Like the third, this fourth sonata is more of a 'bardic' rhapsody on the subject than an attempt at actual presentation of it, although I have made use of all the suggestion of tone-painting in my power,--just as the bard would have reinforced _his_ speech with gesture and facial expression." He aimed to make his music, as he says, "more a commentary on the subject than an actual depiction of it"; but the case would be stated more truly, I think, if one were to say that he has penetrated to the heart of the entire body of legends, has imbued himself with their ultimate spirit and significance, and has bodied it forth in his music with splendid veracity and eloquence.

He has attempted no mere musical recounting of those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at which he hints in his brief motto.

It would be juster to say, rather, that he has recalled in his music the very life and presence of the Gaelic prime--that he has "unbound the Island harp." Above all, he has achieved that "heroic beauty" which, believes Mr.Yeats, has been fading out of the arts since "that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place"-- that heroic beauty which is of the very essence of the imaginative life of the primitive Celts, and which the Celtic "revival" in contemporary letters has so signally failed to revive.

For it is, I repeat, the heroic Gaelic world that MacDowell has made to live again in his music: that miraculous world of stupendous passions and aspirations, of bards and heroes and great adventure--the world of Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdre the Beautiful, and Fergus, and Connla the Harper, and those kindred figures, lovely or greatly tragical, that are like no other figures in the world's mythologies.
This sonata marks the consummation of his evolution toward the acme of powerful expression.

It is cast in a mould essentially heroic; it has its moods of tenderness, of insistent sweetness, but these are incidental: the governing mood is signified in the tremendous exordium with which the work opens, and which is sustained, with few deviations, throughout the work.