buoyancy and freshness, by an abounding vitality, by a constantly
juxtaposed tenderness and strength, by a pervading nobility of tone
and feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not brooding or
hectic, and it is seldom intricate or recondite in its psychology. It
is music curiously free from the fevers of sex. And here I do not wish
to be misunderstood. This music is anything but androgynous. It is
always virile, often passionate, and, in its intensest moments, full
of force and vigour. But the sexual impulse which underlies it is
singularly fine, strong, and controlled. The strange and burdened
winds, the subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir at times
in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, are not to be found
here. In Wagner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, as
Pater felt in William Morris's "King Arthur's Tomb," the tyranny of a
moon which is "not tender and far-off, but close down--the sorcerer's
moon, large and feverish," and the presence of a colouring that is "as
of scarlet lilies"; and there is the suggestion of poison, with "a
sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things." In the music of
MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the
infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their
interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow,
supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either
the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept
by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their
passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded,
but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he
is like Brahms. The passion by which he is swayed is never, in its
expression, ambiguous or exotic, his sensuousness is never luscious.
It is difficult to think of a single passage from which that accent
upon which I have dwelt--the accent of nobility, of a certain
chivalry, a certain rare and spontaneous dignity--is absent. Yet he