“A man is generally something different from the clothes he wears or the business he is occupied with; but when we do see a man identified with his clothes we think but little of him.  And so it is with music.  So-called Russian, Bohemian, or any other purely national music has no place in art, for its characteristics may be duplicated by anyone who takes the fancy to do so.  On the other hand, the vital element of music—­personality—­stands alone.  We have seen the Viennese Strauss family adopting the cross rhythms of the Spanish—­or, to be more accurate, the Moorish or Arab—­school of art.  Moszkowski the Pole writes Spanish dances.  Cowen in England writes a Scandinavian Symphony.  Grieg the Norwegian writes Arabian music; and, to cap the climax, we have here in America been offered a pattern for an ‘American’ national musical costume by the Bohemian Dvorak—­though what the Negro melodies have to do with Americanism in art still remains a mystery.  Music that can be made by ‘recipe’ is not music, but ‘tailoring.’  To be sure, this tailoring may serve to cover a beautiful thought; but—­why cover it? and, worst of all, why cover it (if covered it must be:  if the trademark of nationality is indispensable, which I deny)—­why cover it with the badge of whilom slavery rather than with the stern but at least manly and free rudeness of the North American Indian?  If what is called local tone colour is necessary to music (which it most emphatically is not), why not adopt some of the Hindoo Ragas and modes—­each one of which (and the modes alone number over seventy-two) will give an individual tonal character to the music written according to its rules?  But the means of ‘creating’ a national music to which I have alluded are childish.  No:  before a people can find a musical writer to echo its genius it must first possess men who truly represent it—­that is to say, men who, being part of the people, love the country for itself:  men who put into their music what the nation has put into its life; and in the case of America it needs above all, both on the part of the public and on the part of the writer, absolute freedom from the restraint that an almost unlimited deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us.  Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us.  What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man.  This is what I hope to see echoed in American music.”

Of MacDowell as a pianist, Mr. Henry T. Finck, who had known him in this capacity almost from the beginning of his career in America, has written for me his impressions, and I shall quote them, rather than any of my own; since I had comparatively few opportunities to hear him display, at his best, the full measure of his ability: 

“As he never felt quite sure,” writes Mr. Finck, “that what he was composing was worth while, so, in the matter of playing in public, he was so self-distrustful that when he came on the stage and sat down on the piano stool he hung his head and looked a good deal like a school-boy detected in the act of doing something he ought not to do.