Do
you care for the "first lover," the Photographer's Young Man? It may be
conventional prejudice, but I seem to see him going about on a tricycle,
and I don't think him the right person for Phoebe. Perhaps it is really
the beautiful, gentle, oppressed Clifford who haunts one's memory most, a
kind of tragic and thwarted Harold Skimpole. "How pleasant, how
delightful," he murmured, but not as if addressing any one. "Will it
last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open window! An open
window! How beautiful that play of sunshine. Those flowers, how very
fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how blooming. A flower
with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dewdrops . . . " This comparison
with Skimpole may sound like an unkind criticism of Clifford's character
and place in the story--it is only a chance note of a chance resemblance.
Indeed, it may be that Hawthorne himself was aware of the resemblance.
"An individual of Clifford's character," he remarks, "can always be
pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious
than through his heart." And he suggests that, if Clifford had not been
so long in prison, his aesthetic zeal "might have eaten out or filed away
his affections." This was what befell Harold Skimpole--himself "in
prisons often"--at Coavinses! The Judge Pyncheon of the tale is also a
masterly study of swaggering black-hearted respectability, and then, in
addition to all the poetry of his style, and the charm of his haunted
air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave conclusion of the good sort, the
old sort.
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