ish on
it, would hardly trust himself or another to repair and retouch, in
order to render it perfect. Can any one recognise in this elaborate
nonsense about ideal perfection, any approximation to the feeling
which a man has for the wife he loves? If the novelist wished to
describe this egregious connoisseurship in female charms, he should
have put the folly into the head of some insane mortal, who, reversing
the enthusiasm by which some men have loved a picture or a statue as
if it were a real woman, had learned to love his beautiful wife as if
she were nothing else than a picture or a statue.

Again, in the "Story of the Artist of the Beautiful," we breathe not a
word about the impossibility of framing out of springs and wheels so
marvellous a butterfly, that the seeming creature shall not only fly
and move its antennae, and fold and display its wings like the living
insect, but shall even surpass the living insect by showing a fine
sense of human character, and refusing to perch on the hand of those
who had not a genuine sentiment of beauty. The novelist shall put what
springs and wheels he pleases into his mechanism, but the springs and
wheels he places in the mechanist himself, must be those of genuine
humanity, or the whole fiction falls to the ground. Now the mechanist,
the hero of the story, the "Artist of the Beautiful," is described
throughout as animated with the feelings proper to the artist, not to
the mechanician. He is a young watchmaker, who, instead of plodding at
the usual and lucrative routine of his trade, devotes his time to the
structure of a most delicate and ingenious toy. We all know that a
case like this is very possible. Few men, we should imagine, are more
open to the impulse of emulation, the desire to do that which had
never been done before, than the ingenious mechanist; and few men more
completely under the dominion of their leading passion or project,
because every day brings some new contrivance, some new resource, and
the hope that died at night is revived in the morning. But Mr
Hawthorne is not contented with the natural and very strong impulse of
the mechanician; he speaks throughout of his enthusiastic artisan as
of some young Raphael intent upon "creating the beautiful." Springs,
and wheels, and chains, however fine and complicate, are not "the
beautiful." He might as well suppose the diligent anatomist, groping
amongst nerves and tissues, to be stimulated to _his_ task by an
espe