He was a true patriot, proud and hopeful of his country and of its artistic future, but he could not brook the thought of patriotism used as a cloak to cover mediocrity in art....

He was one who worked steadily and courageously in the face of discouragement; who never courted by trickery or device the favour of the public; who never fawned upon those who might help him; who in his art kept himself pure and unspotted." "O that so many pitchers of rough clay Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!" THE MUSIC-MAKER CHAPTER III HIS ART AND ITS METHODS Among those music-makers of to-day who are both pre-eminent and representative the note of sincere romance is infrequently sounded.
The fact must be obvious to the most casual observer of musical art in its contemporary development.

The significant work of the most considerable musicians of our time--of Strauss, Debussy, Loeffler, d'Indy--has few essentially romantic characteristics.

It is necessary to distinguish between that fatuous Romanticism of which Mr.Ernest Newman has given an unequalled definition: the Romanticism which expended itself in the fabrication of a pasteboard world of "gloomy forests, enchanted castles, impossible maidens, and the obsolete profession of magic," and that other and imperishable Spirit of Romance whose infrequent embodiment in modern music I have remarked.
_That_ is a romance in no wise divorced from reality--is, in fact, but reality diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanticistic properties, it uses them not because of any inherent validity which they possess, but because they may at times be made to serve as symbols.

It deals in a truth that is no less authentic because it is conveyed in terms of a beauty that may often be in the last degree incalculable and aerial.
It is to its persistent embodiment of this valid spirit of romance that MacDowell's work owes its final and particular distinction.