The Brook,” “Moonshine,” “Winter"), in his first orchestral suite, and in the inimitable “Woodland Sketches” and “Sea Pieces.”  Thus his themes are starlight, a water-lily, will o’ the wisps, a deserted farm, a wild rose, the