Mosses from an old manse
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