"I confess that it leaves me quite unmoved. No, not that exactly, for I am rather vexed at it for giving so many idiots an excuse for ranting and absurd sentimentality. Now just look at all these people on the beach. In reality they are bored to extinction, and enjoy the Boulevards infinitely more than this expanse of water, which is quite meaningless to them. And yet you have only to mention the word—the sea—and they will instantly turn up their eyes and start off repeating the lesson they have learned by rote about their rapture and enthusiasm, just like a musical box which grinds out a tune when you press a button at the top. The sea was invented by a few romantically inclined poets. But I deny that there is any truth in then rhapsodies; the sea is hopelessly monotonous, and monotony excludes the possibility of beauty or charm. One has at most the same feeling for it as for a mirror in which one sees oneself reflected. The sea is a blank page, which each one fills up with whatever he happens to have in his own mind, or, if you like it better, a frame into which one puts pictures of one's own imagining. I grant that you can dream by the side of the sea, for it does nothing to disturb your dreams or give them any particular bent or coloring. But can it give the impulse to thought and emotion like the eve-changing outlines of mountain and forest? Never! People with unsophisticated minds know that well enough. The population of the coast always builds its houses with their backs to the sea.
"As a defence against the storms," Wilhelm interposed.
"That may be. But that is not the only reason. It is because the sight of that eternal waste of waters, without a boundary line, without the variety or movement of life upon it, bores them, and they prefer to look out upon the country with all its expressive and varying outlines."
"But the expression which you see in a landscape—you put that into it yourself, by an effort of your own imagination. Forests and mountains are in themselves as inanimate as the sea."
"Quite so; but the landscape has features which remind us of something else, which play, as it were, upon the keyboard of our associations, and it thus calls up the pictures with which we proceed to enliven it. The sea does nothing of this, and the best proof of that is, that no painter has ever yet used the sea by itself for his model. Did you ever know of an artist who painted nothing but the sea?" "Yes, Aiwasowky."
"Who is he?"
"A Russian who paints extraordinary sea pieces."
"What! Only water—without shore, or people, or ships?"
"I remember a picture with absolutely nothing but water, only a spar, or a mast floating on it."
"There, you see!" she cried in triumph. "That broken mast is a trick of the artist. There lies the story. You instantly think of a wrecked ship; you see men, catastrophes, weeping widows and sweethearts; the spar becomes the central point of the picture, and you forget all about the sea. Moreover, the ancients, who surely had an eye for all that is grand and beautiful, they did not know either what to do with the sea. They were a magnificent race, healthy-minded realists—and kept strictly to the evidences of their senses without adding anything transcendental. The sea only appealed to their ear. Homer's adjectives for the sea are only expressive of sound—the resounding, the jubilant, the loud-rushing; hardly more than once does he allude to the gloomy or the wine-colored sea."