It is impossible to read much of Hawthorne
without realizing that what interested him perhaps more than anything else about
human beings is our capacity for evil, our capacity to act out the part of Satan.
His novels and stories are filled with characters such as Ethan Brand of "Ethan
Brand," Goodman Brown of "Young Goodman Brown," Reverend Hooper of "The Minister's
Black Veil," Dr. Heidegger of "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," and Professor Westervelt
of The Blithedale Romance who are portraits of human darkness. There is
no character, however, who fits the description of a demon more fittingly than
old Roger Chillingworth of The Scarlet Letter. In the following passage,
Chillingworth speaks of himself and is described in such a way that it is all
but impossible not to see that he is a human turned fiend and thus, in Hawthorne's
view, in himself a cautionary tale. "But he knew not that the eye and hand were
mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given
over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts,
the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him
beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!--the closest
propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!--and who had grown to
exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed!--he did
not err!--there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart,
has become a fiend for his especial torment!" The unfortunate physician, while
uttering these words, lifted his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld
some frightful shape, which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his
own image in a glass. It was one of those moments--which sometimes occur only
at the interval of years--when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to
his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
