Illustrate the character of Chillingworth.

 Roger ( Chilling worth is described as a man of small stature, with a wrinkled face which shows a remarkable intelligence in its features. There is a slight deformity in his body, one shoulder of which is slightly higher than the other. He is a man of unusual intellectual gifts, given to much reading so that he may be regarded as a figure of "the study and the cloister." His eyes, which have served him to pore over many ponderous books, possess a strange, penetrating power to read the human soul. It is in his old age that he marries Hester Prynne, a young girl. For him to have married a young girl was a blunder, but he realizes the blunder when it is too late. When he meets Hester in the prison, he tells her that, if he had been wise, he should have anticipated that his marriage with her would prove a failure. Having lived a cheerless and lonely life, he had longed for domestic bliss of some kind and had, for this reason, decided to marry Hester. When Hester murmurs that she has greatly wronged him, he is fair enough to say, "We have wronged each other. Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.”

 

  During the two years that Roger Chillingworth has spent among the Indians, he has greatly developed his medical skill. His stay among a tribe of people well-versed in the beneficial properties of herbs has made a better physician of him than many with a medical degree. He is able to soothe the screaming child of Hester with one small dose, and with another dose he brings about a considerable improvement in Hester's own condition when she is suffering from nervous excitement in the prison.

 

Roger Chillingworth is able to exercise perfect self-control. When, arriving in Boston, he sees his wife standing on the scaffold, his face darkens with a powerful emotion which, however, he

instantly controls by an effort of his will, so that the convulsion that might have shaken another man quickly subsides in him. His face generally wears a calm and quiet expression whatever the feelings within him. He looks calm, gentle, and passionless even when there is deep malice or hostility in his heart. This man had originally been kindhearted and, in all his relations with the world, "a pure and upright man." But the adulterous action of his wife transforms him into a malicious and revengeful individual. However, his revenge is not in the least directed against Hester. He believes that for Hester, the punishment of having to wear the scarlet letter on her bosom is more than enough.   

 From the time of his interview with Hester in the prison, Roger Chillingworth begins to devote all his energies to the pursuit of revenge. He shows such an inflexible will in this direction that we recall the correctness of Hester's words n comparıng him to the Black Man who haunts the forest. Subsequently Pearl calls him the Black Man who has got hold of the minister and who may catch Hester. Having taken charge of the minister's health, and having intuitively become suspicious about him, he begins to work upon he minister's mind like the very devil. It is not only the physical ailment of the minister that interests him, but he is also strongly noved to look into the character and qualities of his patient.

 

But there are other people who hold a different view about Roger Chillingworth. These people believe, that Roger Chilling worth's countenance has undergone a remarkable change since he started staying with Mr. Dimmesdale. According to them, his expression had at first been calm, meditative scholar-like, but now there is something ugly and evil in his face which they had no

previously noticed. These people have also begun to say that the re in the physician's laboratory had been brought from hell and  is fed with infernal fuel, the smoke from which is responsible for his face becoming darker and darker. In short, the opinion becomes prevalent that Roger Chillingworth is Satan's emissary who bas come to plot against the minister's soul.

 

Having become certain regarding the nature of the guilty secret in the mind of the minister, Roger Chillingworth becomes even more fierce in his revenge. Gradually he acquires a great hold upon the minister's mind. He becomes not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the minister's interior world. He can play upon the minister's mind as he chooses. He has come to know the spring that controls the minister's machinery of thinking, so that he does not merely torment him but frightens him with a thousand phantoms of horrifying shapes, with their fingers pointing at his breast. And he has accomplished all this with such perfect subtlety that the minister, though he has a dim perception of some evil influence watching over him, is unable to understand what that influence is. Roger Chillingworth becomes the arch-fiend who will show not the least mercy to his victim. The former aspect of an intellectual and a studious man, calm and quiet, has altogether vanished, and been replaced by an eager, searching, almost fierce look though he tries to conceal this expression with a smile. He now becomes a striking example of a man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a certain period of time, perform the devil's functions. For seven full years, Roger Chilling worth scrutinizes the minister's tortured heart and. derives his enjoyment from it, adding fuel to the fiery tortures which the minister experiences. Rightly does Hester charge the physician with cruelty and with the spirit of persecution, in the

following words: You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him sleeping, and waking. You search his thoughts, You burrow and rankle in his heart Your clutch is on his life, and you

cause him to die daily a living death." And yct Roger Chillingworth, who is a great hypocrite, also claims that through his constant efforts he has been instrumental in saving the life of the minister. He says to Hester, "The richest fee that ever a physian earned from a monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But for my aid, his life would have burned away in torments, within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime and thine” But he admits to her that he has made the minister suffer what no mortal man has ever suffered. He admits that he had once a human heart but that he has become a fiend for the special torment of the minister.  The villainy of Roger Chillingworth does not end with his ceaselessly inflicting mental and spiritual torture on Arthur Dim mesdale. Constantly spying on the minister's movements and on those of Hester, he has come to know of their plans to flee from Boston by ship, and he succeeds in thwarting this plan, though he need not have taken the trouble of doing so because the minister has in the meanwhile made up his mind to make a public confession of his guilt. When he tries to restrain the minister from making his intended confession, it is certainly not for any good that he means  towards the priest but to prevent him from slipping from his hands. Eventually when the minister has made his confession, Chillingwne says to him more than once, “Thou hast escaped me! Thou hast escaped me!" There is no mercy in this villain's heart even at this stage.

 

The premature death of Arthur Dimmesdale is a great loss to Roger Chillingworth. Having been deprived in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge, he begins to languish. There being

no more devil's work on earth for him to do, he withers up and dies within a year of the death of the minister. His sin of revenge is greater than the sin of adultery committed by Hester and the minister. In Hester's opinion, Chillingworth's having married her, even though he knew full well that she did not love him, was a greater crime than her own crime of adultery. Speaking to herself about her husband, Hester says, "Yes, I hate him! He betrayed me I He has done me worse wrong than I did him.” The minister, speaking to Hester in the forest, compares the physician's crime with Hester's and his own in the following words: "We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so !" However, even this blackest of villains performs before his death, an act that redeems him, though in an extremely small degree, in our eyes. He bequeaths a large part of his property to Pearl!