Feelings Before Friedrich's Seascape by Heinrich von Kleist

A review of Caspar David Friedrich's "The Monk by the Sea" which appeared in Kleist's newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter

A magnificent thing it is, in an endless solitude by the seashore, beneath a sullen sky, to gaze upon a boundless watery waste. But this has to do with having traveled there, having to return, yearning to cross over, finding that one cannot, and, lacking all there is in life, nevertheless hearing in the roar of the surf, in the rush of the wind, in the drift of the clouds, in the lonely cry of birds, the very voice of life. It has to do with an aspiration of heart, so to speak, and its rejection by nature itself.  Before the picture, however, this is impossible, and that which I should have found within the picture I found instead between the picture and myself, namely, my heart’s aspiration for the picture and my rejection by that picture; and so I myself became the monk, the picture the dune, but that which I should have gazed at with longing, the sea, was completely absent. Nothing can be sadder and more disconcerting than this position in the world: the only spark of life in the vast realm of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle. The picture, with its two or three mysterious elements, stands before one like the Apocalypse, as if it were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts,¹ and since, in its boundlessness and uniformity, it has no foreground but its frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids were peeled away. Nevertheless, the painter has undoubtedly broken new ground in the field of his art; and I am convinced that, with the power of his intellect, were he to depict a square mile of Brandenburg sand, with a barberry bush on which single crow preens itself, then he would have effect of an Ossian or a Kosegarten.² Yes, were such a landscape painted from the very chalk and water found within it; foxes and wolves would, I believe, be set howling: doubtless the strongest praise one could lavish on a landscape painting. – But my own feelings about this wonderful picture are too confused; therefore, before I dare to express them more fully, I have resolved to educate myself through the comments of those who, in pairs, pass by the picture from morning to evening.

1. Edward Young (1683-1765) was an English poet who exercised an enormous influence on the subsequent Romantic movement. His long poem in blank-verse The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, referenced by Kleist here, was illustrated by William Blake and served as a model for Novalis’ Hymns to the Night.

2. Ossian was a legendary bard in Gaelic mythology under whose name the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796) wrote an enormously popular cycle of epic poems. Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758-1818) was a poet and Lutheran pastor who wrote melancholy lyrics about his native Baltic Sea landscape.