In Edward Macdowell ("Living Masters of Musics" Series, John Lane,
2s. 6d. net) Mr. Lawrence Gilman has given us a study of an American composer of high aims and honourable achievement. The conditions under which this series has been planned and executed preclude the possibility of entirely impartial or searching criticism; but Mr. Gilman deserves all credit for his abstention from irrelevant personalities, though it would perhaps have been kinder to omit the grotesque portrait of the composer from his own pencil which faces p. 8. For the rest, the value of this sympathetic essay is considerably impaired by the laboured preciosity of its style, the quality of which may be gathered from the opening sentence: "Among those music-makers of to-day who are both pre-eminent and representative the note of sincere and persuasive romance is infrequently sounded—or, if sounded at all, utters no contagious vitality of emotion, is without that vivid sentiment of enchantment which one recognises at once as of an impulse authentically and profoundly romantic." In view of this wordy exordium, it is an agreeable surprise that Mr. Gilman should have been able to compress his monograph within the compass of eighty pages.
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