frame of an extremely definite sequence of events,--such as Lancelot's
downfall in the tournament, his return to the court, Guinevere's
casting away of the trophies, the approach of the barge bearing
Elaine's body, and Lancelot's reverie by the river bank,--he gives in
the published score no hint whatever of the particular phases of that
moving chronicle of passion and tragedy which he has so faithfully
striven to represent. "I would never have insisted," he wrote in 1899,
"that this symphonic poem need mean 'Lancelot and Elaine' to everyone.
It did to me, however, and in the hope that my artistic enjoyment
might be shared by others, I added the title to my music."

But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual inconsistency of the
modern tone-poet in his attitude toward the whole subject of
programme-music,[8] the tendency was neither a persistent nor
determined one; and he was, as I have noted, even less disposed toward
the frankly literal methods of which Strauss and his followers are
such invincible exponents. His nearest approach to such diverting
expedients as the bleating sheep and the exhilarating wind-machine of
"Don Quixote" is in the denotement of the line:

"And like a thunderbolt he falls"

in his graphic paraphrase of Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle"--an
indulgence which the most exigent champion of programmatic reserve
would probably condone. In the main, MacDowell's predilection for what
he chose to call "suggestive" music finds expression in such continent
symbolism as he employs in those elastically wrought tone-poems, brief
or vigorously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with
memorable vividness--in such things as his terse though astonishingly
eloquent apostrophe "To a Wandering Iceberg," and his "In Mid-Ocean,"