The Power of Beauty in Hawthorne's " The Artist of the Beautiful"

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short novella "The Artist of the Beautiful," the artist Owen Warland is depicted as a child viewing a steam engine for the first time. The very sensitive youth faints in front of the mechanical monster. We could think Owen is overly sensitive at first, but there's another possibility: He's behaving just as he should. Owen, like the classic canary in the coal mine, detects dangers that no one else does.

This conflict is mostly shown to us through the world of labor, a notion established in the first scene when Owen's former employer, Peter Hovenden, walks with his daughter Annie by his old watch business, which is now in Owen's hands. Hovenden watches the young guy at work on something that appears to be too little and delicate for the elder's liking, sneering, "What can the fellow be about?" Unwilling to see Owen's work or "irregular talent" as anything more than a foolish and frivolous pursuit, father and daughter move on to the blacksmith, Robert Danforth.

The elderly man and his daughter leave, and we are led back inside Owen's shop, where the young man is repairing a mechanical butterfly. But this is no ordinary automaton, nor is it like the metal molded by the blacksmith for a specific purpose. Owen's art is intended to be merely aesthetic. But the distinction is evident from the start: the blacksmith creates what is useful and practical, whereas the artist creates what is beautiful but worthless.

Hawthorne suggests that both his and our societies favor the practical over the beautiful, which we may initially reject. After all, our society strives to conserve beauty in a variety of ways, from museums and symphonies to national and municipal parks. Our issue here is not only whether we endeavor to retain beauty in our environment, but if it is sufficient, and, more crucially, whether we truly understand what is beautiful.

Of course, beauty is challenging to describe, but it could be useful here to provide a practical, though imperfect, definition: This middengaard, a beautiful object in our world, carries some essence of the transcendent Beautiful, nothing less than an aspect of the Divine.
When it comes to our artistic endeavors, Hawthorne argues, "the acts of earth, however, etherealized by devotion or talent, are without worth, save as exercises and expressions of the soul." All conventional thought in heaven is higher and more melodic than Milton's song."

Reaching the Empyrean is challenging for an incarnated soul; therefore, we should hunt for signals of magic in the natural world first. This is what the artist in Hawthorne's novel does. Owen strives "to emulate the lovely motions of Nature, as illustrated in the flight of birds or the activity of tiny creatures" when he is young, according to the author, and he "occasionally produced pretty shapes in wood, usually representations of flowers and birds."

Owen, as a watchmaker, first endeavors to meet the demands of his society. He adorns clocks with magnificent patterns and flourishes, or melodious chimes, yet the clocks no longer work properly. Of course, this is unacceptable to Hawthorne's "steady and matter-of-fact kind of individuals who hold the conviction that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as a means of growth and success in this world or preparation for the next."

Most people acknowledge that "advancement and prosperity" are among the most important goals in our civilization. Our economy runs on what appears to be a steady flow of products and services, from new personal technology to new HBO melodramas. How can one sail this prosperous sea? Of course, with a well-paying job. Hawthorne is implying a flaw in the Protestant work ethic. It is debatable if this is the logical result of the ethic. However, he plainly implies that individuals who regard employment as "preparation for the next" life may conclude that all other types of activity are not only irrelevant but disrespectful.

While there is no significant critique of the notion that "to work is to pray," Hawthorne is aware of the consequence of failing to pursue the Beautiful. Throughout the novel, Owen is mocked by his neighbors, who come to think of him as insane, a term Hawthorne refers to as "this easy means of accounting for whatever goes outside the world's most commonplace span!" Indeed, our regular lives are dominated by occupations that are either practical or connected to them. The philosopher Josef Pieper contends that what we now consider leisure is not leisure, at least not in the sense that the ancient Greeks understood it, whose word for leisure, "skole," gave us our term for school. Leisure is a time to pursue greater goals, and many of the ancient Greek interests, such as poetry, philosophy, music, and mathematics, served as the foundation for our liberal arts and sciences.

For moderns, leisure simply breaks time, but for Pieper, this is only a period of rest given to assure the worker's productivity; these breaks serve labor, therefore corrupting a higher idea of leisure and contradicting Aristotle's exhortation that we work to enjoy leisure. But real leisure activities, such as seeking to produce the Beautiful, are undertaken for their own sake, not for any other goal.

Indeed, work and job-related activities dominate our lives. While there is evidence that the work week has shrunk, I have yet to encounter someone who believes they have a short work week. And as the number of hours has declined, so have other factors. For example, commutes are simply an accepted part of life. Or work-like responsibilities relating to the household and family, which may consume people's two days off every week.

While I am not proposing that we would all be better working only three days a week, it seems impossible that so much of our time should be spent on activities that are not directly related to the self and the family. Yes, employment provides for one's self and family, but it is money that does so. All of the hours of labor spent on tasks specific to specific jobs is not time spent engaged in personal pursuits such as reading, exercise, eating well, playing with one's children, or a variety of other things we might dismissively call hobbies, let alone having time for truly spiritual pursuits such as prayer and meditation. As much as the emotion is genuine, prayer and working are not comparable. Our world of work has unquestionably produced an enormous bounty, and while Hawthorne could not have been aware of such an explosion of goods and services as we now know, we can imagine the effect of life so devoted to pursuing the comforts of life that it eclipses other higher pursuits through his story.

This is demonstrated four times in the novel when Owen's creation is destroyed. Following the second devastation, the artist appears to abandon his endeavor to portray the Beautiful, turning to drink and celebration. "When the heavenly element of a man of genius is concealed, the earthly component takes a power the more uncontrolled," Hawthorne writes, adding that "Owen Warland made proof of whatever display of ecstasy may be found in a riot."

I believe we may be forgiven for thinking this applies to everyone, not just the sensitive artist, who had "lost the unwavering influence of a noble purpose" at this point in the tale, implying a link between the loss of that which is higher and seeking pleasure to alleviate the sorrow. For Owen, without the pursuit of the Beautiful, "there was a certain irksomeness of spirit... that was more unbearable than any imaginary sorrows and horrors that the misuse of alcohol might bring up."

Here, Hawthorne presents one of his most vivid descriptions of how the soul suffers when it is lost in the material world, a world that cannot provide any genuine solace to the spiritually lost, but which is frequently what the spiritually lost desire. Other works that tie pointless pleasure to a meaningless life come to mind. The characters in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are hardly human, yet they enjoy a multitude of pleasures to distract them from their existential torment. If someone tries to address their innermost misery for a second, there is meaningless sex, the "feelies," and soma to numb the pain.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published a few decades after Huxley, gave us flat-screen surround-sound television as best a man in the 1950s could picture it, as well as interactive melodramatic TV programs that sucked dumb viewers into its stupefying spell. And there was his idol, Guy Montag, trying to study the Bible while riding the subway but being continuously interrupted by a toothpaste advertisement blaring from the train's speakers.

In Bradbury's novel, Montag's maybe naïve optimism is evident in one revealing incident, when he dares to read Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" to his wife and her shallow friends, forcing one to burst into tears at the sadness she didn't know she possessed.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, is maybe more cynical. As we'll see, neither the joyful blacksmith Robert Danforth nor the bitter old watchmaker Peter Hovenden is likely to be influenced by a sight of the Beautiful. While Danforth is mainly a nice giant, he does make fun of the artist from time to time: "I put more main power into one stroke of my sledgehammer than you have expended since you were a 'prentice," he remarks.

Owen's dissatisfaction with this "man of iron" is evident, as he later reflects, "all my meditations, aims, enthusiasm for the beautiful... everything, all, appear so silly and idle whenever my path is crossed with Robert Danforth!" When Hawthorne subsequently adds, "ideas, which rise up in the imagination and look so wonderful to it... are smashed and ruined by touch with the practical," he makes the antagonistic relationship of beauty and utility clearly obvious. Unable to win this competition, the artist tries to be practical at one point by merely repairing clocks and watches without any creative embellishments, winning society's appreciation but worsening his sorrow. Of sure, the weight of culture is significant. And, while cultural standards can have a stabilizing and generally positive impact on individual conduct, they do not always. Ideas disseminated from a very small number of individuals through modern mass media, quickly and frequently, have a profound impact on our society, adding an oppressive weight to specific beliefs. Neil Postman describes how new technology, like a drop of dye in water, impacts all aspects of civilization. The dye does not merely float in the water but instead colors all of the molecules. As Postman claims, Europe after the printing press was not Europe plus the printing press. It was a different Europe back then. He wonders, "What is America after the computer?" We might ask, "What do we want from the internet?" This machine is nearly post-modern, leveling everything and practically adoring novelty. And it operates on the most practical of characteristics, efficiency, transferring any type of information rapidly and in large volumes.

While the Beautiful can be accessed on the internet, it is buried behind a sea of other things. Many of them are not attractive.
The ending of the story is unexpectedly cheerful, if bittersweet. Owen exhibits his magical, mechanical butterfly to Robert Danforth's family after finally succeeding in creating it via several attempts. Danforth has married the former love of Owen's life, Annie Hovenden, implying yet another loss for the "man of genius," who has lost out to the earthly, practical guy. Owen, on the other hand, is no longer represented.

He stores his invention in a wonderfully carved wooden box, which Danforth appears to respect more than the mystical wonder within, ever the practical guy who can regard both form and purpose, as long as the function is evident. The enchantment of the butterfly is revealed by its wonderful radiance, which changes depending on whose finger it touches. The bitter Hovenden, of course, appears to have the greatest detrimental influence on its emanations, a plain message that the beautiful cannot survive those who are antagonistic to it. The butterfly shines less brightly on Annie's and Danforth's fingertips, but something strange happens when it lands on their little child's finger.

Unlike before, this does not devastate the artist. As Hawthorne tells us with almost aching beauty, "He had caught a far other butterfly than this."

It must be lovely, or otherwise our activities, and our longing would come to an end when our workdays ended. But our longing continues. It frequently bothers us as a barely audible nagging whether we're watching television late at night or diverting ourselves with any of a plethora of "appliances of pleasure," to use a word from Poe. It is a longing for the unfathomable.

Our modern lives require beauty since there isn't much beauty to be found in the machine-like speed of modern life and society. We need to know that there is more to life than the mundane and that there is more to life than a sea of pleasures to calm us. Owen Warland could rest in the infinite delight of having touched the imperishable when he captured his "far other butterflies." And then he could grin, as we may when we encounter the Beautiful in this life and beyond.