Of the specifically musical traits in which MacDowell exhibits the tendencies and preferences which underlie his art, one must begin by saying that his distinguishing quality—­that which puts so unmistakable a stamp upon his work—­eludes precise definition.  His tone is unmistakable.  Its chief possession is a certain clarity and directness which is apparent no less in moments of great stress and complexity of emotion than in passages of simpler and slighter content.  His style has little of the torrential rhetoric, the unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, though it owns something of his forthright quality; nor has it any of Debussy’s withdrawals.  One thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the “broad Shakespearian daylight” of Fitzgerald’s fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell’s writing.  He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line—­which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal:  that he never is.  His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive.  It is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty and character.  He had, of course, his period of crude experimentation, his days of discipleship.  In his earlier writing there is not a little that is unworthy of him:  much in which one seeks vainly for that note of distinction and personality which sounds so constantly throughout the finer body of his work.  But in that considerable portion of his output which is genuinely representative—­say from his opus 45 onward—­he sustains his art upon a noteworthy level of fineness and strength.

The range of his expressional gamut is striking.  One is at a loss to say whether he is happier in emotional moments of weighty significance,—­as in many pages of the sonatas and some of the “Sea Pieces,”—­or in such cameo-like performances as the “Woodland Sketches,” certain of the “Marionettes,"[9] and the exquisite song group, “From an Old Garden,” in which he attains an order of delicate eloquence difficult to associate with the mind which shaped the heroic ardours of the “Norse” and “Keltic” sonatas.  His capacity for forceful utterance is remarkable.  Only in certain pages of Strauss is there anything in contemporary music which compares, for superb virility, dynamic power, and sweep of line, with the opening of the “Keltic” sonata.  He has, moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expression.  Time and again he astonishes by his ability to charge a composition of the briefest span with an emotional or dramatic content of large and far-reaching significance.  His “To the Sea,"[10] for example, is but thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a tone-picture which for breadth of conception and concentrated splendour of effect is paralleled in