He is, strangely enough, the first Celtic influence of genuine vitality and importance which has been exerted upon creative music--a singular but incontestable fact.

As it is exerted by him it has an exquisite authenticity.

Again and again one is aware that the "sheer, inimitable Celtic note," which we have long known how to recognise in another art, is being sounded in the music of this composer who has in his heart and brain so much of "the wisdom of old romance." With him one realises that "natural magic" is, as Mr.Yeats has somewhere said, "but the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which is brought into men's minds." We have observed the operation of this impulse in such comparatively immature productions as the "Wald-Idyllen" and the "Idyls" after Goethe, in the "Four Little Poems" of op.

32, and in the first orchestral suite; but it is in the much later "Woodland Sketches" and "Sea Pieces," for piano, that the tendency comes to its finest issue.
Music, of course--from Frohberger and Haydn to Mendelssohn, Wagner, Raff, and Debussy--abounds in examples of natural imagery.

In claiming a certain excellence for his method one need scarcely imply that MacDowell has ever threatened the supremacy of such things as the "Rheingold" prelude or the "Walkuere" fire music.