des 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 s