Artist+of+the+Beautiful

Artist of the Beautiful

http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/criticism/artist.html 'The following is copied directly from the above website -- I just copied and pasted the pertinent part.

Though Hawthorne cannot be considered a Transcendentalist author [|(9)], in his story he creates an artist who embodies this quest for the self through the creation of his work of art, exploring the Transcendentalist experience of **beauty as a way of resisting the materialistic and utilitarian** New England society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In the short story, Owen Warland is a young man who, after working as a watchmaker apprentice, is left in charge of his master's clock shop when he retires. As a young boy, Owen spends a long time in nature to create little and delicate forms of birds and insects, but when he grows up, the efforts made to put his talent to practical and useful purposes prove futile, since his only wish is to make the clocks he is entrusted with more beautiful, disregarding the precision of their machinery. Driven by a deep love for Annie, his master's daughter, he starts creating a strange and extremely fragile mechanism which imitates a butterfly. His attempts at putting "the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion" are often frustrated, especially when he is visited by his former master Hovenden, Annie, and Peter Stanforth, a blacksmith whom Annie eventually marries. Nevertheless, nature always succeeds in inspiring him again, until he finally achieves his goal and presents Annie and her family with the butterfly of his creation. Everybody is surprised at the sight of the beautiful work of art, which seems to have a life of its own, but f**ails to comprehend the magnitude of the meaning of years of hard work.** However, Owen remains undisturbed, even when Annie's baby crushes the mechanism: **the butterfly is a mere "symbol" of everything he has achieved when experiencing beauty in the process of creation.** When Owen finds inspiration in nature to create with "delicate ingenuity" little figures of flowers and birds, such **talent seems "aimed at the mysteries of the hidden mechanisms" that give life to them**. The choice of the words "mysteries" and "hidden" undeniably allude to that **mystical mission of the artist to find in nature--and only in it--the secret of the beautiful**, which is both the principle and the explanation of all things and the whole of humanity, the spirit that flows without a beginning or an end through the various manifestations of the Universe. **The narrator says of Owen that people suppose he means to "imitate the beautiful movements of nature, exemplified in the flight of birds or the activity of small animals." It is to be noted that this "new development of the love for the beautiful" does not highlight forms or colors, not even that which delights the senses; instead it is based on the exploration of the ultimate principle that begets movement and activity: the spirit which gives life.** Owen, **a clear recreation of the Transcendentalist artist,** is not contented with the "inward enjoyment of the beautiful" but strives to capture its mysterious and elusive essence with "material grasp" when giving it material form in a work of art, guided by his intuition. ... Even though Owen seems to be fragile and vulnerable, Hawthorne, faithful to his allegorical style, meaningfully names his character Owen Warland, who becomes the locus where a long and arduous process of search takes place: a battlefield where he is made to confront conflicting feelings and forces which make him doubt whether to give up or to keep resisting, to abandon himself to mediocrity by submitting to the norms of society or to pursue his transcendental destiny, with the strong conviction that he will only attain fulfillment in self reliance. For that aim, Owen counts on "the innate disposition of his soul," which "accumulates renewed vigor during its apparent idleness" and takes him back to the forest where he eagerly studies the movement of the butterflies and other insects. Together with Owen, Hawthorne explores the obstacles in this thorny process. Gradually, Owen Warland becomes spiritually stronger to overcome the difficulties that arise. His genius must gather strength to rise above failure and start again. He goes through obscure phases, becomes dispirited, and suffers. He feels misunderstood but that does not stop him. He knows, as the man described by Emerson in "Self Reliance," that he should be a "nonconformist," that "imitation is suicide," and that he must blindly rely on himself and accept his destiny although it may entail effort and pain.

[|This website is excellent]