He recognised, and he affirmed the belief, that racial elements are transitory and mutable, and that provinciality in art, even when it is called patriotism, makes for a probable oblivion.
I have already dwelt upon MacDowell's preoccupation with the pageant of the natural world.

If one is tempted, at times, to praise in him the celebrant of the "mystery and the majesty of earth" somewhat at the expense of the musical humanist, it is because he has in an uncommon degree the intimate visualising faculty of the essential Celt.

"In all my work," he avowed a few years before his death, "there is the Celtic influence.

I love its colour and meaning.

The development in music of that influence is, I believe, a new field." That it was a note which he was pre-eminently qualified to strike and sustain is beyond doubt: and, as he seems to have realised, he had the field to himself.