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| The Artist of the Beautiful
| | Nathaniel Hawthorne
| Owen, a watchmaker, 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 himself. 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 endowing a mechanical creation with a sort of life. He wants to be the artist not only 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.
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