Mosses from an old manse
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