 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL.
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
street, 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 watch-maker, 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 time-keeper.
I am sure he has ingenuity enough.”
“Pooh, child! he has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything
formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Warland's irregular
genius. “A plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that
ever I know 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 horse-shoes 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 seen
enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer
scattered into the surrounding gloom.
“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 horse-shoe 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 schoolfellow,
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 artizans, construct little windmills
on the angle of a barn, or watermills across the neighboring
brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy, as
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 distate 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 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
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 eye-sight 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 entrusted 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
now engaged upon.
“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have
known 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. Oh throbbing
heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come
vague and unsatisfied dreams, which will leave me spiritless tomorrow.”
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.”
“Wll, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old schoolfellow,
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 never can 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 wont 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
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 bycontact
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 townspeople 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 clock-work, 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
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
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 for ever.”
“Aha, young man! And is it so?” said the old watchmaker,
looking at him with just enough of 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
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
fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of their
visions
The night was now his time for the slow progress of recreating
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 hold 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
beside. 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 Warland
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
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 inutility 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 gaily 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
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 nor 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 spiritlike 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 etherealised 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
by the lines of lamp-light through the crevices of Owen Warland's
shutters? The townspeople 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 dullness—is
this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the
world's most ordinary scope! From Saint 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 townspeople 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 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
tomorrow night.”
The artist began to mutter some excuse.
“Oh, but it must be so,” quoth Peter Hovendon, “for the
sake of the days when you were one of the household. What,
Robert Danforth? We are making an entertainment, in our
humble way, to celebrate the event.”
“Ah!” said Owen.
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 watch-maker,
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 creation
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
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 ofhis 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
Albert 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
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 past 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
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, imagina
tion, 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 whole
life-sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared
to develope 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
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
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 finger
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 awe-stricken;
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
somewhat changed—“this butterfly is not now to me what
it was when I beheld it afar off, in the day-dreams 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
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
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 Peter 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
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 if 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 hast 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 for ever. And as for Owen Warland, he
looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and
which yet was 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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