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In Front of a Friedrich Seascape with Capuchin Monk

Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim

It is a magnificent thing to gaze off into a boundless watery in infinite solitude by the sea, under a sullen sky; and this has to do with having travelled there, having to return, yearning to cross over, finding one cannot, and while missing all signs of life, nevertheless hearing its voice in the roar of the surf, the rush of the wind, the drift of the clouds, the lonely crying of birds: it has to do with an appeal from the heart, which nature herself rejects. All this however is not possible in front of the picture, and that which I should have found within the picture I found instead between the picture and myself, namely a claim that my heart made on the picture, and a rejection that the picture did to me by not fulfilling it, and so I myself became the Capuchin monk, the picture became the dune, but that across which I should have looked with longing, the sea, was absent completely. To come to terms with this strange feeling I listened carefully to the remarks of the various observers around me, and pass them on as appropriate to this picture, a backdrop in front of which there must always be activity, in that it allows of no response.

[A lady and gentleman approach, he apparently highly intelligent.

The lady looks in her program.]

LADY: Number two. Landscape. Oils. How do you like it?

GENT: Infinitely deep and sublime.

LADY: You mean the sea. Yes, it must be very deep, and the monk is indeed very sublime.

GENT: No, Frau War Minister. I mean the sensibility of our incomparably great Friedrich.

LADY: Is it so old that he too could have seen it?

GENT: Ah, you misunderstand. I mean Friedrich the painter. *Ossian’s harp is audible in this picture.¹ [They pass.]

[Two young Ladies]

FIRST: Did you hear that, Louise? That is Ossian.

SECOND: No no! You misunderstand. That is the ocean.

FIRST: But he said it was playing a harp.

SECOND: I see no harp. It is really quite grisly to look at. [They pass.]

[Two Connoisseurs]

FIRST: Grisly indeed. It’s all completely gray, as this man paints only the driest subjects.

SECOND: You mean, this man paints wet things very drily.

FIRST: I’m sure he paints them just as well as he can. [They pass.]

[A Tutoress with two demoiselles]

T: That is the sea at Rügen.

FIRST D: Where *Kosegarten lives.

SECOND D: Where the groceries come from.

T: Why must he paint such a sad air? How beautiful if he had painted an amber fisher in the foreground.

SECOND D: I’d like to fish up a beautiful amber necklace of my own somewhere. [They pass.]

[A young mother with two blond children and two gentlemen]

FIRST GENT: Magnificent! Only this man can express a soul in his landscape. What great individuality in this picture: the high truth, the solitude, the gloom of the melancholy sky. He certainly knows what he paints.

SECOND GENT: And paints what he knows, feeling and thinking and then painting.

FIRST CHILD: What is it?

FIRST GENT: It is the sea, my child, and a monk walking beside it and feeling very sad not to have a clever little boy like you.

SECOND CHILD: Why isn’t he dancing around in front of it? Why doesn’t he wag his head like the ones in the lantern shows? That would be even more beautiful.

FIRST CHILD: Is he like the monk that tells the weather outside our window?

SECOND GENT: Not exactly, my child, but he too tells the weather in a way. He is Oneness amid the All-encompassing, *the lonely center in the lonely circle.

FIRST GENT: Yes, he is the heart and soul and consciousness of the whole picture in itself and of itself.

SECOND GENT: How divinely inspired the choice of that figure is, nor merely a relative measure for the vastness of the scene, he himself is the subject, he is the picture, and as he appears to be dreamily lost in the view as in a sorrowful reflection of his own isolation, the enclosing sea, void of ships, which binds him like an oath, and the barren dune, as joyless as his own life, seem to be symbolically drawing him out again, like some desolate, self-prophetic plant of seashore.

FIRST GENT: Magnificent! To be sure. You are quite right. (To the Lady) But, my dear, you have said nothing at all.

LADY: Oh, I was feeling so at home with this picture, it is so touching, so genuine in its effect, but while you spoke it became just as obscure as when I went for a walk by the sea with our philosophical friends, hoping for nothing more than a fresh breeze and a sail, and for a glimpse of the sun and the thunder of the surf; but now it’s all like one of my nightmares and longing for my homeland in my dreams. Let us go on. It is too sad. [They pass.]

[A Lady and her Escort]

LADY: Great, inconceivably great! *It is as though the sea were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts.

ESCORT: You mean, as though the monk were immersed in them?

LADY: If only you weren’t always making jokes and disrupting everyone else’s feelings. Secretly you feel exactly the same way, but you like to ridicule in others what you revere in yourself. I said it is as though the sea were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts.

ESCORT: And Mercier’s Bonnet de Nuit and Schubert’s Glimpses of Nature’s Night-side, as well.

LADY: I can only answer with a parallel anecdote. When our immortal Klopstock wrote for the first time in his poems that “the rosy dawn was smiling,” Madame Gottsched said, when she read it, “What sort of a mouth does she have?”

ESCORT: Certainly none as beautiful as yours when you tell it.

LADY: What a bore you are!

ESCORT: Then Gottsched placed his mouth on hers in return for the bon mot.

LADY: And I’ll give you a night-cap for yours, you tiresome man.

ESCORT: I’d prefer a view of your nature from its “night-site.”

LADY: How vile!

ESCORT: Oh, if only we two were standing there like that monk.

LADY: I’d leave you and go to him.

ESCORT: And beg him to unite us in marriage?

LADY: No, to throw you into the sea.

ESCORT: And you would remain with the monk and seduce him and disrupt the whole picture, as well as all his “night-thoughts.” Women! In the end, it is you yourselves who destroy what you feel. By telling so many lies you eventually utter the truth. If only I were that monk, gazing so eternally alone at that dark, forbidding sea, which *lies before him like the Apocalypse! Then, dearest Julie, I would eternally long for you and eternally miss you, for this longing is the only fine emotion in affairs of love.

LADY: No, my dearest! In art as well! If you say such things, I’ll leap into the water after you and leave the monk all alone! [They pass.] All this while a tall, mild-mannered gentleman had been listening with signs of impatience. I stepped accidentally on his toe, and as though I had thereby solicited his opinion, he answered: “How fortunate it is that the pictures have no ears. They would have drawn their veils long ago. The public seem to suspect a lurking immorality, as though the pictures were pilloried here for some crime or other, which the viewers must guess at.” “But what do you think of the picture?”

“It pleases me to see that there are still landscape painters who attend to the wonderful conjunctions of season and sky, which produce such gripping effects even in the most barren of regions. But of course I would much prefer for the painter to have not only the right feeling but the talent and training as well to reproduce it faithfully; and in this respect he stands as far behind certain Dutch painters of similar scenes as he surpasses them in the mood of his conception. It would not be difficult to mention a dozen pictures where sea and shore and monk are better painted. The monk from any distance looks like a brown smudge, and if I had wanted to paint one at all, I would have stretched him out in sleep, or placed him kneeling in all the humility of prayer or contemplation, so as not to obstruct the view of the spectators, on whom the sea obviously makes a stronger impression than that tiny figure. If someone then decided to look about for inhabitants of the shore, he could still have expressed such opinions as some people here, with presumptuous familiarity, so loudly imposed on everyone else.”

These words so pleased me that I tagged along home with the gentleman and shall remain there indefinitely.

Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape

Heinrich von Kleist

from Berliner Abendblätter, October 13, 1810

A magnificent thing it is, in infinite solitude by the sea, under a sullen sky, to gaze off into a boundless watery waste. But this has to do with having travelled there, having to return, yearning to cross over, finding one cannot, and, though missing all signs of life, yet the very voice of life, in the roar of the surf, the rush of the wind, the drift of the clouds, the lonely crying of birds: this one does hear. It has to do with an appeal from the heart and a rejection, so to speak, from nature herself. This however is not possible in front of the picture, and that which I should have found within the picture I found instead between the picture and myself, namely an appeal from my heart to the picture and a rejection by the picture; and so I myself became the Capuchin monk, the picture became the dune, but that across which I should have looked with longing, the sea, was absent completely. Nothing could be sadder or more discomfited than just this position in the world: the single spark of life in the vast realms of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle. The picture with its two or three mysterious objects lies before one like the Apocalypse, as though it were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts, and since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no foreground but the frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off. Yet the painter has doubtless opened a new path in the field of his art; and I am convinced that, through his powers, a square mile of Prussian sand, with a barberry bush and a crow beruffled forlornly in it, would have the effect of an Ossian or a Kosegarten. Yes, were such a painting made with its own chalk and water, the foxes and wolves, I believe, would be set howling by it, which is doubtless the strongest praise one could lavish on this kind of landscape. But my own feelings about this wonderful picture are too confused; and therefore, before daring to speak them out more fully, I have tried to learn something by listening to the comments of those who, in pairs, pass before it continually from morning to night.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810

1 Asterisk and italics signify phrases used by Kleist.