“To the thoughtful man there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor—­perhaps as a portion of his own punishment—­is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.”

Hawthorne wins his effect by presenting the idea to our minds from different points of view, until we are obsessed by the curse that broods heavily over the old house.  Even the aristocratic breed of fowls, of “queer, rusty, withered aspect,” are an emblem of the decay of the Pyncheon family.  The people are apt to be merged into the dense shadows that lurk in the gloomy passages, but when the sun shines on them they stand out with arresting distinctness.  The heroic figure of Hepzibah Pyncheon, a little ridiculous and a little forbidding of aspect, but cherishing through weary years a passionate devotion to her brother, is described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos.  Clifford Pyncheon—­the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated of his destiny—­is delineated with curious insight and sympathy.  It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his “sultry” smile of “elaborate benevolence”—­unrelenting and crafty as his infamous ancestor—­who lends to The House of Seven Gables the element of terror.  Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony, mocks and taunts the dead body of the hypocritical judge until the ghostly pageantry of dead Pyncheons—­including at last Judge Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his neckcloth—­fades away with the oncoming of daylight.

Hawthorne’s mind was richly stored with “wild chimney-corner legends,” many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman mentioned in one of his Tales and Sketches.  He takes over the fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one to the other: 

“A writer of story-books!  What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be?  Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler.”

The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the legends of ghosts and spectres in the Twice-Told Tales, the allusions to the elixir of life in his Notebooks, the introduction of witches into The Scarlet Letter, of mesmerism into The Blithedale Romance, show how often Hawthorne was pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible world.  He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous, half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief.  One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his fancies, and so to pique us into the desire to be momentarily at least one of the foolish and imaginative.