It is impossible to conceive him attempting the musical exposition of such themes as kindled the imagination of Strauss when he wrought out his "Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," and "Till Eulenspiegel"; nor has he any appreciable affinity with the prismatic subtleties of the younger French school: so that there is little in the accent of his musical speech to remind one of the representative voices of modernity.
Though he has avoided shackling his music to a detailed programme, he has never very seriously espoused the sophistical compromise which concedes the legitimacy of programme-music provided it speaks as potently to one who does not know the subject-matter as to one who does.

The bulk of his music no more discloses its full measure of beauty and eloquence to one who is in ignorance of its poetic basis than would Wagner's "Faust" overture, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet," or Debussy's "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune." Its appeal is conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional crisis upon which the musician has built; and in much of his music he has frankly recognized this fact, and has printed at the beginning of such works as the "Idyls" and "Poems" after Goethe and Heine, the "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas, the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England Idyls," the fragment of verse or legend or meditation which has served as the particular stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works he has contented himself with the suggestion of a mood or subject embodied in his title, as, for example, in his "Woodland Sketches,"-- "To a Wild Rose," "Will o' the Wisp," "At an Old Trysting Place," "In Autumn," "From an Indian Lodge," "To a Water-Lily," "A Deserted Farm." That he has been tempted, however, in the direction of the compromise to which I have alluded, is evident from the fact that although his symphonic poem "Lancelot and Elaine" is built upon the 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," from the "Sea Pieces"; in "To a Water-lily," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in the "Winter" and "In Deep Woods" from the "New England Idyls"; in the "Marionettes" ("Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," "Villain," "Sweetheart"); in the Raff-like orchestral suite, op.