achieved that "heroic beauty" which, believes Mr. Yeats, has been
fading out of the arts since "that decadence we call progress set
voluptuous beauty in its place"--that heroic beauty which is of the
very essence of the imaginative life of the primitive Celts, and which
the Celtic "revival" in contemporary letters has so signally failed to
revive. For it is, I repeat, the heroic Gaelic world that MacDowell
has made to live again in his music: that miraculous world of
stupendous passions and aspirations, of bards and heroes and great
adventure--the world of Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and
Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdré the Beautiful, and Fergus, and
Connla the Harper, and those kindred figures, lovely or greatly
tragical, that are like no other figures in the world's mythologies.

This sonata marks the consummation of his evolution toward the acme of
powerful expression. It is cast in a mould essentially heroic; it has
its moods of tenderness, of insistent sweetness, but these are
incidental: the governing mood is signified in the tremendous exordium
with which the work opens, and which is sustained, with few
deviations, throughout the work. Deirdré he has realised exquisitely
in his middle movement: that is her image, in all its fragrant
loveliness. MacDowell has limned her musically in a manner worthy of
comparison with the sumptuous pen-portrait of her in Standish
O'Grady's "Cuculain": "a woman of wondrous beauty, bright gold her
hair, eyes piercing and splendid, tongue full of sweet sounds, her
countenance like the colour of snow blended with crimson."

In the close of the last movement we are justified in seeing a
translation of the sublime tradition of Cuchullin's death. This it is
which furnished MacDowell with the theme that he celebrates in the
lines of verse which I have quoted above. I believe that he was