Christian lived at the piano, playing all the music that he could find in the house, and making up a strange, formless music of his own when there was nothing else to play. His ear, from the first, was faultless; if a poker fell in the fireplace he could tell you the pitch of the note which it sounded. He was always listening, and sounds, with him, often became visible, or at least reflected themselves upon his brain in contours and patterns. The wind at night, when it flapped at the windows with the sound of a sail flapping, seemed to surround the house with realisable forms of sound. The music which he played on the piano made lines, whenever he thought of it; never pictures. His mother, who did not seem to herself to know or care anything about music, sometimes described a little scene which the music he had been playing called up to her, but he could never see things in that way. When he played the first ballad of Chopin, for instance, she saw two lovers, sheltering under trees in a wood, out of the rain which was falling around them, and she followed their emotions, as the music interpreted them to her. But he did not understand music like that; what was mathematical in it he saw as pattern, but the emotion came to him in an almost equally abstract way, as musical emotion, beginning and ending in the music itself, and not needing to have any of one's own feelings put into it. It was the music itself that cried and wept, and tore one; the passions of abstract sound.
For, he knew from the beginning, the soul of music is something more than the soul of humanity expressing itself in melody, and the life of music something more than an audible dramatisation of human life. Beethoven, let us say, is angry with the world, Schumann dreams about the roots of a flower; and they sit down to make music under that impulse. Well, the anger will be there, and the flower coming up out of the earth, but the music itself will have forgotten both the dream and the feeling, the moment it begins to speak articulately in sound. It will have its own message, as well as its own language, and you will not be able to write down that message in words, any more than your words can be translated into that language.