Comprehension question

[sunnyy]

hello.

[Jackson Richardson]

Hello. It's a bit overcast here this morning in South London but I hope it is fine where you are.

What's your question?

[Gladys]

"Do not think too hardly of Philip....The temptations of beauty are much dwelt upon, but I fancy they
only bear the same relation to those of ugliness, as the temptation to excess at a feast, where the delights
are varied for eye and ear as well as palate, bears to the temptations that assail the desperation of hunger.
Does not the Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utmost trial to what is human in us?"

In Dante's Inferno, Ugolino is locked away with his sons in a Pisan tower called the Eagles’ Tower, but—after his death—known by the nickname of the Hunger Tower. Once his sons have starved to death, one by one, the dying father turned blind is finally tempted to cannibalism. It is truly horrific: http://www.shmoop.com/inferno/canto-xxxiii-summary.html

Likewise the humpbacked Phillip Wakem experiences the worst of life. As temptations of starvation are much worse than those of a cornucopia, so temptations of ugliness exceed those of beauty. Philip is ugly! Out of desperation, his treatment of the departing Maggie is less than gracious but can be understood in the same way as Ugolino's temptation to cannibalism. With the narrator, our deepest sympathies should extend to poor Philip Wakem, in love with the unattainable.

[Sahand]

Thanks.

[Sahand]

So we can conclude that "temptations of beauty" means the temptations which one has when beauty is the matter of the course or when he/she is beautiful and in the same way way there are temptations which arise in the course of ugliness. I mean our temptations in the condition of negative is severer than temptations in the condition of positive categories. Is my understanding right?

[Gladys]

I mean our temptations in the condition of negative is severer than temptations in the condition of positive categories. Is my understanding right?

What you say is not wrong but rather misses the narrator's purpose. Just as the moving story of the deaths of Ugolino and his sons is high tragedy, Phillip Wakem's fate, far from the limelight, is tragic in its peculiar way.

Does not the Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utmost trial to what is human in us?

Philip had never been soothed by that mother's love which flows out to us in the greater abundance because our need is greater, which clings to us the more tenderly because we are the less likely to be winners in the game of life; and the sense of his father's affection and indulgence toward him was marred by the keener perception of his father's faults. Kept aloof from all practical life as Philip had been, and by nature half feminine in sensitiveness, he had some of the woman's intolerant repulsion toward worldliness and the deliberate pursuit of sensual enjoyment; and this one strong natural tie in his life,--his relation as a son,--was like an aching limb to him. Perhaps there is inevitably something morbid in a human being who is in any way unfavorably excepted from ordinary conditions, until the good force has had time to triumph; and it has rarely had time for that at two-and-twenty. That force was present in Philip in much strength, but the sun himself looks feeble through the morning mists.