the contemporary literature of the piano only by himself.  Consider, also, the “Epilogue” in the revised version of the “Marionettes.”  The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation:  here is reflected the mood of one who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life, in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a controlling destiny than are the figures of his puppet microcosm.

[9] The revised version, published in 1901, is referred to.  The original edition, which appeared in 1888, is decidedly inferior.

[10] From the “Sea Pieces,” for piano.

[Illustration:  THE PIAZZA AND GARDEN WALK AT PETERBORO]

This scope and amplitude of expression are realised through a method at once plastic and unlaboured; his art has spontaneity—­the deceptive spontaneity of the expert craftsman.  It is not, in its elements, a strikingly novel style.  His harmony, per se, is not unusual, if one sets it beside the surprising combinations evolved by such innovators as d’Indy, Debussy, and Strauss.  It is in the novel disposition of familiar material—­in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his “free, instinctive application of the old in a new way”—­that MacDowell’s emphatic individuality consists.  Whether it is a more signal achievement to create a new speech through the readjustment of established locutions than to evolve it from fresh and unworked elements, is open to debate.  Be that as it may, however, MacDowell’s achievement is of the former order.

His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable.  An over-insistence upon certain formulas—­eloquent enough in themselves—­has been charged against it, and the accusation is not without foundation.  MacDowell is exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the diminished seventh.  There is scarcely a page throughout his later work in which one does not encounter this effect in but slightly varied form.  Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture.  I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent in colour.  His tonal web is always densely woven—­he avoids “thinness” as he avoids the banal phrase and the futile decoration.  In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric.  His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint—­poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance.  Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices.  Dissonance—­in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day—­plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method.  The climax of the second of the “Sea Pieces”—­“From a Wandering Iceberg”—­marks