to which I have alluded, is evident from the fact that although his symphonic poem “Lancelot and Elaine” is built upon the frame of an extremely definite sequence of events,—­such as Lancelot’s downfall in the tournament, his return to the court, Guinevere’s casting away of the trophies, the approach of the barge bearing Elaine’s body, and Lancelot’s reverie by the river bank,—­he gives in the published score no hint whatever of the particular phases of that moving chronicle of passion and tragedy which he has so faithfully striven to represent.  “I would never have insisted,” he wrote in 1899, “that this symphonic poem need mean ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ to everyone.  It did to me, however, and in the hope that my artistic enjoyment might be shared by others, I added the title to my music.”

But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual inconsistency of the modern tone-poet in his attitude toward the whole subject of programme-music,[8] the tendency was neither a persistent nor determined one; and he was, as I have noted, even less disposed toward the frankly literal methods of which Strauss and his followers are such invincible exponents.  His nearest approach to such diverting expedients as the bleating sheep and the exhilarating wind-machine of “Don Quixote” is in the denotement of the line: 

  “And like a thunderbolt he falls”

in his graphic paraphrase of Tennyson’s poem, “The Eagle”—­an indulgence which the most exigent champion of programmatic reserve would probably condone.  In the main, MacDowell’s predilection for what he chose to call “suggestive” music finds expression in such continent symbolism as he employs in those elastically wrought tone-poems, brief or vigorously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with memorable vividness—­in such things as his terse though astonishingly eloquent apostrophe “To a Wandering Iceberg,” and his “In Mid-Ocean,” from the “Sea Pieces”; in “To a Water-lily,” from the “Woodland Sketches”; in the “Winter” and “In Deep Woods” from the “New England Idyls”; in the “Marionettes” ("Soubrette,” “Lover,” “Witch,” “Clown,” “Villain,” “Sweetheart"); in the Raff-like orchestral suite, op. 42 ("In a Haunted Forest,” “Summer Idyll,” “The Shepherdess’ Song,” “Forest Spirits"), and in the later and far more important “Indian” suite for orchestra ("Legend,” “Love Song,” “In War-time,” “Dirge,” “Village Festival").

[8] That MacDowell came later to realise the disadvantages, no less than the inconsistency, of writing programme-music based upon a detailed and definite programme and then withholding the programme, is indicated by this passage from a lecture on Beethoven which he delivered at Columbia:  “If it [Beethoven’s music] is absolute music, according to the accepted meaning of the term, either it must be beautiful music in itself,—­that is, composed of beautiful sounds,—­or its excuse for not being beautiful must rest upon its power of expressing emotions and ideas that