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.
“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 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.