racial elements are transitory and mutable, and that provinciality in
art, even when it is called patriotism, makes for a probable oblivion.

I have already dwelt upon MacDowell's preoccupation with the pageant
of the natural world. If one is tempted, at times, to praise in him
the celebrant of the "mystery and the majesty of earth" somewhat at
the expense of the musical humanist, it is because he has in an
uncommon degree the intimate visualising faculty of the essential
Celt. "In all my work," he avowed a few years before his death, "there
is the Celtic influence. I love its colour and meaning. The
development in music of that influence is, I believe, a new field."
That it was a note which he was pre-eminently qualified to strike and
sustain is beyond doubt: and, as he seems to have realised, he had the
field to himself. He is, strangely enough, the first Celtic influence
of genuine vitality and importance which has been exerted upon
creative music--a singular but incontestable fact. As it is exerted by
him it has an exquisite authenticity. Again and again one is aware
that the "sheer, inimitable Celtic note," which we have long known how
to recognise in another art, is being sounded in the music of this
composer who has in his heart and brain so much of "the wisdom of old
romance." With him one realises that "natural magic" is, as Mr. Yeats
has somewhere said, "but the ancient worship of Nature and that
troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places
being haunted, which is brought into men's minds." We have observed
the operation of this impulse in such comparatively immature
productions as the "Wald-Idyllen" and the "Idyls" after Goethe, in
the "Four Little Poems" of op. 32, and in the first orchestral suite;
but it is in the much later "Woodland Sketches" and "Sea Pieces," for
piano, that the tendency comes to its finest issue.