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. It did not break through formalism by sheer violence of emotion, as did Beethoven's: it represents the rhapsodical revery of an inspired poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems strange or alien, and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to give them coherence, and unaware of their character until perhaps when, awakened from his dream, he naïvely wonders what they may have meant--you remember that he added titles to his music after it was composed. He put his dreams in music and guessed their meaning afterward." Of Liszt and Chopin: "To all of this new, strange music [the piano music of the Romantics] Liszt and Chopin added the wonderful tracery of Orientalism. The difference between these two is, that with Chopin this tracery developed poetic thought as with a thin gauze; whereas with Liszt [in his piano music] the embellishment itself made the starting-point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John Field." Of Wagner: "His music-dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furniture, must be considered the greatest achievement in our art."