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.  We are always referred back to language as actually expressing an idea, when, as a matter of fact, language expresses nothing but that which its vital parallel means of expression, gesture and facial expression, permit it to express.  Words mean nothing whatsoever in themselves; the same words in different languages mean wholly different things; for written words are mere symbols, and no more express things or ideas than any marks on paper would.  Yet language is forever striving to emulate music by actually expressing something, besides merely symbolising it, and thus we have in poetry the coining of onomatopoetic words—­words that will bring the things they stand for more vividly before our eyes and minds.  Now music may express all that words can express and much more, for it is the natural means of expression for all animals, mankind included.  If musical sounds were accepted as symbols for things we would have another speech.  It seems strange to say that by means of music one could say the most commonplace thing, as, for instance:  ‘I am going to take a walk’; yet this is precisely what the Chinese have been doing for centuries.  For such things, however, our word-symbols do perfectly well, and such a symbolising of musical sounds must detract, I think, from the high mission of music:  which, as I conceive, is neither to be an agent for expressing material things; nor to utter pretty sounds to amuse the ear; nor a sensuous excitant to fire the blood, or a sedative to lull the senses:  it is a language, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language.  It appeals directly to the Seelenzustaende it springs from, for it is the natural expression of it, rather than, like words, a translation of it into set stereotyped symbols which may or may not be accepted for what they were intended to denote by the writer”—­a credo which sums up in fairly complete form his theory of music-making, whatever validity it may have as a philosophical generalisation.

In regard to the sadly vexed question of musical nationalism, especially in its relation to America, his position was definite and positive.  His views on this subject may well be quoted somewhat in detail, since they have not always been justly represented or fully understood.  In the following excerpt, from a lecture on “Folk-Music,” he pays his respects to Dvorak’s “New World” symphony, and touches upon his own attitude toward the case as exemplified in his “Indian” suite: