How does Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrate faith in The Artist of the Beautiful?

Faith in “The Artist of the Beautiful''

Owen Warland is the possessor of wondrously inconceivable ideas “which grow

up within the imagination.'' A watchmaker by occupation, he is expected to be practical

and concerned with utility. But his ideas are directly in contrast with the essence of

practicality. Unlike the Greek idea of combining the useful with the beautiful, his is an

idea of beauty in a form so pure that it cannot be tainted by the Practical. He is a scientist

concerned with nature and deeply puzzled by mechanics, but fundamentally he is an

artist, driven to create for the sake of creation alone, driven not by fact but by faith.

To the misfortune of the townspeople, Owen is concerned not with keeping

accurate time, but with beauty and minute detail. He cares little for fixing watches when

he could be making improvements on them and giving them melodies. He is fascinated

by the mystical workings of nature and motion. He yearns for knowledge of that which is

larger than him. His is a pure aesthetic, and his desire is to replicate natural beauty. This

he strives to embody in a replica of the beautifully delicate butterfly which is both natural

and unnatural.

The town sees him as a nuisance, and he is generally considered to be crazy.

Certainly he is inflicted with obsession; he is obsessed with impossible and impractical

pursuits. Yet despite the resistance and scoffing with which he is presented, he maintains

faith in his idea of spiritualization, of endowing a mechanical creation with a sort of life.

He wants to be the artist not only of the beautiful, but of the natural and enigmatically
incomprehensible. He wants to make something so great that man cannot even begin to

fathom its design.

His lofty goals are foreign to his acquaintances. The antithesis of his personality

manifests itself in the character of Peter Hovenden, an older man to whom he was

apprenticed. Acquiring his shop, he supposedly learned from Peter so as to imitate him,

but instead the ideas, in fact the very essence, of Peter repel him and drive him further

into his perhaps unworthy pursuit. Owen's ambition is impractical not only because it

serves no practical purpose, but also because of the excessive effort which Owen exerts.

As Owen is compelled by the beautiful, Peter's raison d’être is practicality. Unlike Peter,

Owen is not at all concerned with the practical. While a watchmaker is supposed to be

practical, considering beauty secondary if at all, Owen is wholly compelled by his desire

to create the beautiful. Owen's dream is ``exposed to be shattered and annihilated by

contact with the Practical.'' For him the beautiful is pure, with vulnerability and without

utility; those who fail to recognize beauty are ``Evil Spirits'' attempting to infect him with

the disease of skepticism. And to some extent they do succeed in corrupting him with this

malignancy.

The short story traces the progress and numerous setbacks of his endeavor.

Essentially, any intrusion on the part of the outside world, any distraction from his task,

disturbs Owen's advancement. Every scene that presents another person in his shop is

destined to end in failure. It is interesting to note that while other people catalyze the

demise of the art, until the very end, it is always Owen who is actively destroying his

work. Talking to Robert, a blacksmith who represents brute force, Owen begins to doubt

his cause. In Robert's presence, he and his ideal are reduced, diminutive to objects of
ridicule. Then, having his concentration disturbed and forgetting the delicacy and

precision necessary to his art, Owen shatters the object of his devotion and dedication.

This is a devastating moment, the first of many in a path of frustration and

acknowledgement of futility. This is the initial intrusion of doubt into Owen's self-

contained world.

It is only Annie, Peter's daughter, whose presence Owen does not find

immediately nonconductive to his art. She is younger and may be able to offer him

solace. He becomes, however, sorely disappointed, as Annie proves to be both

distracting, causing him again to destroy his art, and incapable of understanding. As long

as Owen devotes attention and affection to Annie, he cannot have the focus nor diligence

to bring his aesthetic into material form. Again and again, Owen comes so close to

achieving his goal, only to regress after seeing Peter. Peter's last intrusion into the store is

to tell the artist of Annie's engagement. Owen, who earlier says he must suffer for his

deception, here seems to play an active role in his suffering. The evil spirit inside him

struggles to break free and he allows himself “one slight outbreak. 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'' (373). Clearly, it is

Owen, not Peter, who is in control here, who allows his hard work to be decimated. He

has lost faith in Annie, his future, and finally and fatally in his creation.

The artist is oppressed, above all, by a society that is concerned only with that

which is practical. This society is too scientific, too calculating, to have any room for

beauty. The same single-mindedness that causes Aylmer to see Georgiana's birthmark as

a defect and enables him to become overwhelmed by the task of its removal to the
exclusion of all other thought is the societal flaw that barricades beauty from entrance

into the everyday world. Like the world in which Hawthorne finds himself, art seems to

be persecuted by a non-appreciative audience.

In such an atmosphere, art is open to attack. Owen's beliefs leave him vulnerable;

even “the slightest pressure of [Peter's] finger would ruin [him] forever'' (367). He feels a

strong sense of purpose and is very much aware of the societal forces with which he must

contend. “The leaden thoughts and the despondency that [the hard, coarse world] fling

upon me are my clogs. Else, I should long ago have achieved the task that I was created

for'' (367). Peter's contempt and indignation, emblematized by his sneer, haunt Owen's

so-called purposeless purpose. In a more positive reading of the interactions of these two

men, one considers that this contempt is necessary in order to encourage Owen. His goal

becomes twofold: to create the beautiful and to prove his worthiness to others by showing

this beauty. It is only within this oppression that marginalizes the artist that Owen can

really create and attain the purity necessary for bringing his dreams into reality. He is

able to overcome disbelief and transform it into the fire needed to see his project to

completion. But each failure on the part of others to understand precipitates his failure to

retain faith, leaving him further from his goal. Their doubt of him instills doubt within his

soul as well, a doubt which prevents him from peaceful work.

Although both physically weak and thoroughly impractical, Owen has strength

unmatched by any of the other characters. He ``possess a force of character that seems

hardly compatible with its delicacy.'' In order to complete his task, Owen Warland must

have unwavering faith in his ability to reach its completion. It is this strength, this hungry

burning desire that is characteristic of the artist. From each setback he eventually acquires
renewed faith to continue. He is an artist working against, almost in spite of, reality. This

requires tremendous determination. His only real hindrance is doubt.

Like its creator, the butterfly is not immune to vulnerability. The Achilles tendon of both

is doubt. Much as Owen is unable to retain himself in the presence of Peter, the

butterfly's wings droop when it rests on the old watchmaker's finger. Owen explains the

quintessential thesis of the story, which applies to the beautiful and its artist. “In an

atmosphere of doubt and mocking, its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the

soul of him who instilled his own life into it'' (383). Faith is the fuel for Owen's

inspiration; doubt the genesis of his failure.

He succeeds because he is interested not in the beauty that he has created, but in

the beauty from which it was created. Owen's true beauty is not the marvelous almost-

living butterfly he crafts, but the beautiful faith that was needed to create the butterfly.

Owen has the soul of an artist, never ceasing because of hardships, because something

seems impractical or impossible.

Despite his self-proclaimed success, the ending is tragic. The butterfly,

representing years of Owen's work, is cruelly crushed, as should be Owen's remaining

faith in the innocence and potential for redemption of humanity. Owen is to be forever

ostracized in his community. Not even a small child has appreciation for the awesome;

not even Annie is capable of fully understanding his motivations. ``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!'' (368) This is

a bittersweet success, an internal triumph not to be recognized by the outside observer.

The butterfly is too perfect, too fragile, to exist in this world. At the conclusion of the

story, very little has changed. The butterfly is destroyed; Peter is still scornful; the

blacksmith is still the forceful masculine counterpart to Owen's appreciation of the

delicate. The mystery of beauty is gone. None of Owen's acquaintances attain any

enlightenment. But the butterfly was not brought into being for their edification. The

butterfly exists only for those who want and need the butterfly, and the butterfly attempts

to protect itself from those who are not ready for beauty.

Owen's success then stems from his self-reliance. His happiness is not affected by

the derision of society because he has no need for society and its acceptance. He

transcends beyond the physical realm. Indeed, as the story concludes: ``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'' (385).