He
started from the bedside and covered his face with his hands, as if to
hide it from those dead eyes.... But his deep repentance for the misery
he had brought upon his parent did not produce in him a resolution to do
wrong no more. The sudden consciousness of accumulated guilt made him
desperate. He felt as if no one had thenceforth a claim to justice or
compassion at his hands, when his neglect and cruelty had poisoned his
mother's life, and hastened her death."
* * * * *
What separates this story from the rest of Hawthorne's works is an
intricate plot, with passages of open humor, and a rather melodramatic
tone in the conclusion. These are the result in part of the prevalent
fashion of romance, and in part of a desire to produce effects not quite
consonant with his native bent. The choice of the title, "Fanshawe,"
too, seems to show a deference to the then prevalent taste for brief and
quaint-sounding names; and the motto, "Wilt thou go on with me?" from
Southey, placed on his title-page, together with quotations at the heads
of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful
conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume
an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as
evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light
of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents
that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked
Hawthorne's own mind, and Butler is a crude example of the sinful spirit
which he afterward analyzed under many forms.
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