The Artist of the Beautiful

“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.”

Immediately after an encounter with the burly, congenial blacksmith, Owen becomes discomposed “by contact with the practical” and strikes a fatal blow to his life’s work. The narrator then points out one of the main themes of the story; that reality and imagination are antithetical to one another, with one oppressing and keeping the other from creating.

“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.” 

Once again, the restraint of iron appears in the text. After his encounter with Robert Danforth, Owen strikes a crushing blow to his invention and enters one of those periods in which he begins to follow the expectations of society. Unlike with most people, who seem to thrive in the regularity, Owen’s doing so proves that he is feeling repressed and low. The church clock, a central part of community life that connects spirituality with the mundane, is an apt symbol representing that well-ordered life that oppresses him.

“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’s reactions to his critics is physical; here, he feels weighed down by Peter Hovenden’s attitude, and after these encounters, he sometimes makes mistakes that ruin his work. Hawthorne uses the word “sagacious” and “shrewd” many times to describe Peter’s actions or being, implying that he has mental discernment and judgment that Owen does not wish to recognize because it is rational and reasonable, but not conducive to the mental life of the artist. Here, Hawthorne introduces an element of the supernatural in the way Owen reacts to Peter.

“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.” 

When his obsession returns in full force after a dormant period in which his artistic spirit feels repressed by Peter Hovenden, Owen goes outside and “waste[s] the sunshine” (13). He chases butterflies, watches water insects, and examines living creatures. This is something the people cannot understand, because he is not working, adhering to societal norms, sticking to Puritan mores. But he is seeking his ideal in nature, so he can reproduce it in mechanical form. The narrator here makes a moral judgment about the artist, pointing out that in trying to capture the beautiful and render it understandable through a human lens, an artist also changes its essence irrevocably in a negative way. It loses something and is destroyed. Perhaps this, in turn, relates to the destruction of the butterfly at the end of the book. 

“‘I have deceived myself, and must suffer for it. I yearned for sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that you might give it to 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!’” 

Owen loves Annie. He believes she is different from her father and the young blacksmith. Later, however, when she comes to him so he can repair a thimble for her, she gives his work the lightest touch and breaks it. He realizes that he has been fooling himself to think that she could grasp the vulnerability of his creation and the ingenuity of his work. Though he longs for a companion in understanding, this small incident makes him feel alone in his obsession. Although we do not know what Annie feels at this exclamation, it is possible that Owen’s harsh treatment of her here closed any romantic possibilities for Owen. 

“It might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had come so spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with the rude revelers, was indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that had so etherealized him among men.”

Here, the butterfly appears again as a symbol. This time, a natural butterfly inspires the artist to go back to work and again take up the struggle between art and utility, passion and practicality. The butterfly represents change, hope, nature, rebirth, and the Christian soul, and is an apt metaphor for the protagonist’s state of mind as he attempts to rise out of the science-based, Industrial Revolution-influenced times in which he lives.

“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.” 

Despite Annie’s ruining his work months before, Owen still loves her and still sees her as his muse: “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” (18). In doing so, he makes his own situation pitiable, and suffers, as artists are wont to do. The author goes on to relate that, had he won Annie’s love, he may have eventually re-discovered her shallowness—or, he might have been so happy that his “beauty” would have been the richer and worthier for it. The news of her marriage to “a rude man of earth and iron” (18) stuns him, and he becomes sick for a while.

“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.” 

There is a fantastical, supernatural element in this story, and it manifests not just within the symbol of the butterfly but inside Owen Warland’s mind. He has ingenuity beyond what his peers see in him, and although he seems completely uninterested in mechanical innovations, he is influenced by them. When this quote appears in the narrative, Owen has begun babbling to others about the possibilities of mechanisms; what he once thought was possible but does not believe in anymore. It is a loss of faith, but somehow, he overcomes it to create the butterfly, which—if not a complete spiritualization of machinery, certainly resembles one. Additionally, this quote helps the text relate back to the story’s context, as the world is becoming more industrialized and machines do more and more work within society.

“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.” 

Over the course of this tale, Owen Warland suffers setbacks and then frenzied, obsessive periods in which he works on nothing but his butterfly. Eventually, he finds the strength—as he terms it—to continue the work yet again, after another awakening period. Hawthorne adds narrative tension and a truth about humanity with this quote, which comes just as he finally comes close to his goal: “It was his fortune, good or ill, to achieve the purpose of his life” (21). It also stresses the importance of the project to Owen; it is such a vital part of his existence that his life is secondary to its completion. 

“‘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.’” 

This is a complex image; a happiness so profound that it incorporates sadness into Owen’s happiness. The sadness, however, seems warranted, given the struggles Owen has gone through in order to see his dream to fruition. He has overcome all obstacles in his search for beauty, with no help from others. His isolation has allowed him to take lone credit for a masterpiece of technology; yet in making the butterfly his sole object for so long, he has alienated everyone around him. Here, Hawthorne subtly inserts the moral conflict that lies at the heart of the tale.

“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 saving the ample magnificence of its purple and gold-flecked 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.” 

First, Owen takes out a jewel box made from ebony and pearl, with a picture of a boy chasing a butterfly; but the butterfly has become a winged spirit and the boy has ascended to “win the beautiful” (23). The box in which the butterfly resides is a symbol in itself, of Owen’s success and how it has helped him break free of his earthly bonds. The butterfly emerges, “nature’s ideal,” (23) perfect, vibrant, rich and beautiful. This is the moment of art’s transcendence, when Owen reveals his creation to his muse. She, like the others, does not know how to understand it, but she can esteem it as an artistic object and acknowledge Owen’s ingenuity. 

“‘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!’” 

Annie, upon viewing the butterfly, asks repeatedly if it is alive: “Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it” (24). This is his earnest response; he has put so much of himself into it, that it is alive. It has been his obsession and his goal for so long that it has become an extension of himself and his sensibilities. He adds that the butterfly is not as it was when he imagined it “in the daydreams of my youth” (24). He makes a parallel here to his feelings for Annie, which changed when he realized that her perfection in his eyes was an illusion, a result of his love for her. An object of one’s affection is often better in dreams than in reality and that goes for art as well as people. 

“‘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.’”

When the butterfly created by Owen is transferred from Robert’s finger to Peter Hovenden’s, it droops and its gold and purple colors fade, and “the starry lustre that gleamed around the blacksmith’s hand became faint and vanished” (26), leading Annie to cry out that it is dying. In explanation, Owen offers the above quote, saying that the butterfly has imbibed a spirit that appears much like his own—one which suffers and loses life when exposed to a skeptic. Annie, in response, wants her child to have it, believing that the child’s innocence will restore the butterfly, but the child’s nature has been infused with too much of Peter’s. Not only does the butterfly alternate between brightness and dullness in the child’s hand, but the child ultimately destroys it.