instrument, it shall concern itself with essences and impressions, and not at all with transcriptions.  His standpoint is, in the last analysis, that of the poet rather than of the typical musician:  the standpoint of the poet intent mainly upon a vivid embodiment of the quintessence of personal vision and emotion, who has elected to utter that truth and that emotion in terms of musical beauty.  One is, indeed, almost tempted to say that he is paramountly a poet, to whom the supplementary gift of musical speech has been extravagantly vouchsafed.

He is a realist, as I have said—­applying the term in that larger sense which denotes the transmutation of life into visible or audible form, and which implicates Beethoven as well as Wagner, Schumann as well as Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Debussy as well as Strauss:  all those in whom the desire for intelligible utterance coexists with, or supersedes, the impulse toward perfected design.  But if MacDowell’s method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it the method of Schumann, or of Debussy.  He occupies a middle ground between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so frequently declined.  It is impossible to conceive him attempting the musical exposition of such themes as kindled the imagination of Strauss when he wrought out his “Heldenleben,” “Zarathustra,” and “Till Eulenspiegel”; nor has he any appreciable affinity with the prismatic subtleties of the younger French school:  so that there is little in the accent of his musical speech to remind one of the representative voices of modernity.

Though he has avoided shackling his music to a detailed programme, he has never very seriously espoused the sophistical compromise which concedes the legitimacy of programme-music provided it speaks as potently to one who does not know the subject-matter as to one who does.  The bulk of his music no more discloses its full measure of beauty and eloquence to one who is in ignorance of its poetic basis than would Wagner’s “Faust” overture, Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” or Debussy’s “L’Apres-midi d’un Faune.”  Its appeal is conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional crisis upon which the musician has built; and in much of his music he has frankly recognized this fact, and has printed at the beginning of such works as the “Idyls” and “Poems” after Goethe and Heine, the “Norse” and “Keltic” sonatas, the “Sea Pieces,” and the “New England Idyls,” the fragment of verse or legend or meditation which has served as the particular stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works he has contented himself with the suggestion of a mood or subject embodied in his title, as, for example, in his “Woodland Sketches,”—­“To a Wild Rose,” “Will o’ the Wisp,” “At an Old Trysting Place,” “In Autumn,” “From an Indian Lodge,” “To a Water-Lily,” “A Deserted Farm.”  That he has been tempted, however, in the direction of the compromise