When he took up his work at Columbia his activity as a concert pianist had, of course, to be virtually suspended. With the exception of two short tours of a few weeks' each, he gave up his public appearances altogether until the year of his sabbatical vacation (1902-03). In December, 1902, he went on an extensive concert tour, which took him as far west as San Francisco and occupied all of that winter. The following spring and summer were spent Abroad, in England and on the Continent. In London he appeared in concert, playing his second concerto with the Philharmonic Society on May 14. He returned to America in October, and resumed his work at Columbia.
Meanwhile his composition had continued uninterruptedly. Indeed, the eight years during which he held his Columbia professorship were, in a creative sense, the most important of his life; for to this period belong the "Sea Pieces" (op. 55), the two superb sonatas, the "Norse" (op. 57) and the "Keltic" (op. 59), and the best of his songs-the four of op. 56 ("Long Ago," "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid Sings Light," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep"), and the three of op. 58 ("Constancy," "Sunrise," "Merry Maiden Spring"): a product which contains the finest flower of his inspiration, the quintessence of his art.[7] He wrote also during these years the three songs of op. 60 ("Tyrant Love," "Fair Springtide," "To the Golden Rod"); the "Fireside Tales" (op. 61); the "New England Idyls" (op. 62); numerous part-songs, transcriptions, arrangements; and, finally, the greater part of a suite for string orchestra which he never finished to his satisfaction: in fact, nearly one quarter of the bulk of his entire work was composed during these eight years. During this period, moreover, was published all of the music hitherto unprinted which he cared to preserve.
He had bought in 1896 a piece of property near the town of Peterboro, in southern New Hampshire, consisting of a small farmhouse, some out-buildings, fifteen acres of arable land, and about fifty acres of forest. The buildings he consolidated and made over into a rambling and comfortable dwelling-house; and in this rural "asyl" (as Wagner would have called it), surrounded by the woods and hills that he loved, he spent his summers from then until the end of his life. There most of his later music was written, in a small log cabin which he built, in the heart of the woods, for use as a workshop. Thus his summers were devoted to composition, and his winters to the arduous though absorbing labours of his professorship; in addition, he taught in private a few classes for which he made time in that portion of the day which was not taken up by his sessions at the university. During his first two winters in New York he also served as conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, and he was for a time president of the Manuscript Society, an association of American composers. Altogether, it was a scheme of living which permitted him virtually no opportunity for the rest and idleness which he imperatively needed.
In New York the MacDowells' home was, during the first year, a house in 88th Street, near Riverside Drive. Later they lived at the Majestic Hotel; but during most of the Columbia years-from 1898 till 1902-they occupied an apartment at 96th Street and Central Park West. After their return from the sabbatical vacation abroad they lived for a year at the Westminster Hotel in Irving Place, and for a year in an apartment house on upper Seventh Avenue, near Central Park. When that was sold and torn down they returned to the Westminster; and there MacDowell's last days were spent.
After he left Columbia in 1904, he continued his private piano classes (at some of which he gave free tuition to poor students in whose talent he had confidence). He should have rested-should have ceased both his teaching and his composing; for he was in a threatening condition. Had he spent a year in a sanitarium, or had he stopped all work completely and taken even a brief vacation, he might have averted the collapse which was to come. In the spring of 1905 he began to manifest alarming signs of nervous exhaustion. A summer in Peterboro brought no improvement. That autumn his ailment was seen to be far more deeply seated than had been supposed. There were indications of an obscure brain lesion, baffling but sinister. Then began a very gradual, progressive, and infinitely pathetic decline-the slow beginning of the end. He suffered little pain, and until the last months he preserved in an astonishing degree his physical well-being. It was clear almost from the start that he was beyond the aid of medical science, even the boldest and most expert. A disintegration of the brain-tissues had begun-an affection to which specialists hesitated to give a precise name, but which they recognized as incurable. His mind became as that of a little child. He sat quietly, day after day, in a chair by a window, smiling patiently from time to time at those about him, turning the pages of a book of fairy tales that seemed to give him a definite pleasure, and greeting with a fugitive gleam of recognition certain of his more intimate friends. Toward the last his physical condition became burdensome, and he sank rapidly. At nine o'clock on the evening of January 23, 1908, in the beginning of his forty-seventh year, he died at the Westminster Hotel, New York, in the presence of the heroic woman who for almost a quarter of a century had been his devoted companion, counsellor, helpmate, and friend. After such simple services as would have pleased him, held at St. George's Episcopal Church, on January 25, his body was taken to Peterboro; and on the following day, a Sunday, he was buried in the sight of many of his neighbours, who had followed in procession, on foot, the passage of the body through the snow-covered lane from the village. His grave is on an open hill-top, commanding one of the spacious and beautiful views that he had loved. On a bronze tablet are these lines of his own, which he had devised as a motto for his "From a Log Cabin," the last music that he wrote:
"A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun."
CHAPTER II
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS
In his personal intercourse with the world, MacDowell, like so many sensitive and gifted men, had the misfortune to give very often a wholly false account of himself. In reality a man of singularly lovable personality, and to his intimates a winning and delightful companion, he lacked utterly the social gift, that capacity for ready and tactful address which, even for men of gifts, is not without its uses. It was a deficiency (if a deficiency it is) which undoubtedly cost him much in a material sense. Had he possessed this serviceable and lubricant quality it would often have helpfully smoothed his path. For those who could penetrate behind the embarrassed and painful reticence that was for him both an impediment and an unconscious shield, he gave lavishly of the gifts of temperament and spirit which were his; even that lack of ready address, of social adaptability and adjustment, which it is possible to deplore in him, was, for those who knew him and valued him, a not uncertain element of charm: for it was akin to the shyness, the absence of assertiveness, the entirely genuine modesty, which were of his dominant traits. Yet in his contact with the outer world this incurable shyness sometimes, as I have said, led him into giving a grotesquely untrue impression of himself: he was at times gauche, blunt, awkwardly infelicitous in speech or silence, when he would have wished, as he knew perfectly how, to be considerate, gentle, sympathetic, responsive. On the other hand, his shyness and reticence were seemingly contradicted by a downright bluntness, a deliberate frankness in matters of opinion in which his convictions were involved; for his views were most positively held and his convictions were often passionate in intensity, and he declared them, upon occasion, with an utter absence of diplomacy, compromise, or equivocation; with a superb but sometimes calamitous disregard of his own interests.
MacDowell in 1892
Confident and positive to a fault in his adherence to and expression of his principles, he was as morbidly dubious concerning his own performances as he was uneasy under praise. He was tortured by doubts of the value of each new work that he completed, after the flush and ardour generated in its actual expression had passed; and he listened to open praise of it in evident discomfort. I have a memory of him on a certain occasion in a private house following a recital at which he had played, almost for the first time, his then newly finished "Keltic" Sonata. Standing in the center of a crowded room, surrounded by enthusiastically effusive strangers who were voluble-and not overpenetrating-in their expressions of appreciation, he presented a picture of unhappiness, of mingled helplessness and discomfort, which was almost pathetic in its genuineness of woe. I was standing near him, and during a momentary lull in the amiable siege of which he was the distressed object, he whispered tragically to me: "Can't we get out of this?-Do you know the way to the back door?" I said I did, and led him through an inconspicuous doorway into a comparatively deserted corridor behind the staircase. I procured for him, through the strategic employment of a passing servant, something to eat, and we staid in concealment there until the function had come to an end, and his wife had begun to search for him. He was quite happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the stairs and telling me in detail his conception of certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which he had had in mind while composing his sonata.
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