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It is now the reign of the brutal, the realistic, the impossible in music. Formal excellence is neglected and programme-music has reduced art to the level of an anecdote. Chopin neither preaches nor paints, yet his art is decorative and dramatic though in the climate of the ideal.

In the Fourth Symphony in G major, the last part alone is sung, and is of an almost humorous character, being a sort of childish description of the joys of Paradise. In spite of appearances, Mahler refuses to connect these choral symphonies with programme-music.

The spear, the arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to programme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had ever justified this slight perversion of aim, this excess almost corruption of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well.

There can be little question of the success which has attended his application of this principle to his own performances in this field, nor of the skill and tact with which he has reshaped the form in accordance with his chosen poetic or dramatic scheme. His four sonatas belong undeniably, though with a variously strict allegiance, to the domain of programme-music.

Whether this striving after nerve-shattering combinations is a dangerous tendency is quite beside the mark. Let us register the fact. Beginning in the path made by Brahms, he soon came under the influence of Liszt, and we were given a chaplet of tone-poems, sheer programme-music, but cast in a bigger and more flexible mould than the thrice-familiar Liszt pattern.

It is in the same boar hunt: And fiery with invasive eyes, And bristling with intolerable hair, Plunged; Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers.

No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance without form; but that form will be inherent in the idea, and there will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas in the world." Concerning programme-music he wrote at length. "In my opinion," he says in one of his lectures, "the battle over what music can express and what it cannot express has been carried on wrong lines.

The interlocking passages which have become so prevalent in modern music we find in his compositions dating from 1835." Of Schumann he said happily: "His music is not avowed programme-music; neither is it, as was much of Schubert's, pure delight in beautiful sound.

But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual inconsistency of the modern tone-poet in his attitude toward the whole subject of programme-music, 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.

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.