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