Evasion of the Finite in Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful"

In Christ and Apollo, William F. Lynch argues that our path to insight, beauty, or God must be a narrow and direct one that leads straight through our human realities, through our labor, our disappointments, our friends, our game legs, our harvests, our subjection to time. There are no shortcuts to beauty or to insight. We must go through the finite, the limited, the definite, omitting none of it lest we omit some of the potencies of being-in-the-flesh.... We waste our time if we try to go around or above or under the definite; we must go literally through it. And in taking this narrow path directly, we shall be using our remembered experience of things seen and earned in a cumulative way, to create hope in the things that are not yet seen. (7) Father Lynch contrasts this process through the finite with the practice of those "imaginations" that try to achieve a tenuous, mystical contact with the finite, touching it just sufficiently, they tell us, to produce mystical vision, but not solidly enough, they add, for their vision to be impaired by the actuality of things. These imaginations I think of as "exploiters of the real." They believe the real can be "used" in the name of beauty or God, and they will exploit persons or things without being particularly interested in either. (8) Lynch's study makes no mention of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but they are fertile ground to which we may apply Lynch's premise. A number of Hawthorne's tales reveal a distrust in the sort of leaps into the infinite that Lynch decries, and the characters who attempt this road to enlightenment are ultimately left thwarted and unfulfilled. (1) Embedded in such works is the message that something of greater, more lasting value than what was sought by such questionable means could have been attained had the characters been willing to follow the path of the finite. One example of such an unsatisfying pursuit can be seen in the person of Owen Warland, the watchmaker's apprentice and title character in "The Artist of the Beautiful." In this story, Owen sacrifices human love and the strength of earthly reality in his quest for artistic perfection. And although Owen does, in a sense, attain the prize he sets his heart upon, his victory turns out to be short-lived and unsatisfying, and we are left wondering what might have been had he taken more human means to accomplish his end. Critical opinion towards Owen's pursuit of pure artistic spirit has been divided. A number of commentators have argued that Owen, by means of the extraordinary butterfly he creates and his placid acceptance of its quick demise, is finally vindicated and indeed embodies the artist's triumph over a materialistic world. (2) Others, however, affirm the implicit criticism that the tale levies upon Owen's idealism, finding even his butterfly a hollow triumph--a judgment they believe confirmed by his creation's destruction at the hand of the Danforth infant. (3) This second view, we may see, is strengthened all the more as we examine Owen's progress through the lens of Lynch's perspective. Whatever Owen's final artistic achievement, neither it nor his position as the Artist of the Beautiful should be viewed as possessing genuine transcendent superiority. Instead, Owen is a disturbing extremist who, in his self-protective renunciation of the material, also has cut himself off from love and humanity. Consequently, the art he produces is not only devoid of longevity, but also qualitatively inferior to the common art of humanity personified in human relationships and the human body. Early in the story, Owen's excessively ethereal disposition is contrasted with the raw power of Robert Danforth, the young blacksmith who is both the artist's former schoolmate and his current rival for the affections of Annie Hovenden, the daughter of Owen's former employer, Peter Hovenden. …