'What does the Fantasia mean to you?' I asked him.

'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.