The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town's limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of men with a strict "Art for Art's sake" program, exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to be his follower. These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d'Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures equally well. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding, sonorous name.