"Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Artist of the Beautiful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

useful. He did not, like the crowd of school-boy artizans, construct
little windmills on the angle of a barn, or watermills across the
neighboring brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy,
as to think it worth their while to observe him closely, sometimes saw
reason to suppose that he was attempting to imitate the beautiful
movements of nature, as exemplified in the flight of birds or the
activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new development of
the love of the Beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a
painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined from all
utilitarian coarseness, as it could have been in either of the fine
arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular
processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a
steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of
mechanical principle would be gratified, he turned pale, and grew
sick, as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to
him. This horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of
the Iron Laborer; for the character of Owen's mind was microscopic,
and tended naturally to the minute, in accordance with his
diminutive frame, and the marvellous smallness and delicate power of
his fingers. Not that his sense of beauty was thereby diminished
into a sense of prettiness. The beautiful Idea has no relation to
size, and may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for
any but microscopic investigation, as within the ample verge that is
measured by the arc of the rainbow. But, at all events, this
characteristic minuteness in his objects and accomplishments made
the world even more incapable than it might otherwise have been, of
appreciating Owen Warland's genius. The boy's relatives saw nothing
better to be done- as perhaps there was not- than to bind him
apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange ingenuity might
thus be regulated, and put to utili-tarian purposes.

Peter Hovenden's opinion of his apprentice has already been
expressed. He could make nothing of the lad. Owen's apprehension of
the professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick. But
he altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker's
business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had
been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under
his old master's care, Owen's lack of sturdiness made it possible,
by strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative
eccentricity within bounds. But when his apprenticeship was served
out, and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden's failing
eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how
unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along
his daily course. One of his most rational projects was, to connect
a musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting
moment fall into the abyss of the Past in golden drops of harmony.
If a family-clock was entrusted to him for repair- one of those
tall, ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature, by
measuring out the lifetime of many generations- he would take upon