demand other than merely beautiful tones for their utterance.  Music, for instance, that would give us the emotion—­if I may call it that—­of a series of exploding bombshells could hardly be called ‘absolute music’; yet that is exactly what the opening of the last movement of the so-called ‘Moonlight’ Sonata meant to Miss Thackeray, who speaks of it in her story, ’Beauty and the Beast.’...  If this is abstract music, it is bad.  We know, however, that Beethoven had some poetic idea in his mind as he wrote this; but as he never gave the clew to the world, the music has been swallowed as ‘absolute music’ by the modern formalists”—­a comment which would apply almost word for word, with a change of names and titles, to a certain tumultuous and “unbeautiful” passage in MacDowell’s “Lancelot and Elaine.”  This passage is intended to express the rage and jealousy of Guinevere; but MacDowell has given no indication of this fact in his score, and only occasionally does the information find its way into the programme-books.  Yet in his own copy of the score he wrote a complete and detailed key to the significance of the music at every point.  Such are the ways of the musical realist!

He was, in an extraordinarily complete sense, a celebrant of the natural world.  His imagination was enslaved by the miraculous pageant of the visible earth, and he sought tirelessly to transfix some moment of its wonder or its splendour or its terror in permanent images of tone.  The melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow:  these things urged him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and sincerity.  His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in its voicing of that indefinable and evanescent sense of association which is evoked by certain aspects, certain phases, of the outer world—­that sudden emotion of things past and irrecoverable which may cling about a field at sunset, or a quiet street at dusk, or a sudden intimation of spring in the scent of lilacs.

But although such themes as he loved to dwell upon in his celebration of the magic of the natural world were very precious to his imagination, the human spectacle held for him, from the first, an emotion scarcely less swift and abundant.  His scope is comprehensive:  he can voice the archest gaiety, a naive and charming humour, as in the “Marionettes” and in the songs “From an Old Garden”; there is passion in the symphonic poems and in many of the songs; while in the sonatas and in the “Indian” suite the tragic note is struck with impressive and indubitable authority.