[10] From the "Sea Pieces," for piano.

[Illustration: THE PIAZZA AND GARDEN WALK AT PETERBORO]

This scope and amplitude of expression are realised through a method
at once plastic and unlaboured; his art has spontaneity--the deceptive
spontaneity of the expert craftsman. It is not, in its elements, a
strikingly novel style. His harmony, _per se_, is not unusual, if one
sets it beside the surprising combinations evolved by such innovators
as d'Indy, Debussy, and Strauss. It is in the novel disposition of
familiar material--in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his "free,
instinctive application of the old in a new way"--that MacDowell's
emphatic individuality consists. Whether it is a more signal
achievement to create a new speech through the readjustment of
established locutions than to evolve it from fresh and unworked
elements, is open to debate. Be that as it may, however, MacDowell's
achievement is of the former order.

His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable. An over-insistence upon
certain formulas--eloquent enough in themselves--has been charged
against it, and the accusation is not without foundation. MacDowell is
exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the
diminished seventh. There is scarcely a page throughout his later work
in which one does not encounter this effect in but slightly varied
form. Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can
think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are
so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely
woven--he avoids "thinness" as he avoids the banal phrase and the
futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord