‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Nothing!’
‘Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense. You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I know how it moves me, but I cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.’
Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
‘Oh, do go on,’ I entreated him. ‘Tell me more about music. Do you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since you always play him.’
He smiled.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act of The Twilight of the Gods is not greater than a little song of Grieg’s.’
‘I see,’ I murmured humbly. ‘The Twilight of the Gods—that is Wagner, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Don’t you know your Wagner?’
‘No. I—’