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p In order to acquaint the reader more closely with our author’s arguments, we shall set out here in detail his objections to some of the “reproaches” which the idealists levelled against the beautiful in reality.

p The idealist aestheticians said that inanimate nature did not care about the beauty of its works and that therefore they could not be as fine as the creation of an artist who was consciously striving to realise his ideal of beauty. Chernyshevsky objects to this that the merit of a premeditated work will be higher than that of an unpremeditated one only when the powers of their producers are equal. But the powers of man are far weaker than 243 those of nature; therefore his creations are rough, crude and clumsy by comparison with the works of nature. Moreover, beauty is unpremeditated only in inanimate nature: animals care about their appearance; some of them constantly preen themselves; as for man, beauty is very rarely unpremeditated in him; there are few people who do not care about their appearance. It cannot be said that nature does not strive to produce the beautiful. It never strives consciously, of course, but "if we understand the beautiful as fullness of life, we must admit that the striving for life that permeates all of nature is at the same time a striving to produce the beautiful”. The fact that this striving is not conscious does not prevent it from being real, just as the fact that striving for symmetry is not conscious does not prevent the two halves of a leaf being symmetrical.

p The beautiful in art is premeditated. But here too there are exceptions to the general rule. An artist frequently acts unconsciously. Even when he is guided by a conscious intention, he does not always care about beauty alone, because apart from the striving for beauty he also has other strivings. There is no doubt, however, that there is more premeditation in works of art than in the creations of nature. "But, while it benefits from premeditation, on the one hand, art suffers from it, on the other. The point is that an artist who is striving to conceive the idea of the beautiful, very often conceives something that is not beautiful at all: it is not enough to want the beautiful, one must be able to comprehend it in its true form, and how often artists are mistaken in their conception of beauty! How often they are decieved even by their artistic instinct, not only by their reflective concepts which are for the most part one-sided! In art all the shortcomings of individuality are inseparable from premeditation."

p It is also said that the beautiful is rarely found in reality. Chernyshevsky disagrees with this too. According to him, there is far more beauty in reality than the German aestheticians maintain. For example, there are very many beautiful and majestic landscapes in nature, and in some countries one finds them at every turn: places such as Switzerland, Italy, even Finland, the Crimea, the banks of the Dnieper and the Volga. The majestic is comparatively rarely found in the life of man. Yet there have always been many people whose whole lives have been a continuous series of sublime feelings and deeds. And we must not complain that there are few beautiful moments in our life, because it is up to us ourselves to fill it with great and beautiful things.

“Life is empty and colourless only in the case of colourless people who talk about feelings and needs, without in fact being capable of having any special feelings and needs apart from the need to pose.” Finally, beauty, that is, so-called feminine beauty,

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244 is by no means a rare phenomenon, "there are just as many people with beautiful faces as there are people who are kind, clever, etc.” And in any case the beautiful is found more often in reality than in art. A great many truly dramatic events take place in life, but there are very few truly beautiful tragedies or dramas: only a few dozen in the whole of West European literature, and only two in Russia—Boris Godunov and Scenes from Chivalrous Times.^^79^^ Beautiful landscapes are encountered more frequently in nature than in painting.

p Works of sculpture, statues, are far inferior to living people. "It has become an axiom,” our author says, "that the beauty of form of Venus de Medici or Venus de Milo, Apollo Belvedere, and so on, is of a much higher order than the beauty of living people. In St. Petersburg there is no Venus de Medici and no Apollo Belvedere, but there are works by Canova; therefore, we, inhabitants of St. Petersburg, may take the liberty of judging to a certain extent the beauty of works of sculpture. We must say that in St. Petersburg there is not a single statue which in beauty of facial features is not far inferior to a countless number of living people, and that one need only walk along a busy street to encounter several such faces.” Cliernyshevsky thinks that most people of independent mind will agree with him on this. He does not regard his personal impression as proof, however. He quotes other, “stronger” proof. In art execution is always far below the ideal that exists in the artist’s imagination. But the artist’s ideal cannot be above the people lie encounters in life: the creative Imagination only combines the impressions that reality makes on us; "the imagination only diversifies an object and magnifies it extensively, but we cannot imagine anything more intense than that which we have observed or experienced”. It may perhaps be said that in combining the impressions received from experience, the artist’s creative imagination could unite in one face features belonging to different faces. Ghernyshevsky doubts this too. He says: "It is doubtful, firstly, whether there is any need to do so and, secondly, whether the imagination is capable of combining in a single face these features that belong to different faces.” Eclecticism never leads to anything good and once an artist is infected by it he reveals his lack of taste or his inability to find a truly beautiful face for his model.

p This would appear to be contradicted by certain well-known facts from the history of art. Who has not heard of Raphael’s complaint about ’the "poo? harvest" of beautiful women in Italy? Chernyshevsky has not forgotten it. Only he thinks that it was not. provoked by the lack of beautiful women there. The point is that Raphael "was looking for the most beautiful woman, and there is of course only one most beautiful woman in the whole 245 world,” he says, "and where is she to be found? There is always very little of that which is excellent in its kind for the very simple reason that if there were a lot of it we would again divide it into classes and call that which is found only in two OF three individuals excellent; the rest would be called second-rate. And it must be said, in general, that the idea that the beautiful is rarely found in reality is based on a confusion of the concepts of ’very’ and ’the most’: there are many very majestic rivers, but only one that is the most majestic, of course; there are many great generals, but only one of them was the most great".

The dreams of the imagination are always far inferior in terms of beauty to that which is reality. Recognition of this, in Ghernyshevsky’s opinion, is "one of the most essential differences between the old-fashioned world outlook, under the influence of which the transcendental systems of science arose, and the present view of nature and life".