but an intimate and ever-present ideal. He was a musician, yet he
looked out upon the visible world and inward upon the world of the
emotions through the transforming eyes of the poet. He would have
none of a formal and merely decorative beauty--a beauty serving no
expressional need of the heart or the imagination. In this ultimate
sense he is to be regarded as a realist--a realist with the
romantic's vision, the romantic's preoccupation; and yet he is as
alien to the frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as
he is to the academic ideal. Though he conceives the prime mission of
music to be interpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, in
its function as an expressional instrument, it shall concern itself
with essences and impressions, and not at all with transcriptions.
His standpoint is, in the last analysis, that of the poet rather than
of the typical musician: the standpoint of the poet intent mainly
upon a vivid embodiment of the quintessence of personal vision and
emotion, who has elected to utter that truth and that emotion in
terms of musical beauty. One is, indeed, almost tempted to say that
he is paramountly a poet, to whom the supplementary gift of musical
speech has been extravagantly vouchsafed.

He is a realist, as I have said--applying the term in that larger
sense which denotes the transmutation of life into visible or audible
form, and which implicates Beethoven as well as Wagner, Schumann as
well as Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Debussy as well as Strauss: all those
in whom the desire for intelligible utterance coexists with, or
supersedes, the impulse toward perfected design. But if MacDowell's
method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it
the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He occupies a middle ground
between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the
sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so