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The Artist of the Beautiful
Nathaniel Hawthorne
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and
emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement
from the window of a small shop. It was a projecting window; and on the inside were
suspended a variety of watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what
o'clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to the window with his pale face bent
earnestly over some delicate piece of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated
lustre of a shade lamp, appeared a young man.
"What can Owen Warland be about?" muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself a retired
watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man whose occupation he was now
wondering at. "What can the fellow be about? These six months past I have never come by
his shop without seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond his
usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know enough of my old business to
be certain that what he is now so busy with is no part of the machinery of a watch."
"Perhaps, father," said Annie, without showing much interest in the question, "Owen is
inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has ingenuity enough."
"Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better than a Dutch toy,"
answered her father, who had formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Warland's
irregular genius. "A plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to
spoil the accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out of its
orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp
anything bigger than a child's toy!"
"Hush, father! He hears you!" whispered Annie, pressing the old man's arm. "His ears are as
delicate as his feelings; and you know how easily disturbed they are. Do let us move on."
So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further conversation, until
in a by-street of the town they found themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith's
shop. Within was seen the forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof,
and now confining its lustre to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor, according as the
breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the
intervals of brightness it was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and
the horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire seemed to be
glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space. Moving about in this red glare and
alternate dusk was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque
an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if
each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon he drew a white-hot
bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of might, and was soon
enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the
surrounding gloom.
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"Now, that is a pleasant sight," said the old watchmaker. "I know what it is to work in gold;
but give me the worker in iron after all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a reality.
What say you, daughter Annie?"
"Pray don't speak so loud, father," whispered Annie, "Robert Danforth will hear you."
"And what if he should hear me?" said Peter Hovenden. "I say again, it is a good and a
wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and reality, and to earn one's bread with the
bare and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels
within a wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my case, and finds
himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at his own trade and fit for nothing else,
yet too poor to live at his ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money.
And then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being
such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?"
"Well said, uncle Hovenden!" shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep,
merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I
suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a
horseshoe or make a gridiron."
Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.
But we must return to Owen Warland's shop, and spend more meditation upon his history
and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably his daughter Annie, or Owen's old
school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would have thought due to so slight a subject. From the
time that his little fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate
ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally figures of flowers
and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden mysteries of mechanism. But it was
always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the
crowd of school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn or watermills
across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy as to think
it worth their while to observe him closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was
attempting to imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight of
birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new development of the love of
the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was
as completely refined from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the
fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular processes of ordinary
machinery. Being once carried to see a steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive
comprehension of mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick,
as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This horror was partly
owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron laborer; for the character of Owen's mind
was microscopic, and tended naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive
frame and the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that his sense of
beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness. The beautiful idea has no relation
to size, and may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic
investigation as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow. But, at
all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and accomplishments made the
world even more incapable than it might otherwise have been of appreciating Owen
Warland's genius. The boy's relatives saw nothing better to be done--as perhaps there was
ads:
not--than to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange ingenuity might
thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.
Peter Hovenden's opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed. He could make
nothing of the lad. Owen's apprehension of the professional mysteries, it is true, was
inconceivably quick; but he altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a
watchmaker's business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had been
merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his old master's care, Owen's
lack of sturdiness made it possible, by strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his
creative eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out, and he had
taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden's failing eyesight compelled him to relinquish,
then did people recognize how unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father
Time along his daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a musical
operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the harsh dissonances of life might
be rendered tuneful, and each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops
of harmony. If a family clock was intrusted to him for repair,--one of those tall, ancient
clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by measuring out the lifetime of many
generations,--he would take upon himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of
figures across its venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours. Several
freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker's credit with that steady and
matter-of-fact class of people who hold the opinion that time is not to be trifled with,
whether considered as the medium of advancement and prosperity in this world or
preparation for the next. His custom rapidly diminished--a misfortune, however, that was
probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Warland, who was becoming more
and more absorbed in a secret occupation which drew all his science and manual dexterity
into itself, and likewise gave full employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius.
This pursuit had already consumed many months.
After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out of the obscurity of
the street, Owen Warland was seized with a fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand
tremble too violently to proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon.
"It was Annie herself!" murmured he. "I should have known it, by this throbbing of my
heart, before I heard her father's voice. Ah, how it throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work
again on this exquisite mechanism to-night. Annie! dearest Annie! thou shouldst give
firmness to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus; for if I strive to put the very spirit
of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet!
If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will
leave me spiritless to-morrow."
As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the shop door opened and gave
admittance to no other than the stalwart figure which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire,
as seen amid the light and shadow of the blacksmith's shop. Robert Danforth had brought a
little anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the young artist had
recently bespoken. Owen examined the article and pronounced it fashioned according to his
wish.
"Why, yes," said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as with the sound of a
bass viol, "I consider myself equal to anything in the way of my own trade; though I should
have made but a poor figure at yours with such a fist as this," added he, laughing, as he laid
his vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen. "But what then? I put more main strength
into one blow of my sledge hammer than all that you have expended since you were a
'prentice. Is not that the truth?"
"Very probably," answered the low and slender voice of Owen. "Strength is an earthly
monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever there may be of it, is altogether
spiritual."
"Well, but, Owen, what are you about?" asked his old school-fellow, still in such a hearty
volume of tone that it made the artist shrink, especially as the question related to a subject
so sacred as the absorbing dream of his imagination. "Folks do say that you are trying to
discover the perpetual motion."
"The perpetual motion? Nonsense!" replied Owen Warland, with a movement of disgust;
for he was full of little petulances. "It can never be discovered. It is a dream that may delude
men whose brains are mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were
possible, it would not be worth my while to make it only to have the secret turned to such
purposes as are now effected by steam and water power. I am not ambitious to be honored
with the paternity of a new kind of cotton machine."
"That would be droll enough!" cried the blacksmith, breaking out into such an uproar of
laughter that Owen himself and the bell glasses on his work-board quivered in unison. "No,
no, Owen! No child of yours will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won't hinder you any
more. Good night, Owen, and success, and if you need any assistance, so far as a downright
blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I'm your man."
And with another laugh the man of main strength left the shop.
"How strange it is," whispered Owen Warland to himself, leaning his head upon his hand,
"that all my musings, my purposes, my passion for the beautiful, my consciousness of
power to create it,--a finer, more ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have no
conception,--all, all, look so vain and idle whenever my path is crossed by Robert Danforth!
He would drive me mad were I to meet him often. His hard, brute force darkens and
confuses the spiritual element within me; but I, too, will be strong in my own way. I will
not yield to him."
He took from beneath a glass a piece of minute machinery, which he set in the condensed
light of his lamp, and, looking intently at it through a magnifying glass, proceeded to
operate with a delicate instrument of steel. In an instant, however, he fell back in his chair
and clasped his hands, with a look of horror on his face that made its small features as
impressive as those of a giant would have been.
"Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,--
it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke--the fatal
stroke--that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over--the toil of months, the object of my
life. I am ruined!"
And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket and left the Artist
of the Beautiful in darkness.
Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of
a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by
contact with the practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character
that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the
incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and
be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.
For a time Owen Warland succumbed to this severe but inevitable test. He spent a few
sluggish weeks with his head so continually resting in his hands that the towns-people had
scarcely an opportunity to see his countenance. When at last it was again uplifted to the
light of day, a cold, dull, nameless change was perceptible upon it. In the opinion of Peter
Hovenden, however, and that order of sagacious understandings who think that life should
be regulated, like clockwork, with leaden weights, the alteration was entirely for the better.
Owen now, indeed, applied himself to business with dogged industry. It was marvellous to
witness the obtuse gravity with which he would inspect the wheels of a great old silver
watch thereby delighting the owner, in whose fob it had been worn till he deemed it a
portion of his own life, and was accordingly jealous of its treatment. In consequence of the
good report thus acquired, Owen Warland was invited by the proper authorities to regulate
the clock in the church steeple. He succeeded so admirably in this matter of public interest
that the merchants gruffly acknowledged his merits on 'Change; the nurse whispered his
praises as she gave the potion in the sick-chamber; the lover blessed him at the hour of
appointed interview; and the town in general thanked Owen for the punctuality of dinner
time. In a word, the heavy weight upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely
within his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible.
It was a circumstance, though minute, yet characteristic of his present state, that, when
employed to engrave names or initials on silver spoons, he now wrote the requisite letters in
the plainest possible style, omitting a variety of fanciful flourishes that had heretofore
distinguished his work in this kind.
One day, during the era of this happy transformation, old Peter Hovenden came to visit his
former apprentice.
"Well, Owen," said he, "I am glad to hear such good accounts of you from all quarters, and
especially from the town clock yonder, which speaks in your commendation every hour of
the twenty-four. Only get rid altogether of your nonsensical trash about the beautiful, which
I nor nobody else, nor yourself to boot, could ever understand,--only free yourself of that,
and your success in life is as sure as daylight. Why, if you go on in this way, I should even
venture to let you doctor this precious old watch of mine; though, except my daughter
Annie, I have nothing else so valuable in the world."
"I should hardly dare touch it, sir," replied Owen, in a depressed tone; for he was weighed
down by his old master's presence.
"In time," said the latter,--"In time, you will be capable of it."
The old watchmaker, with the freedom naturally consequent on his former authority, went
on inspecting the work which Owen had in hand at the moment, together with other matters
that were in progress. The artist, meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head. There was nothing
so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which
everything was converted into a dream except the densest matter of the physical world.
Owen groaned in spirit and prayed fervently to be delivered from him.
"But what is this?" cried Peter Hovenden abruptly, taking up a dusty bell glass, beneath
which appeared a mechanical something, as delicate and minute as the system of a
butterfly's anatomy. "What have we here? Owen! Owen! there is witchcraft in these little
chains, and wheels, and paddles. See! with one pinch of my finger and thumb I am going to
deliver you from all future peril."
"For Heaven's sake," screamed Owen Warland, springing up with wonderful energy, "as
you would not drive me mad, do not touch it! The slightest pressure of your finger would
ruin me forever."
"Aha, young man! And is it so?" said the old watchmaker, looking at him with just enough
penetration to torture Owen's soul with the bitterness of worldly criticism. "Well, take your
own course; but I warn you again that in this small piece of mechanism lives your evil
spirit. Shall I exorcise him?"
"You are my evil spirit," answered Owen, much excited,--"you and the hard, coarse world!
The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs, else I
should long ago have achieved the task that I was created for."
Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of contempt and indignation which
mankind, of whom he was partly a representative, deem themselves entitled to feel towards
all simpletons who seek other prizes than the dusty one along the highway. He then took his
leave, with an uplifted finger and a sneer upon his face that haunted the artist's dreams for
many a night afterwards. At the time of his old master's visit, Owen was probably on the
point of taking up the relinquished task; but, by this sinister event, he was thrown back into
the state whence he had been slowly emerging.
But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating fresh vigor during its
apparent sluggishness. As the summer advanced he almost totally relinquished his business,
and permitted Father Time, so far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and
watches under his control, to stray at random through human life, making infinite confusion
among the train of bewildered hours. He wasted the sunshine, as people said, in wandering
through the woods and fields and along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he found
amusement in chasing butterflies or watching the motions of water insects. There was
something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated these living
playthings as they sported on the breeze or examined the structure of an imperial insect
whom he had imprisoned. The chase of butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in
which he had spent so many golden hours; but would the beautiful idea ever be yielded to
his hand like the butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet, doubtless, were these days, and
congenial to the artist's soul. They were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through
his intellectual world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were
real to him, for the instant, without the toil, and perplexity, and many disappointments of
attempting to make them visible to the sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in poetry, or
whatever other material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the
beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his ethereal domain, and
crush its frail being in seizing it with a material grasp. Owen Warland felt the impulse to
give external reality to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have
arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of
their visions.
The night was now his time for the slow progress of re-creating the one idea to which all his
intellectual activity referred itself. Always at the approach of dusk he stole into the town,
locked himself within his shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch for many hours.
Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the watchman, who, when all the world should be
asleep, had caught the gleam of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland's shutters.
Daylight, to the morbid sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an intrusiveness that
interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and inclement days, therefore, he sat with his head
upon his hands, muffling, as it were, his sensitive brain in a mist of indefinite musings, for
it was a relief to escape from the sharp distinctness with which he was compelled to shape
out his thoughts during his nightly toil.
From one of these fits of torpor he was aroused by the entrance of Annie Hovenden, who
came into the shop with the freedom of a customer, and also with something of the
familiarity of a childish friend. She had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted
Owen to repair it.
"But I don't know whether you will condescend to such a task," said she, laughing, "now
that you are so taken up with the notion of putting spirit into machinery."
"Where did you get that idea, Annie?" said Owen, starting in surprise.
"Oh, out of my own head," answered she, "and from something that I heard you say, long
ago, when you were but a boy and I a little child. But come, will you mend this poor
thimble of mine?"
"Anything for your sake, Annie," said Owen Warland,--"anything, even were it to work at
Robert Danforth's forge."
"And that would be a pretty sight!" retorted Annie, glancing with imperceptible slightness
at the artist's small and slender frame. "Well; here is the thimble."
"But that is a strange idea of yours," said Owen, "about the spiritualization of matter."
And then the thought stole into his mind that this young girl possessed the gift to
comprehend him better than all the world besides. And what a help and strength would it be
to him in his lonely toil if he could gain the sympathy of the only being whom he loved! To
persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life--who are either in
advance of mankind or apart from it--there often comes a sensation of moral cold that
makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the
prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but
separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.
"Annie," cried he, growing pale as death at the thought, "how gladly would I tell you the
secret of my pursuit! You, methinks, would estimate it rightly. You, I know, would hear it
with a reverence that I must not expect from the harsh, material world."
"Would I not? to be sure I would!" replied Annie Hovenden, lightly laughing. "Come;
explain to me quickly what is the meaning of this little whirligig, so delicately wrought that
it might be a plaything for Queen Mab. See! I will put it in motion."
"Hold!" exclaimed Owen, "hold!"
Annie had but given the slightest possible touch, with the point of a needle, to the same
minute portion of complicated machinery which has been more than once mentioned, when
the artist seized her by the wrist with a force that made her scream aloud. She was
affrighted at the convulsion of intense rage and anguish that writhed across his features. The
next instant he let his head sink upon his hands.
"Go, Annie," murmured he; "I have deceived myself, and must suffer for it. I yearned for
sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that you might give it me; but you lack
the talisman, Annie, that should admit you into my secrets. That touch has undone the toil
of months and the thought of a lifetime! It was not your fault, Annie; but you have ruined
me!"
Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably; for if any human spirit could
have sufficiently reverenced the processes so sacred in his eyes, it must have been a
woman's. Even Annie Hovenden, possibly might not have disappointed him had she been
enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.
The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any persons who had hitherto
retained a hopeful opinion of him that he was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to unutility as
regarded the world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a relative had put
him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus freed from the necessity of toil, and having
lost the steadfast influence of a great purpose,--great, at least, to him,--he abandoned
himself to habits from which it might have been supposed the mere delicacy of his
organization would have availed to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a man of
genius is obscured the earthly part assumes an influence the more uncontrollable, because
the character is now thrown off the balance to which Providence had so nicely adjusted it,
and which, in coarser natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Warland made
proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked at the world through the
golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions that bubble up so gayly around the
brim of the glass, and that people the air with shapes of pleasant madness, which so soon
grow ghostly and forlorn. Even when this dismal and inevitable change had taken place, the
young man might still have continued to quaff the cup of enchantments, though its vapor
did but shroud life in gloom and fill the gloom with spectres that mocked at him. There was
a certain irksomeness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest sensation of which the
artist was now conscious, was more intolerable than any fantastic miseries and horrors that
the abuse of wine could summon up. In the latter case he could remember, even out of the
midst of his trouble, that all was but a delusion; in the former, the heavy anguish was his
actual life.
From this perilous state he was redeemed by an incident which more than one person
witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not explain or conjecture the operation on
Owen Warland's mind. It was very simple. On a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist sat
among his riotous companions with a glass of wine before him, a splendid butterfly flew in
at the open window and fluttered about his head.
"Ah," exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely, "are you alive again, child of the sun and
playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal winter's nap? Then it is time for me to be
at work!"
And, leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed and was never known to sip
another drop of wine.
And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and fields. It might be fancied
that the bright butterfly, which had come so spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with
the rude revellers, was indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that
had so etheralized him among men. It might be fancied that he went forth to seek this spirit
in its sunny haunts; for still, as in the summer time gone by, he was seen to steal gently up
wherever a butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contemplation of it. When it took
flight his eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy track would show the path to
heaven. But what could be the purpose of the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed,
as the watchman knew by the lines of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland's
shutters? The towns-people had one comprehensive explanation of all these singularities.
Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally efficacious--how satisfactory, too, and
soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dulness--is this easy method of
accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope! From St. Paul's days
down to our poor little Artist of the Beautiful, the same talisman had been applied to the
elucidation of all mysteries in the words or deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or
too well. In Owen Warland's case the judgment of his towns-people may have been correct.
Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy--that contrast between himself and his
neighbors which took away the restraint of example--was enough to make him so. Or
possibly he had caught just so much of ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an
earthly sense, by its intermixture with the common daylight.
One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary ramble and had just thrown the
lustre of his lamp on the delicate piece of work so often interrupted, but still taken up again,
as if his fate were embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the entrance of old Peter
Hovenden. Owen never met this man without a shrinking of the heart. Of all the world he
was most terrible, by reason of a keen understanding which saw so distinctly what it did
see, and disbelieved so uncompromisingly in what it could not see. On this occasion the old
watchmaker had merely a gracious word or two to say.
"Owen, my lad," said he, "we must see you at my house to-morrow night."
The artist began to mutter some excuse.
"Oh, but it must be so," quoth Peter Hovenden, "for the sake of the days when you were one
of the household. What, my boy! don't you know that my daughter Annie is engaged to
Robert Danforth? We are making an entertainment, in our humble way, to celebrate the
event."
That little monosyllable was all he uttered; its tone seemed cold and unconcerned to an ear
like Peter Hovenden's; and yet there was in it the stifled outcry of the poor artist's heart,
which he compressed within him like a man holding down an evil spirit. One slight
outbreak. however, imperceptible to the old watchmaker, he allowed himself. Raising the
instrument with which he was about to begin his work, he let it fall upon the little system of
machinery that had, anew, cost him months of thought and toil. It was shattered by the
stroke!
Owen Warland's story would have been no tolerable representation of the troubled life of
those who strive to create the beautiful, if, amid all other thwarting influences, love had not
interposed to steal the cunning from his hand. Outwardly he had been no ardent or
enterprising lover; the career of his passion had confined its tumults and vicissitudes so
entirely within the artist's imagination that Annie herself had scarcely more than a woman's
intuitive perception of it; but, in Owen's view, it covered the whole field of his life.
Forgetful of the time when she had shown herself incapable of any deep response, he had
persisted in connecting all his dreams of artistical success with Annie's image; she was the
visible shape in which the spiritual power that he worshipped, and on whose altar he hoped
to lay a not unworthy offering, was made manifest to him. Of course he had deceived
himself; there were no such attributes in Annie Hovenden as his imagination had endowed
her with. She, in the aspect which she wore to his inward vision, was as much a creature of
his own as the mysterious piece of mechanism would be were it ever realized. Had he
become convinced of his mistake through the medium of successful love,--had he won
Annie to his bosom, and there beheld her fade from angel into ordinary woman,--the
disappointment might have driven him back, with concentrated energy, upon his sole
remaining object. On the other hand, had he found Annie what he fancied, his lot would
have been so rich in beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the
beautiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for; but the guise in which his sorrow
came to him, the sense that the angel of his life had been snatched away and given to a rude
man of earth and iron, who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,--this was
the very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd and contradictory
to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear. There was nothing left for Owen
Warland but to sit down like a man that had been stunned.
He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery his small and slender frame assumed an
obtuser garniture of flesh than it had ever before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his
delicate little hand, so spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than
the hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might have induced a
stranger to pat him on the head--pausing, however, in the act, to wonder what manner of
child was here. It was as if the spirit had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a
sort of vegetable existence. Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk, and not
irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin to think him; for he was apt to
discourse at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books,
but which he had learned to consider as absolutely fabulous. Among them he enumerated
the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon;
and, coming down to later times, the automata of a little coach and horses, which it was
pretended had been manufactured for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that
buzzed about the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute steel springs.
There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled, and quacked, and ate; though, had any
honest citizen purchased it for dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere
mechanical apparition of a duck.
"But all these accounts," said Owen Warland, "I am now satisfied are mere impositions."
Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once thought differently. In his idle
and dreamy days he had considered it possible, in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery,
and to combine with the new species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that should
attain to the ideal which Nature has proposed to herself in all her creatures, but has never
taken pains to realize. He seemed, however, to retain no very distinct perception either of
the process of achieving this object or of the design itself.
"I have thrown it all aside now," he would say. "It was a dream such as young men are
always mystifying themselves with. Now that I have acquired a little common sense, it
makes me laugh to think of it."
Poor, poor and fallen Owen Warland! These were the symptoms that he had ceased to be an
inhabitant of the better sphere that lies unseen around us. He had lost his faith in the
invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which
rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his
hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them and
leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them more and more to the things of which
alone it can take cognizance; but in Owen Warland the spirit was not dead nor passed away;
it only slept.
How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the torpid slumber was broken by a convulsive
pain. Perhaps, as in a former instance, the butterfly came and hovered about his head and
reinspired him,--as indeed this creature of the sunshine had always a mysterious mission for
the artist,--reinspired him with the former purpose of his life. Whether it were pain or
happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first impulse was to thank Heaven for
rendering him again the being of thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility that he had
long ceased to be.
"Now for my task," said he. "Never did I feel such strength for it as now."
Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more diligently by an anxiety lest
death should surprise him in the midst of his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all
men who set their hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that life becomes of
importance only as conditional to its accomplishment. So long as we love life for itself, we
seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we
recognize the frailty of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there is a
vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while engaged in any task that seems
assigned by Providence as our proper thing to do, and which the world would have cause to
mourn for should we leave it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration
of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible
existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light?
Should he perish so, the weary ages may pass away--the world's, whose life sand may fall,
drop by drop--before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been
uttered then. But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit, at any
particular epoch manifested in human shape, has gone hence untimely, without space
allowed him, so far as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth.
The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves
his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The
painter--as Allston did--leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its
imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no irreverence to say so, in the
hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere.
This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as a proof that the deeds
of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and
manifestations of the spirit. In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious
than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left
unfinished here?
But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune, good or ill, to achieve the purpose of his
life. Pass we over a long space of intense thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting
anxiety, succeeded by an instant of solitary triumph: let all this be imagined; and then
behold the artist, on a winter evening, seeking admittance to Robert Danforth's fireside
circle. There he found the man of iron, with his massive substance thoroughly warmed and
attempered by domestic influences. And there was Annie, too, now transformed into a
matron, with much of her husband's plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen Warland
still believed, with a finer grace, that might enable her to be the interpreter between strength
and beauty. It happened, likewise, that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at his
daughter's fireside, and it was his well-remembered expression of keen, cold criticism that
first encountered the artist's glance.
"My old friend Owen!" cried Robert Danforth, starting up, and compressing the artist's
delicate fingers within a hand that was accustomed to gripe bars of iron. "This is kind and
neighborly to come to us at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had bewitched you out
of the remembrance of old times."
"We are glad to see you," said Annie, while a blush reddened her matronly cheek. "It was
not like a friend to stay from us so long."
"Well, Owen," inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, "how comes on the
beautiful? Have you created it at last?"
The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition of a young child of
strength that was tumbling about on the carpet,--a little personage who had come
mysteriously out of the infinite, but with something so sturdy and real in his composition
that he seemed moulded out of the densest substance which earth could supply. This
hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, and setting himself on end, as Robert
Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a look of such sagacious observation
that the mother could not help exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist
was disturbed by the child's look, as imagining a resemblance between it and Peter
Hovenden's habitual expression. He could have fancied that the old watchmaker was
compressed into this baby shape, and looking out of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he
now did, the malicious question: "The beautiful, Owen! How comes on the beautiful? Have
you succeeded in creating the beautiful?"
"I have succeeded," replied the artist, with a momentary light of triumph in his eyes and a
smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth of thought that it was almost sadness. "Yes, my
friends, it is the truth. I have succeeded."
"Indeed!" cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her face again. "And is
it lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?"
"Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come," answered Owen Warland. "You shall know,
and see, and touch, and possess the secret! For, Annie,--if by that name I may still address
the friend of my boyish years,--Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this
spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of beauty. It comes late,
indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, when objects begin to lose their freshness of hue
and our souls their delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most needed. If,--
forgive me, Annie,--if you know how--to value this gift, it can never come too late."
He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box. It was carved richly out of ebony by
his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a
butterfly, which, elsewhere, had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward; while
the boy, or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended from earth
to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the beautiful. This case of ebony
the artist opened, and bade Annie place her fingers on its edge. She did so, but almost
screamed as a butterfly fluttered forth, and, alighting on her finger's tip, sat waving the
ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in prelude to a flight. It is
impossible to express by words the glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which
were softened into the beauty of this object. Nature's ideal butterfly was here realized in all
its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but of
those which hover across the meads of paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed
infants to disport themselves with. The rich down was visible upon its wings; the lustre of
its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight glimmered around this wonder--the
candles gleamed upon it; but it glistened apparently by its own radiance, and illuminated the
finger and outstretched hand on which it rested with a white gleam like that of precious
stones. In its perfect beauty, the consideration of size was entirely lost. Had its wings
overreached the firmament, the mind could not have been more filled or satisfied.
"Beautiful! beautiful!" exclaimed Annie. "Is it alive? Is it alive?"
"Alive? To be sure it is," answered her husband. "Do you suppose any mortal has skill
enough to make a butterfly, or would put himself to the trouble of making one, when any
child may catch a score of them in a summer's afternoon? Alive? Certainly! But this pretty
box is undoubtedly of our friend Owen's manufacture; and really it does him credit."
At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew, with a motion so absolutely lifelike that
Annie was startled, and even awestricken; for, in spite of her husband's opinion, she could
not satisfy herself whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of wondrous
mechanism.
"Is it alive?" she repeated, more earnestly than before.
"Judge for yourself," said Owen Warland, who stood gazing in her face with fixed attention.
The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie's head, and soared into a
distant region of the parlor, still making itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in
which the motion of its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course with
his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it returned in a spiral curve and settled
again on Annie's finger.
"But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had
alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings.
"Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it."
"Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?" replied Owen Warland. "Alive? Yes,
Annie; it may well be said to possess life, for it has absorbed my own being into itself; and
in the secret of that butterfly, and in its beauty,--which is not merely outward, but deep as
its whole system,--is represented the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, the soul of an
Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I created it. But"--and here his countenance somewhat
changed--"this butterfly is not now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the
daydreams of my youth."
"Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything," said the blacksmith, grinning with childlike
delight. "I wonder whether it would condescend to alight on such a great clumsy finger as
mine? Hold it hither, Annie."
By the artist's direction, Annie touched her finger's tip to that of her husband; and, after a
momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from one to the other. It preluded a second flight by
a similar, yet not precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment; then,
ascending from the blacksmith's stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually enlarging curve to the
ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room, and returned with an undulating movement
to the point whence it had started.
"Well, that does beat all nature!" cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the heartiest praise that
he could find expression for; and, indeed, had he paused there, a man of finer words and
nicer perception could not easily have said more. "That goes beyond me, I confess. But
what then? There is more real use in one downright blow of my sledge hammer than in the
whole five years' labor that our friend Owen has wasted on this butterfly."
Here the child clapped his hands and made a great babble of indistinct utterance, apparently
demanding that the butterfly should be given him for a plaything.
Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover whether she
sympathized in her husband's estimate of the comparative value of the beautiful and the
practical. There was, amid all her kindness towards himself, amid all the wonder and
admiration with which she contemplated the marvellous work of his hands and incarnation
of his idea, a secret scorn--too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness, and perceptible
only to such intuitive discernment as that of the artist. But Owen, in the latter stages of his
pursuit, had risen out of the region in which such a discovery might have been torture. He
knew that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever praise might be
bestowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the fitting sentiment which should be
the perfect recompense of an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle,--
converting what was earthly to spiritual gold,--had won the beautiful into his handiwork.
Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of all high performance must be
sought within itself, or sought in vain. There was, however, a view of the matter which
Annie and her husband, and even Peter Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which
would have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily bestowed. Owen
Warland might have told them that this butterfly, this plaything, this bridal gift of a poor
watchmaker to a blacksmith's wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have
purchased with honors and abundant wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels of his
kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the artist smiled and kept the
secret to himself .
"Father," said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the old watchmaker might gratify
his former apprentice, "do come and admire this pretty butterfly."
"Let us see," said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with a sneer upon his face that
always made people doubt, as he himself did, in everything but a material existence. "Here
is my finger for it to alight upon. I shall understand it better when once I have touched it."
But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of her father's finger was pressed
against that of her husband, on which the butterfly still rested, the insect drooped its wings
and seemed on the point of falling to the floor. Even the bright spots of gold upon its wings
and body, unless her eyes deceived her, grew dim, and the glowing purple took a dusky hue,
and the starry lustre that gleamed around the blacksmith's hand became faint and vanished.
"It is dying! it is dying!" cried Annie, in alarm.
"It has been delicately wrought," said the artist, calmly. "As I told you, it has imbibed a
spiritual essence--call it magnetism, or what you will. In an atmosphere of doubt and
mockery its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled his
own life into it. It has already lost its beauty; in a few moments more its mechanism would
be irreparably injured."
"Take away your hand, father!" entreated Annie, turning pale. "Here is my child; let it rest
on his innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life will revive and its colors grow brighter than
ever."
Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger. The butterfly then appeared to recover
the power of voluntary motion, while its hues assumed much of their original lustre, and the
gleam of starlight, which was its most ethereal attribute, again formed a halo round about it.
At first, when transferred from Robert Danforth's hand to the small finger of the child, this
radiance grew so powerful that it positively threw the little fellow's shadow back against the
wall. He, meanwhile, extended his plump hand as he had seen his father and mother do, and
watched the waving of the insect's wings with infantine delight. Nevertheless, there was a
certain odd expression of sagacity that made Owen Warland feel as if here were old Pete
Hovenden, partially, and but partially, redeemed from his hard scepticism into childish
faith.
"How wise the little monkey looks!" whispered Robert Danforth to his wife.
"I never saw such a look on a child's face," answered Annie, admiring her own infant, and
with good reason, far more than the artistic butterfly. "The darling knows more of the
mystery than we do."
As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the
child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand
of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the
ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision
involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into
the sky and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture
of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as of stardust,
floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet. Then the butterfly came fluttering
down, and, instead of returning to the infant, was apparently attracted towards the artist's
hand.
"Not so! not so!" murmured Owen Warland, as if his handiwork could have understood
him. "Thou has gone forth out of thy master's heart. There is no return for thee."
With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance, the butterfly struggled, as it
were, towards the infant, and was about to alight upon his finger; but while it still hovered
in the air, the little child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp and shrewd expression in his
face, made a snatch at the marvellous insect and compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed.
Old Peter Hovenden burst into a cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith, by main force,
unclosed the infant's hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering fragments,
whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And as for Owen Warland, he looked
placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had
caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the
beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little
value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
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