James Hogg
(1770 - 1835)

Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist.

A nearly illiterate shepherd until the age of eighteen, Hogg became a prolific writer of poetry, ballads, songs, short stories, and historical narratives who was ranked among Scottish writers only below Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. He established a persona as the "Ettrick Shepherd," a rustic and provincial poet, and gained fame through his association with the influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Yet that reputation declined after his death, and a century later he was remembered, if at all, only for an unconventional novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which during his life had been dismissed as an obtuse satire on Christian fanaticism. Featuring Gothic and supernatural elements, including a schizophrenic narrator and a psychological double/devil figure, as well as proto-modern narrative complexity, the work has been rediscovered by modern critics who have come to view it as a masterpiece of prose fiction. In recent years, the revival of Scottish nationalism has led to new interest in Hogg and the reprinting of his other works as well. Despite his many imitations of Burns and Scott, the pieces that utilize the supernatural folk traditions represent Hogg's best achievements and also provide the most interest for modern readers. Ghosts, both real and explained, appear regularly in Hogg's works, as do less familiar creatures: brownies, fairies, kelpies, and wraiths. Critics continue to reevaluate Hogg's work and find much to recommend in it, showing how the author uses the occult for purposes other than mere shock and integrates his own humor and folk wisdom with strange and lively narratives to produce highly moral, extremely entertaining tales.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born to a pious tenant farmer in 1770, Hogg spent his early life as a shepherd in the Ettrick hills of Scotland following his family's bankruptcy in 1777. With minimal formal schooling, he taught himself to read using the only book available, a Bible, while his early interest in literature was founded on the Scottish oral tradition of ballads, songs, and fairy tales that were recited to him by his mother. As his self-education continued in his late teens, Hogg began to read the great works of English and Scottish literature and composed his first pieces of poetry, including verses imitative of John Milton, Alexander Pope, and others. By 1802 he had met Sir Walter Scott as the famous writer was collecting folk ballads for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Hogg later read the work and, largely unimpressed with its quality, determined to compose superior verse on the same subject. He subsequently sent several poems to Scott, both his own original ballads and adaptations of those his mother had taught him. Hogg's poetic abilities and his knowledge of Scottish lore impressed Scott, and in the following years a friendship grew between the two men that had an important influence on Hogg's career. Hogg's writings of this period appeared in his 1807 collection, The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales.

In February of 1810, after Hogg had lost two farms due to lack of funds, he departed the pastoral tranquility of Ettrick for several years and moved to Edinburgh. His weekly periodical, The Spy, containing articles, poems, and tales mostly written by Hogg himself, was published between 1810 and 1811, but collapsed following the printing of a particularly scandalous story. Meanwhile, Hogg began crafting his literary persona as the "Ettrick Shepherd," a self-taught poet of provincial Scotland. He contributed poetry and prose to Scottish literary magazines and established himself as a national literary figure with his collection The Queen's Wake in 1813. The parodies of The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain (1816) delighted audiences and maintained Hogg's popularity, though many of his other works of this period were ignored or denigrated by contemporary critics. In 1817 Hogg began a successful relationship with the newly founded Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which published the collaborative "Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS." in October of that year. Coauthored with John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, the anonymous satire written in biblical form lampooned prominent Edinburgh Whigs and created a stir in the city. By 1820 Hogg had married and returned to rural life, retreating to his Altrive farm near Yarrow. The sales of his 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner proved discouraging, and Hogg's writings of the subsequent period were frequently ignored or panned by his contemporaries, though he remained a recognizable figure in Scottish literary circles. His reminiscences of a lifelong friendship, Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, appeared in 1834 and capitalized on interest in Scotland's most popular writer, but his later collection of short stories, Tales of the Wars of Montrose (1835), was a failure. Hogg died in November of 1835 after a prolonged illness and was buried in Ettrick.

MAJOR WORKS

With few exceptions, Hogg's writings about the occult and paranormal are acknowledged to be his best. His attitude toward the supernatural is ambivalent: his ancestors believed fully in the existence of creatures from another level of reality, and Hogg constantly shifts between providing rational explanations of strange events and presenting them without comment—a technique that effectively increases the suspense. He recognized that religious faith, like superstition, demands the acceptance of things unseen, and although he was a devout Presbyterian, he saw no inconsistency in maintaining beliefs in both fairy lore and Christianity.

In the poem "Superstition" (1815), Hogg laments that "gone is [Superstition's] mysterious dignity, / And true Devotion wanes away with her." Supernatural creatures, he says, not only teach the necessity of accepting the unseen but also fill guilty hearts with dread and make known their dark deeds. Hogg's fiction features various supernatural beings, from conventional ghosts to fairies. "The Barber of Duncow" (1831), one of his best ghost stories, tells how a spirit reveals to a new bride her husband's profligate past. After the wife disappears, her ghost—with throat nearly severed—leads villagers to her corpse, and when the husband touches the body, it begins to bleed profusely. Other tales depict more unusual supernatural creatures, those found in the folklore with which Hogg was familiar such as wraiths, fairies, and brownies. In "Adam Bell" (1811), some servants, having seen the apparition of their missing master, learn that a wraith appearing in daylight prognosticated very long life. In "The Wool-Gatherer" (1811), a young shepherd, Barnaby, whiles away a journey by telling the heroine some fine ghost stories. His seriousness provokes her to ask if he truly believes in such events. He believes in them, he says, a much as he believes in the gospels; he believes in the apparitions that warn of death, that save life, and discover guilt. Brownies figure in two of Hogg's best works, the historical novel The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), which mixes legends of a preternatural creature with the efforts of several defeated revolutionaries to hide from political and religious persecution in the hills and farmlands of Scotland, and the story "The Brownie of the Black Haggs" (1828). Witches appear in the entertaining novel The Three Perils of Man (1822) and the story "The Hunt of Eildon" (1818).

In his poems, too, Hogg writes extensively of otherworldly creatures. In "Lyttil Pynkie" (1831), a beautiful elf-girl begins a wild dance that causes the death of the evil Baron and his profligate retainers; at the end, she enables the good priest who has come to exorcise her to see clearly the invisible evil at work throughout the world. The Pilgrims of the Sun (1815), Hogg's most ambitious poem, combines an allegorical and philosophical journey through the universe with an effective ghost story, while "Kilmeny" (1813), often praised as Hogg's best lyric, deals with the visit of the purest maiden on earth to Fairyland—a conjunction of the fairy and Christian paradises—from which she returns to recount what she has seen. Hogg's comic poem "The Witch of Fife" (1813) presents a pleasure-loving old man who finds himself married to a witch, who later saves him as he is about to be burned at the stake.

Hogg's acknowledged masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is more overtly religious than his other works and rather than using supernatural creatures presents supernatural events that emphasize terror and evil. The figure alluded to in the title is Robert Wringhim Colwan, the illegitimate son of a reverend, who is brought up as an Antinomian Calvinist and thus believes himself a member of God's elect—and therefore assured of divine salvation regardless of his sins in life. After the strange disappearance of his elder brother, Robert meets a mysterious individual, Gil-Martin, who encourages him to commit acts of violence against the "ungodly," culminating in several murders and Robert's own suicide. The novel features a dual narrative, first that of the deluded and possibly schizophrenic "sinner," followed by the apparently objective account of the work's fictional editor who had purportedly discovered Robert's memoirs after his body was exhumed some one hundred years later. The work, which explores questions about morality, religion, psychology, and the demonic, works up to a terrifying climax, and some critics have claimed that the character of Gil-Martin is one of the most convincing representations of the power of evil in literature.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Hogg was a prolific writer who had enjoyed renown in his day, yet after his death and until the mid-twentieth century most of his work was ignored by commentators. Many of Hogg's short poems and tales were written purely to turn a profit, and these hastily composed works are generally regarded as deeply flawed and of little merit. But even his best writings, much appreciated by his contemporaries who enjoyed his celebrations of Scottish rural scenes and superstitions as well as his imitations of ancient Scottish ballads, generated little critical interest after his death. Those who read his work generally found his plots inadequate, his endings haphazard, and his poetry poorly crafted. A turning point in Hogg's critical reputation occurred in the 1920s when André Gide (see Further Reading) "rediscovered" Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, recognizing it as a significant work of world literature and as Hogg's masterpiece. Gide praised Hogg's depiction of the supernatural side of faith and the work's moral and religious effects. Since Gide's comments, numerous scholars have studied the novel and praised its sophisticated narrative technique, psychological complexity, and deeply ironic and ambivalent elements. Critics have begun to investigate the author's other neglected writings as well, and some have shown how the supernatural informs nearly all of the writer's best work. They have pointed out how it achieves its effects through the tension of belief and unbelief rather than through gratuitous horror and shows that supernatural events should not be ignored because the wonders of the invisible world reveal the moral universe. Critics acknowledge that much of Hogg's writing is ordinary and uninteresting, but his best work is enjoying renewed attention and gaining stature as some of the most original writing from the nineteenth century in its depiction of the tension between things of this world and those of other realms.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Scottish Pastorals, Poems, Songs, etc., Mostly Written in the Dialect of the South (poetry) 1801
Memoir of the Author's Life (memoirs) 1806
The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales (poetry, songs, and autobiographical sketch) 1807
The Forest Minstrel; A Selection of Songs, Adapted to the Most Favourite Scottish Airs [with Thomas M. Cunningham and others] (poetry and songs) 1810
The Spy [editor and main contributor] (journalism, poetry, and sketches) 1810–11
The Queen's Wake (poetry) 1813
The Pilgrims of the Sun (poetry) 1815
Mador of the Moor (poetry) 1816
The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain [with Thomas Pringle] (poetry) 1816
Dramatic Tales. 2 vols. (short stories) 1817

"Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS." [with John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson, and others] (satire) 1817
The Brownie of Bodsbeck, and Other Tales (novel and short stories) 1818
A Border Garland (songs) 1819
The Jacobite Relics of Scotland: Being the Songs, Airs, and Legends of the Adherents of the House of Stuart. 2 vols. [editor and contributor] (songs) 1819–21
Winter Evening Tales, Collected among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland. 2 vols. (short stories) 1820
The Poetical Works of James Hogg. 4 vols. (poetry and songs) 1822
The Three Perils of Man; or, War, Women, and Witchcraft. 3 vols. (novel) 1822
The Three Perils of Woman; or, Love, Leasing, and Jealousy. 3 vols. (short stories) 1823
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide's Grave, 1828
Queen Hynde (poetry) 1825
The Shepherd's Calendar. 2 vols. (poetry) 1829
Songs, by the Ettrick Shepherd (songs) 1831
Altrive Tales: Collected from among the Peasantry of Scotland, and from Foreign Adventurers (short stories) 1832
A Queer Book (poetry) 1832
Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (reminiscences) 1834; also published as The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott
Tales of the Wars of Montrose. 3 vols. (short stories) 1835
Tales and Sketches. 6 vols. (novels and short stories) 1837
The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd. 2 vols. (ballads, poetry, and sketches) 1865

PRIMARY SOURCES

JAMES HOGG (STORY DATE 1836)

SOURCE: Hogg, James. "Expedition to Hell." In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 496-506. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1973.

In the following excerpt from a story first published in 1836, the narrator addresses the reader on the significance of dreams.

There is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is written than dreaming. It is a strange thing. For my part I do not understand it, nor have I any desire to do so; and I firmly believe that no philosopher that ever wrote knows a particle more about it than I do, however elaborate and subtle the theories he may advance concerning it. He knows not even what sleep is, nor can he define its nature, so as to enable any common mind to comprehend him; and how, then, can he define that ethereal part of it, wherein the soul holds intercourse with the external world?—how, in that state of abstraction, some ideas force themselves upon us, in spite of all our efforts to get rid of them; while others, which we have resolved to bear about with us by night as well as by day, refuse us their fellowship, even at periods when we most require their aid?

No, no; the philosopher knows nothing about either; and if he says he does; I entreat you not to believe him. He does not know what mind is; even his own mind, to which one would think he has the most direct access: far less can he estimate the operations and powers of that of any other intelligent being. He does not even know, with all his subtlety, whether it be a power distinct from his body, or essentially the same, and only incidentally and temporarily endowed with different qualities. He sets himself to discover at what period of his existence the union was established. He is baffled; for Consciousness refuses the intelligence, declaring, that she cannot carry him far enough back to ascertain it. He tries to discover the precise moment when it is dissolved, but on this Consciousness is altogether silent; and all is darkness and mystery; for the origin, the manner of continuance, and the time and mode of breaking up of the union between soul and body, are in reality undiscoverable by our natural faculties—are not patent, beyond the possibility of mistake: but whosoever can read his Bible, and solve a dream, can do either, without being subjected to any material error.

It is on this ground that I like to contemplate, not the theory of dreams, but the dreams themselves; because they prove to the unlettered man, in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with external nature, as well as with a world of spirits with which it has no acquaintance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to the soul as if sleeping in death.

I account nothing of any dream that relates to the actions of the day; the person is not sound asleep who dreams about these things; there is no division between matter and mind, but they are mingled together in a sort of chaos—what a farmer would call compost—fermenting and disturbing one another. I find that in all dreams of that kind, men of every profession have dreams peculiar to their own occupations; and, in the country, at least, their import is generally understood. Every man's body is a barometer. A thing made up of the elements must be affected by their various changes and convulsions; and so the body assuredly is. When I was a shepherd, and all the comforts of my life depended so much on good or bad weather, the first thing I did every morning was strictly to overhaul the dreams of the night; and I found that I could calculate better from them than from the appearance and changes of the sky. I know a keen sportsman who pretends that his dreams never deceive him. If the dream is of angling, or pursuing salmon in deep waters, he is sure of rain; but if fishing on dry ground, or in waters so low that the fish cannot get from him, it forebodes drought; hunting or shooting hares is snow, and moorfowl wind, & c. But the most extraordinary professional dream on record is, without all doubt, that well-known one of George Dobson, coach-driver in Edinburgh, which I shall here relate; for though it did not happen in the shepherd's cot, it has often been recited there.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

DOUGLAS S. MACK (ESSAY DATE 1995)

SOURCE: Mack, Douglas S. "Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg." In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 129-35. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

In the following essay, Mack explores the sources that inform Hogg's use of the supernatural in his works.

This essay focuses on some of the roots of the use of the supernatural in the works of James Hogg; this subject will be approached through an examination of specific examples provided by The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of articles contributed by Hogg to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between 1819 and 1828.

The Shepherd's Calendar is a title with a long history in the literature of the English language. Hogg, however, had a particular and unusual right to use it: in his youth he had spent many years as a professional shepherd in the remote and mountainous Ettrick district of southern Scotland. Indeed, in parts of his Shepherd's Calendar he draws upon the experiences of his own pastoral life in the 1790s; and elsewhere in the series he sets out to re-create on paper something of the manner and the content of the traditional oral story-telling of Ettrick. To describe The Shepherd's Calendar in this way seems to suggest that it is a project of a somewhat antiquarian nature, involving an attempt to record and preserve old customs and manners before they finally pass away. That is no doubt part of what Hogg is seeking to achieve; but his "Shepherd's Calendar" articles go far beyond a mere antiquarian interest. Indeed, these contributions to Blackwood's make up a sequence of sophisticated and complex narratives in which the supernatural plays a particularly striking role.

Let us begin by looking at "Storms", a largely autobiographical article in which Hogg writes about the trials and dangers encountered by shepherds as a result of severe snow-falls. Much of the article is devoted to an account of Hogg's own experiences during the winter of 1794–95. At this time he was working as a shepherd at Blackhouse in the Yarrow valley, part of the Ettrick district, and he was a member of a local literary society formed by "a few young shepherds". At the society's meetings each of the members "read an essay on a subject previously given out; and after that every essay was minutely investigated, and criticised".¹ In The Rise of the Historical Novel, John MacQueen has convincingly argued that the society's agenda probably "included the forbidden subject of radical politics and the need for reform, if not revolution".² This was, after all, the 1790s: revolution was in the air.

Be that as it may, Hogg was on his way to a meeting of this society when signs of an approaching storm forced him to turn back. The meeting of the society went ahead in his absence; and as events turned out the shieling at which it was held "was situated in the very vortex of the storm; the devastations made by it extended all around that, to a certain extent; and no farther on any one quarter than another" (16). The storm was universally viewed in the Ettrick community "as a judgement sent by God for the punishment of some heineous offence" (15). Hogg goes on to record a conversation, during which he learned that the blame for the heinous offence was being laid at the door of his literary society:

"Weel chap" said he to me "we hae fund out what has been the cause of a' this mischief now."

"What do you mean John?"

"What do I mean? It seems that a great squad o' birkies that ye are conneckit wi', had met that night at the herds house o' Ever Phaup, an had raised the deil amang them."

Every countenance in the kitchen changed; the women gazed at John and then at me, and their lips grew white. These kind of feelings are infectious, people may say what they will; fear begets fear as naturally as light springs from reflection. I reasoned stoutly at first against the veracity of the report, observing that it was utter absurdity, and a shame and disgrace for the country to cherish such a rediculous lie.

"Lie!" said John "It's nae lie; they had him up amang them like a great rough dog at the very time that the tempest began, and were glad to draw cuts, an' gie him ane o' their number to get quit o' him again."

Lord how every hair of my head, and inch of my frame crept at hearing this sentence; for I had a dearly loved brother who was one of the number, several full cousins, and intimate acquaintances; indeed I looked on the whole fraternity as my brethern, and considered myself involved in all their transactions. I could say no more in defence of the society's proceedings, for to tell the truth, though I am ashamed to acknowledge it, I suspected that the allegation might be too true.

                                           (16-17)

"For to tell the truth, though I am ashamed to acknowledge it, I suspected that the allegation might be too true." These are highly significant words. They show the young Hogg wholly at home with a system of assumptions in which a blizzard can be explained as the judgement of God, and in which it can seem natural to encounter the physical and active presence of the Devil, here and now, among one's relations and intimate acquaintances. On the other hand, he says "I am ashamed to acknowledge it". The mature Hogg is by no means contained by a naive acceptance of the old beliefs: he is fully aware that times have changed, and that in a post-Enlightenment world the old ideas have come to be seen as childishly absurd. All this points to a crucial feature of Hogg's intellectual and cultural position: he is situated between two worlds—or rather, he is fully part of two very different worlds. One of these worlds is the Ettrick of his pastoral youth, a district where he continued to spend much of his time throughout his life, and where he died. His other world is Edinburgh, which he graced for more than a quarter of a century as a professional author.

It would not be extravagant to say that in Hogg's lifetime each of these two worlds was in its own way a key site in the intellectual life of Europe. From Edinburgh, Walter Scott was enthralling an international audience with his poetry and his novels; and the Scottish capital was still basking in the afterglow of the great days of David Hume and Adam Smith, of Hutton the geologist and Black the chemist, and of all the other major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ettrick also had its importance, at any rate for those sensitive to the living significance of the great traditional ballads. It was from Ettrick that Scott (with Hogg's help) obtained some of the material for Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and it was Yarrow (in Ettrick) that Wordsworth famously left Unvisited in 1803—and later Visited in the autumn of 1814, with Hogg as his guide. The mature Hogg was the heir of the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment, and he was also the heir, and even the embodiment, of Wordsworth's unvisited Yarrow, with its "treasured dreams of times long past".

Hogg's place within these two worlds is important for his fiction; indeed much of his writing can be seen as an assertion, aimed at a sceptical Edinburgh audience, of the validity of traditional Ettrick beliefs and values. An excellent example of this process is provided by "Mr Adamson of Laverhope", a story from The Shepherd's Calendar in which a narrator, who clearly shares the assumptions of Enlightenment Edinburgh, offers for our contemplation an account of what peasant superstition has made of a natural calamity—a man being killed by lightning during a thunderstorm.

How does the story of Mr Adamson appear if we accept the supernatural interpretation of the superstitious inhabitants of Ettrick? In this view, we are not dealing with a natural event in which a man is struck by lightning; we are dealing rather with a divine judgment. God's lightning strikes down an evildoer; and the Devil, who has been present in disguise, carries Mr Adamson's soul off to Hell in the last thunderclap of the storm. What has Adamson done to deserve this condign punishment? His first offence is that, while seeking to collect debts, he has evicted a poor family and caused their goods to be sold by public auction. Thereafter, the community comes together to shear Mr Adamson's sheep, "it being customary for the farmers to assist one another reciprocally on these occasions"; but Adamson, dissatisfied with himself over the eviction, sours the usual hilarity of the communal shearing by irritably and violently attacking first a sheep-dog, and then a boy who comes to the dog's defence. Finally, Adamson refuses the customary alms to a beggar who visits the shearing. It is made clear that all these actions are contrary to Adamson's duty as a professing Christian; and we are also made to see that his actions outrage the shared values of an agricultural community which must depend upon mutual support for survival in a harsh environment.

The values of Ettrick are celebrated within the story by means of a detailed and affectionate account of the shared pleasures of the communal sheep-shearing, and these values are given explicit expression through the words and actions of the shepherd Rob Johnson. The Good Shepherd is always a resonant figure in Hogg. Behind fictional characters like Rob Johnson and Daniel Bell of The Three Perils of Woman there lies, of course, the figure of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd; but we are also reminded of the biblical King David, once a shepherd boy—and of Jesus, the supreme Good Shepherd.

In the supernatural interpretation of "Mr Adamson of Laverhope," then, evil deeds provoke divine vengeance. This view is powerfully backed up by Hogg's detailed rendering of the convulsion of the thunderstorm, a notable feature of which is a description of a flood which sweeps down on Adamson's sheepfolds "with a cataract front more than twenty feet deep" (33). This is an apt image in a story of divine anger; but surprisingly enough it is also true to weather conditions in southern Scotland, where flash floods of this kind are by no means unknown. For example, a report on the front page of The Scotsman newspaper for 27 July 1983 describes "a wall of water 20ft high and 200yds wide in places" which earlier in the week had surged across a four-mile area in the valley of the Hermitage Water, causing widespread damage to property and considerable danger to life and limb.

The flood, then, however extraordinary, nevertheless remains firmly within the boundaries of the possible; and this may serve as a reminder that Hogg's Enlightenment narrator does not share the Ettrick community's supernatural interpretation of Mr Adamson's death. For the narrator, Adamson is simply the unfortunate victim of a natural event, and this interpretation is reinforced by the narrator's concluding anecdote concerning the death by lightning of Mr Adam Copland of Minnigess. In this anecdote there is not a hint of the supernatural; instead we have cool, detached and rational comments on the operation of "the electric matter that slew Mr Copland". The story of the death of Mr Copland is, as it were, an Enlightenment version of the story erected by peasant superstition around the death of Mr Adamson; but Hogg so manages matters that the peasant superstition becomes much more coherent, impressive and convincing than the views of his Enlightened narrator. Hogg, that is to say, subverts his own narrator—just as the Editor is subverted in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

It seems, then, that in "Mr Adamson of Laverhope" Hogg employs a devious narrative strategy in order to question the Enlightened assumptions of his readers; indeed, the thrust of the story is that the traditional Christian world-view, dismissed by the narrator as peasant superstition, is in fact the source of an enlightenment which is genuine and real. Such a view sits comfortably with opinions expressed by Hogg in other contexts, for example in the sermon on Deism in the Lay Sermons of 1834, and in the poem "Superstition", which dates from 1815. "Superstition" looks back with regret to the old Ettrick belief in the supernatural, which has faded under the advance of modern rationalism.

    Those were the times for holiness of frame;
      Those were the days when fancy wandered free;
    That kindled in the soul the mystic flame,
      And the rapt breathings of high poesy;
      Sole empress of the twilight—Woe is me!
    That thou and all thy spectres are outworn;
      For true devotion wanes away with thee.
    All thy delirious dreams are laughed to scorn,
    While o'er our hills has dawned a cold saturnine morn.

The Ettrick tradition was a Christian one, but it contained elements surviving from pre-Christian times. This is reflected in a number of Hogg's works, in which a young woman is taken from Scotland to a heavenly land, from which she returns transformed in one way or another. Most of Hogg's variations on this theme have certain things in common: the story is usually set in pre-Reformation Scotland; the young woman is usually linked in some way to the Blessed Virgin Mary—indeed, she is usually called Mary; the question of whether she does, or does not, remain a virgin is always an issue of some importance; and the heaven to which she is taken always has strong hints of pre-Christian or non-Christian traditions about Fairyland. This group of Hogg texts includes such works as "Kilmeny", The Pilgrims of the Sun, "A Genuine Border Story", and "Mary Burnet".

The last-named, from The Shepherd's Calendar, is a story quite different in tone from "Mr Adamson of Laverhope". The central character, Mary Burnet, is subjected by her lover John Allanson to something between a seduction and a rape. Supernatural forces, both good and evil, are brought into play by this outrage; and Mary, apparently under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, disappears from earth to become a part-heavenly, part-fairy creature. In her fairy guise, Mary returns to earth to lure her seducer to his destruction, and seven years after her disappearance she returns again, in heavenly and fairy glory, to give comfort to her grieving parents. The word "glamour" came into use in the Scots language before becoming established in English usage; and this word, in its traditional Scots sense of "magic, enchantment, witchcraft", exactly captures the spirit of "Mary Burnet".

Another aspect of Hogg's use of the supernatural in The Shepherd's Calendar comes to the fore in the story "The Brownie of the Black Haggs", a work which explores deep and disturbing recesses of the human mind. Lady Wheelhope becomes obsessed by Merodach, a servant thought by the country people to be a brownie sent to haunt her as a punishment for her wickedness. Her obsession deepens and becomes more complex as, again and again, she tries unsuccessfully to harm him only to suffer herself from the results of her own actions. We are told that the lady "fixed her eyes on Merodach. But such a look!… It was not a look of love nor of hatred exclusively; neither was it of desire or disgust, but it was a combination of them all. It was such a look as one fiend would cast on another, in whose ever-lasting destruction he rejoiced" (105). The author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is very much on his home ground here.

I have been attempting to suggest that Hogg's short stories are richly complex works which draw on deep wells of tradition in their resonant use of the supernatural; and it would be fair to say that his shorter fiction is beginning to achieve a high reputation, especially in Scotland and North America. If this emerging reputation is deserved, why has it taken so long for the worth of these stories to be recognized? A clue is provided by "Tibby Hyslop's Dream", another of the Shepherd's Calendar pieces. This is in effect a story of sexual harassment and attempted seduction; but in the numerous nineteenth-century collected editions of Hogg's works the text is so heavily bowdlerized as to be almost entirely innocent of sexual implication. The story is thus emptied of its significant content.

The posthumous nineteenth-century collected editions of Hogg are all deplorably inadequate; and, as was to be expected in the circumstances, his reputation—high in his lifetime—declined rapidly thereafter. There has been a substantial revival over the past forty years or so, as good modern editions of some of his works have become available. A complete and accurate edition of The Shepherd's Calendar has still to appear, however: and the same could be said of many other major Hogg texts and collections. It is therefore pleasant to be able to record that a new and complete edition of Hogg is at present in active preparation, under the auspices of the University of Stirling's Centre for Scottish Literature and Culture.

Notes

1. James Hogg, Selected Stories and Sketches, ed. Douglas S. Mack, Edinburgh, 1982, 5.

2. John MacQueen, The Rise of the Historical Novel, Edinburgh, 1989, 208.

3. James Hogg, Selected Poems, ed. Douglas S. Mack, Oxford, 1970, 75; ll. 91-99.

TITLE COMMENTARY

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (REVIEW DATE 1 NOVEMBER 1824)

SOURCE: "New Publications, with Critical Remarks: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner." The New Monthly Magazine 11 (1 November 1824): 506.

In the following excerpt, the critic offers a strongly negative assessment of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, objecting especially to Hogg's "bad grammar."

[The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is,] we presume, intended to bring that exaggerated and extravagant style of writing which has lately become too prevalent, into the contempt which it so richly merits. All former horrors are nothing to the ineffable enormities of this justified Sinner, who is a parricide, fratricide, and clericide—for we must coin new words to comprehend all his multifarious offences. Nothing more completely ridiculous can well be imagined than the whole of the story…. We do not altogether approve of the mode which the author has chosen of attacking the religious prejudices of numbers, who, notwithstanding their speculative opinions, are in no danger of becoming either parricides or fratricides. We must also remark, that in spite of the high seasoning given to these Confessions, they are still singularly dull and revolting, and that it is altogether unfair to treat the reader with two versions of such extraordinary trash as the writer has given us in "the Editor's narrative," and the Confessions themselves. Moreover, though we may be compelled to read as much bad Scotch, as any gentleman on the other side of the Tweed may choose to pour out upon us, yet we do protest most solemnly against the iniquity of bad English, of which the present work furnishes most abundant instances. We account his bad grammar amongst the most crying sins of the miscreant with whose history we are here regaled.

WILLISTON R. BENEDICT (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1983)

SOURCE: Benedict, Williston R. "A Story Replete with Horror." Princeton University Library Chronicle 44, no. 3 (spring 1983): 246-51.

In the following essay, Benedict studies the original, 1824 edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and interprets the novel within the context of the literature of the early nineteenth century and within Hogg's oeuvre.

Among the books in the private collection of Mr. Robert H. Taylor, which is now housed in the Firestone Library, is a fine and uncut copy in the original boards of James Hogg's only novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg (1770–1835) was born into a humble farming family of the Lowlands of Scotland. He taught himself to read and write at an early age, and had the good fortune, at about the age of 30, to be drawn from rural obscurity into Edinburgh's literary society through the aid and encouragement of Sir Walter Scott. Like his mentor, Hogg proved successful at publishing some volumes of poetry before turning to the composition of works of fiction about 1818. By 1824, the date of his novel's publication, he had demonstrated to the Edinburgh "literati" his interest in and vast knowledge of the traditional tales of rural Scotland, which constitute one of the principal sources of his novel.

Hogg's few references, in his other works and in his chiefly unpublished correspondence, to the Justified Sinner provide little information as to his intention in writing it. William Blackwood, Edinburgh's most important publisher of the age, had evidently declined to publish the novel, and it appeared instead under the London imprint of T. N. Longman and his associates in the summer of 1824. Departing from his previous practice, Hogg authorized publication of the book without the inclusion of his name on the title page. In a letter to Blackwood dated 28 June 1824 Hogg wrote, with considerable urgency in his usual hurried manner: "There is one hint I beseech you to remember to give…. It is that as some one of our friends are likely to be the first efficient noticers of The Confessions they will not notice them at all as mine but as written by a Glasgow man by all means…. This will give excellent and delightful scope and freedom."¹ In the preface to another volume published in 1832, Hogg explained his desire for anonymous authorship: "The next year, 1824, I published The Confessions of a Sinner ; but it being a story replete with horror, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it: so it was published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well."

Other comments on the book in Hogg's correspondence are rare. In a letter to Blackwood, probably dated 6 August 1828, he wrote that a certain Mrs. Hughes "insists on the Confessions of a Sinner being republished with my name, as she says it is positively the best story of that frightful kind that ever was written. I think you must buy up the remaining copies [of the 1824 edition] and make an edition of them for a trial."² This suggestion resulted in the reprinting in 1828 of the novel under Hogg's name, but with the title altered to The Suicide's Grave. A substantially revised version, expunged of its more sensational passages, was issued in 1837 as The Confessions of a Fanatic. Subsequent editions of the novel utilized the text of 1837 until 1895, when it was at last reprinted with the text of the original 1824 edition fully restored. Another edition containing Hogg's initial version appeared in 1924, with a short but perceptive introduction by T. Earle Welby. But not until an edition was printed in 1947, containing a cogent and more extended analysis of the novel by André Gide, did the Confessions begin to receive the serious attention of scholars of 19th-century Scottish literature. The "bowdlerization" of Hogg's novel throughout the 19th century gives a special importance to its initially published text under Hogg's own supervision.

For the setting of his "story replete with horror" Hogg chose Edinburgh and its environs in the early years of the 18th century. The memory of the terrible period of civil and religious conflict in Scotland during the second half of the 17th century remained vivid in the minds of men and women ca. 1710, as did the powerful influence of Calvinist doctrine. The most inveterate Calvinists were the children of those Cameronians who were the determined opponents of episcopacy and of the doctrine of salvation through the efficacy of good works. The anonymous reviewer of Hogg's novel in London's Literary Gazette (July 1824) shrewdly judged that "the main object of his book … seems to be to satirize the excess of that Calvinical or Cameronian doctrine, which rests the salvation of mankind entirely on faith without good works." The novel functions principally as a severe indictment of the self-righteousness of the "just Pharisee," and as a fearful warning of the perils of religious mania, which can, as here, lead to a career of homicide. Hogg's presentation of this thesis in the Confessions constitutes the subtlest development of it in his works of fiction, and may well comprise its most powerful and original realization in British fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE SAINTSBURY ON THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER

[In the midst of all of Hogg's] chaotic work, there is still to be found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written—a story which … is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader shall wonder how the devil it got where it is….

[In] truth, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, while it has all Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated grasp of character: the few personages of the Confessions are consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with advantage, the form is excellent….

In no book known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable better managed…. The story of the pretended Gil Martin, preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated here.

SOURCE: Saintsbury, George. "Hogg." Macmillan's Magazine 60, no. 359 (September 1889). Reprinted in The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875–1920. Vol. I, pp. 26-52. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923.

To personify the homicidal "righteous Pharisee" Hogg created as his protagonist Robert Wringhim Colwan. Educated exclusively in the Calvinist tenets of the predestined salvation of a few souls and the damnation of the majority of mankind, Colwan espouses the unique efficacy of faith in one's personal salvation to justify the commission of crimes against those imagined to be personal and ideological enemies. These crimes culminate in a succession of homicides that envelop most of the members of Colwan's immediate family. He is impelled to perpetrate these acts by a mysterious being who, while giving his name as Gil-Martin, embodies most of the attributes traditionally associated by Scottish Calvinists with the Devil. The Cameronians, obsessed by the power and omnipresence of the forces of darkness, ascribed to these invisible entities an almost palpable reality. The Devil was to them the most fascinating and terrifying of imagined supernatural powers, possessing among other gifts the ability to appear and disappear at will and the possibility of assuming the physiognomy and shape of any mortal. Combining the talents of Calvinist minister and Scottish lawyer, Satan is described by one of Hogg's characters as often posing as "a strick believer in a' the truths of Christianity." It is while pretending to be a strict coreligionist of Colwan that Gil-Martin incites him to commit the succession of homicides and to kill himself after his insane acts have been revealed to the authorities. One of Gil-Martin's chief devices of persuasion was the assumption of Colwan's precise appearance, so that the former seemed to constitute Colwan's "second self." In the Confessions this delusion of the "second self" is linked in Colwan's mind with the possibility that his intrinsic self has been possessed by the Devil. In fact it represents a projection into visible form of Colwan's own spiritual pride, worldly ambition, and unresolvable inner conflicts.

While composing his novel during the early 1820s, Hogg was evidently relying upon the current vogue of the "Gothic novel" to assure it a readership readily excited by the terrifying and the improbable in fiction. A powerful revival of interest in German literature, especially of the sensational variety, had followed the publication in London in 1813 of Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne. There ensued numerous translations of and reviews concerning German works of this genre from 1817 through 1828, chiefly by Hogg's fellow Scotsmen Thomas Carlyle and Robert Pearse Gillies. Preoccupation with the supernatural was an inherent theme in this proliferation of publications, some of the most interesting of which employ the idea of the "second self" (or "Doppelgänger") to create an atmosphere of suspense and terror. Hogg's novel appears to be the only extended work of fiction published in the British Isles during the early 19th century to utilize the motif of the "second self" in a manner comparable to such contemporary German authors as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean-Paul Richter. The works most resembling Hogg's novel to be translated at this period were Adalbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl and Hoffmann's sole completed novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels. (The latter is unique in contemporary German fiction in linking the "Doppelgänger" theme to a criminally insane protagonist, resembling Hogg's Colwan.)

Can the appearance in 1824 in English translations of Peter Schlemihl and Die Elixiere des Teufels have materially influenced Hogg's treatment of the "second self" in the Confessions? A notice in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany for April indicates that Hogg's book was already in the press. It remained unpublished, however, until mid-July, when both the Literary Gazette and the magazine John Bull carried advertisements (on 17 and 18 July respectively) that it had just been published. However, the appearance of Hogg's important anecdote "A Scots Mummy," later incorporated almost verbatim into the novel, in the issue of Blackwood's Magazine for August 1823 indicates that Hogg had for many months pondered the composition of his book, and was already preparing readers of that periodical for its subsequent publication. It seems probable, therefore, that Hogg concentrated his efforts on composing the novel during the period from autumn 1822 to spring 1824, and that it was largely completed by April 1824. Information in John Bull indicates the prior publication of both of the German novels; the periodical advertised Peter Schlemihl as available to the public on 14 March, while the first announcement of Gillies's translation of Die Elixiere des Teufels appeared there on 27 June. While the friendship of Hogg and Gillies complicates the problem of the influence of the latter's translation on Hogg's novel, one must conclude that it has so far proved impossible to establish any documented influence upon Hogg's employment of the "second self" in his novel by any contemporary German author.

Although he relied for the success of the Confessions upon the popularity of English and German fiction of the supernatural, Hogg introduced important elements into his novel which set it—and his numerous works of shorter fiction—apart from such authors as Ann Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin. Hogg's works have as their settings predominantly rural environments, with characters drawn from the Scottish peasantry or lesser landed gentry rather than from the aristocracy or wealthy middle class. Also notable are the frequent use by Hogg's characters of Scots dialect, in contrast to the more genteel language of "Gothic" romances; a reliance upon prosaic and homely details to enhance the sense of horror; a less inhibited employment of explicit details of physically hideous and morally shocking occurrences; and, above all, a firm and frequently demonstrated conviction that ordinary men and women constantly experience the intervention of the supernatural in their everyday lives. The traditional elements of superstition, communicated orally from generation to generation among the Scottish peasantry, and the long legacy of Scottish Calvinism influenced Hogg's Confessions and his shorter works of fiction to a considerably greater degree than did the conventions of the "Gothic novel." These traditional themes included retribution for real or imagined grievances, with supernatural intervention being often employed to reveal past crimes and impose a vengeance (like that directed against Colwan) that human justice could not provide. Linked to this idea is Calvinism's emphasis upon the punishment of the "unrighteous," rather than upon their redemption, an emphasis that contributed to the fearful and mysterious ethos of Hogg's novel. Another element is Hogg's frequent use of dreams or hallucinations to prove (in Hogg's words) "in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with … a world of spirits with which it has no acquain-tance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to the soul as if sleeping in death."

Despite the modest but unflagging success of his previous published volumes of prose, the Confessions proved a complete failure with the reading public of 1824. The enigmatic nature of the book also baffled the four anonymous London reviewers who took the trouble to write about it after its publication. The critic for the Westminster Review (October 1824) dismissed Colwan as an insane fanatic, and Gil-Martin as a "mongrel devil." The reviewer in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (November 1824) attacked Hogg's style as "exaggerated and extravagant," ridiculed the narrative as totally implausible, and denounced the author for his adverse view of Calvinism. On 17 July there appeared in the Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres a much more searching analysis of the novel. The critic found it, although "mystical and extravagant," nonetheless "curious and interesting, such as we might have expected from Mr. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, whose [creation] it is." The reviewer in the British Critic (July 1824) was also perspicacious enough to recognize Hogg as the author. While judging the novel a "most uncouth and unpleasant volume," he described and even reproduced verbatim many of its incidents in the review, and perceptively linked Hogg's work—in "machinery" and themes (including that of the "second self")—to Gillies's translation of the Elixiere des Teufels. After four reviews, generally adverse in tenor, the commercial failure of Hogg's novel was assured. As a result of this contemporary neglect, the book enjoys a reputation for scarcity among modern collectors of Scottish and English literature, copies in the original condition of publication (such as the Taylor copy) being exceedingly uncommon.

With the possible exception of one or two of his short tales, nothing in Hogg's copious body of prose fiction prepares the reader for a book of such psychological subtlety and tension as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It was, in fact, much closer in conception and spirit to certain celebrated works of German Romanticism than to the fiction of Hogg's own compatriots, including of course the vastly more popular Sir Walter Scott. Hogg's combination of traditional, theological, supernatural, and psychological motifs in a manner alien to the readers of his own day delayed critical recognition of the literary importance and originality of his work for more than a century.

Notes

1. Unpublished holograph letter, National Library of Scotland.

2. Ibid.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH (ESSAY DATE 1993)

SOURCE: Smith, Iain Crichton. "A Work of Genius: James Hogg's Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 1-11.

In the following essay, Smith offers high praise for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that its sophisticated and advanced (by nineteenth-century standards) psychological and philosophical aspects, among others, distinguish the novel as "one of the very greatest of all Scottish books."

It is a strange thing that in a biography of James Hogg written by Sir George Douglas and dated September 1899, there are only three references to the Memoirs of Justified Sinner, the most substantial of these occurring in a footnote rebutting an opinion apparently held by Andrew Lang that John Gibson Lockhart had a hand in the novel.¹ There is no attempt at an analysis of the book.

Yet this is a towering Scottish novel, one of the very greatest of all Scottish books. We know that Scott and Hogg were acquaintances and that their relationship was sometimes uneasy. Douglas writes:

His [i.e., Hogg's] principal grounds of irritation against Scott were the consistent abstinence of the latter from recognizing him in any of his published writing: his sometimes gratuitous and unhelpful criticism of the prose pieces … and his rather inconsiderate recommendation of Hogg to the post of head shepherd to Lord Porchester, the condition of that appointment being that he should put his 'poetical talent under lock and key for ever.'²

Yet I believe that Scott wrote nothing as artistically satisfying, as brilliant in conception and execution and continuous logical power as Hogg's novel. When we set beside it the Walpoles and the Radcliffes one can see that Hogg moves in an altogether different dimension.

The story is easily told.

A life-loving laird called Colwan marries a religious zealot whose implacable spiritual adviser, a minister called Wringhim, believes utterly in the Calvinist Law of Election by Grace. Two sons are born of her, one called George whom her husband acknowledges as his and who is an amiable average normal boy, the other Robert (whom the laird does not acknowledge on the grounds that he has been separated from his wife who now lives with Wringhim). Robert is educated into the strict Calvinist religion and is persuaded of the truth of the Law of Election. Robert one day meets a young man who speaks to him about religious things but is really the Devil. On the latter's instructions he kills a minister, his brother George and possibly his mother. At the end of the book—his psyche tortured beyond endurance—he kills himself.

Now it is no use comparing Hogg with Scott or, as far as I can see, with anyone in his century (born in 1770, Hogg died in 1835).

This novel seems to me to be psychologically far in advance of Hogg's time and can only be properly understood in the twentieth century. (I believe this also to be true of Dostoevski with whom Hogg can without chauvinism be compared) I have often thought that there is a resemblance between Scottish and Russian writers in their primary concerns. The Scot is a metaphysical philosophical being, and, in general, refuses to rest content with the description of manners. It is no accident that Macdiarmid, for example, writes often of the Russians. In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle he asks for a share of Dostoevski's "appalling genius." I believe that Hogg had more than his share, especially (and probably exclusively) in this book.

Time and time again we are reminded of Dostoevski and of no one else. (If one compares the book with, say, Gogol's Diary of a Madman we are, I think, in a different world.)

One is reminded of Dostoevski first of all in the fact that both writers are capable of inducing a sense of vertigo in the reader. It is difficult to explain this clearly but I mean that one seems to be caught up in a curiously dizzy mechanism so that the normal appears strange and foggy and inverted. One thinks for instance of the Vision at Arthur's Seat which is metaphysical in its implications and much more sophisticated than the grotesque visions, say, in The Castle of Otranto.

Again, one gets, now and again, a scene in Hogg which reminds one directly of Dostoevski, that is, the proud glorying in abasement and injury as in the following. Robert is trying to spoil George's tennis game and has been hit:

In the meantime, young Wringhim [i.e., Robert] was an object to all of the uttermost disgust. The blood flowing from his mouth and nose he took no pains to stem, neither did he so much as wipe it away; so that it spread over all his cheeks, and breast, even off at his toes. In that state did he take up his station in the middle of the competitors; and he did not now keep his place, but ran about, impeding everyone who attempted to make at the ball. They loaded him with execrations, but it availed nothing; he seemed courting persecution and buffetings, keeping steadfastly to his old joke of damnation, and marring the game so completely that, in spite of every effort on the part of the players, he forced them to stop their game and give it up. He was such a rueful-looking object, covered with blood, that none of them had the heart to kick him, although it appeared the only thing he wanted; and, as for George, he said not another word to him, either in anger or reproof.³

In another passage we get another Dostoevski theme, the contempt of the absolute man for the liberal. The passage begins:

He [i.e., Robert] then raised himself on his knees and hams, and raising up his ghastly face, while the blood streamed over both ears, he besought his life of his brother, in the most abject whining manner, gaping and blubbering most piteously.

                                        (p. 41)

The passage continues, later on:

"Well, Robert, I will believe it. I am disposed to be hasty and passionate: it is a fault in my nature; but I never meant, or wished you evil; and God is my witness that I would as soon stretch out my hand to my own life, or my father's, as to yours." At these words, Wringhim uttered a hollow exulting laugh, put his hands in his pockets, and withdrew a space to his accustomed distance.

                                        (p. 42)

There is a curious effeminacy (combined with absolutism) in Robert who, one senses, would have admired George more if he had been totally ruthless and not liberal.

Another Dostoevskian characteristic is the humor of the book. The opening section where the laird's wife sits up with a prayer book in her hand on her wedding night and refuses to come to bed is brilliantly funny, especially when the laird himself drops off to sleep in the middle of her prayers and begins to snore:

He began, in truth, to sound a nasal bugle of no ordinary calibre—the notes being little inferior to those of a military trumpet. The lady tried to proceed, but every returning note from the bed burst on her ear with a louder twang, and a longer peal, till the concord of sweet sounds became so truly pathetic that the meek spirit of the dame was quite overcome; and, after shedding a flood of tears, she arose from her knees, and retired to the chimney-corner with her Bible in her lap, there to spend the hours in holy meditation till such time as the inebriated trumpeter should awaken to a sense of propriety.

                                       (p. 7)

True, this might appear to be pawky humor but a careful analysis will show that it is very purposeful. Hogg is asserting human values against absolute ones gone mad. He has learnt (what Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe haven't) that there is a place for humor in the he kind of book he is writing, as Dostoevski also knew. Much of his other humor is on a more purely metaphysical level as for instance at the end of the book where the Devil gets into the printer's shop—a printer's devil. This is a nice metaphysical pun.

But there are many other instances of this nature, for the story belongs to the kingdom of the absurd. A number of names are bandied about in connection with Hogg, for example, Defoe, Poe, and Henry James in a book such as The Turn of the Screw. The latter, I think, is closer to him in conscious art: as for Defoe and Poe I cannot see that they are very like him. Poe is far more morbid than Hogg, and Defoe doesn't have his sense of ideology. It seems to me that the chosen theme suggests more the milieu of a Dostoevski in its ambiguous explorations of the spirit. And to find a writer treating a Dostoevskian theme in the eighteenth century—what a miracle!

I can in fact think of no other Scottish book which is a miracle of this kind. How did Hogg—a minor poet and minor prose writer in his other work—make this transcendental leap? It seems to be inexplicable except that in some strange fashion—perhaps in a hallucinatory logical vision—he was given the sight of this particular extreme form of religion carried to its ultimate conclusion, and worked out the implications with the instantaneous grasp of genius.

The crucial discovery he made is overwhelmingly simple. It is this. What if the Doctrine of Divine Election is actually a doctrine not of God but of the Devil? What if the Devil should find himself able to acquiesce quite sincerely in the implications of the doctrine? What if the Devil should on these terms admit that he is a Christian and really mean it?

It is worth thinking about this before we discuss it in more detail. There are plays by Marlowe and Goethe about a man who sells his soul to the Devil. In these plays the man is intellectually brilliant but he knows that he is dealing with the Devil—he is selling his soul to him. It is the ultimate capitalist transaction. The Devil offers, in return, knowledge, luxury and women. But the Devil in this particular book doesn't offer luxury or women. He offers in fact what God appears to offer—Divine Election—and this in itself is the damnable thing because the theory is in its axioms devilish for it states that a certain number are elected to be saved. God does the selection. The inexorable logic of the theory arises from the attempt to deny that good works are enough—for a man could do all sorts of good works and still be a heathen. There is a logic to the theory but it is the logic of madness since it leads unequivocally to the conclusion that ideology is more important than humanity, and it is therefore in essence a peculiarly twentieth-century preoccupation. It is a special instance of a general theory which has perverted our own civilization. It implies the creation of a spiritual elite implacable against all those who do not belong to it. It is a Mensa society of theology. It leads to the kind of thinking that enticed Leopold and Loeb to carry out their murder on the grounds of their own superiority. It is not so unlike the ideas of Nietzche as commonly understood and put into practice, say, by the student in Crime and Punishment.

Members of the elite elect each other. Robert Wringhim's father elects Robert as he elected himself previously. One of the victims is not a heathen but a minister. Here we are in the presence of something very modern. The Communist, for instance, hates the Socialist more than he hates the Tory.

Now this theory can also be compared with Dostoevski's work. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevski begins with the proposition, "If there is no immortality all things are permissible." Hogg begins essentially with the proposition: "If a man knows that he is saved no matter what he does—saved to all eternity—and all good works are irrelevant—then all things are permissible."

Such ideas lead to a totalitarian philosophy. That is why I said that Hogg and Dostoevski can only be fully understood in the twentieth century.

Now Robert does not recognize the Devil for the simple reason that the Devil agrees with all his ideas and does so sincerely since the ideas themselves are devilish. Again and again we find this idea:

"Tell me this, boy:" [says Wringhim to Robert after he has seen and spoken to the Devil] "did this stranger, with whom you met, adhere to the religious principles in which I have educated you?"

"Yes, to every one of them in their fullest latitude," said I.

"Then he was no agent of the Wicked One with whom you held converse," said he.

                                    (pp. 110-11)

"For a man who is not only dedicated to the King of Heaven in the most solemn manner, soul, body, and spirit, but also chosen of him from the beginning, justified, sanctified, and received into a communion that never shall be broken, and from which no act of his shall ever remove him—the possession of such a man, I tell you, is worth kingdoms …"

                                       (p. 131)

The Devil quotes the Old Testament in order to justify murder:

"If the acts of Jehu, in rooting out the whole house of his master, were ordered and approved of by the Lord," said he, "would it not have been more praiseworthy if one of Ahab's own sons had stood up for the cause of the God of Israel, and rooted the sinners and their idols out of the land?"

                                           (p. 134)

The most astounding passage of all is this:

"We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person" [says the Devil]. "I myself have suffered grievously in that way. The spirit that now directs my energies is not that with which I was endowed at my creation. It is changed within me, and so is my whole nature. My former days were those of grandeur and felicity. But, would you believe it? I was not then a Christian. Now I am. I have been converted to its truths by passing through the fire, and, since my final conversion, my misery has been extreme."

                                         (p. 174)

The methods Hogg uses for involving the reader in this whirlpool are various in operation but similar in essence. They all depend on ambiguity. The quotation just given shows ambiguity operating linguistically and in ideology. We find ambiguity at the very beginning of the book. Robert tries to enter the inn into which George and his companions have gone after their tennis game. They won't let him, and eventually he attracts a crowd to attack the inn saying that it is occupied by Jacobites. However there happens to be a number of Whigs in the inn and the landlord tells them that the crowd is composed of Jacobites whereupon the Whigs sally out and attack their own people, not finding out till the end of the fray what has happened.

The Devil, too, often transforms himself into all kinds of shapes. Sometimes he looks like George, sometimes like Robert, sometimes like a minister. One of the interesting bits in the novel is when the Devil disguises himself as an actual preacher just after he and Robert have murdered Blanchard, the minister, and causes that preacher to be arrested for the crime though he wasn't in the area at all. This does not seem to me to be akin to the horseplay in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. It is much more seriously intended and more metaphysical in its implications.

There is also a continuous confusion of identities. At times Robert doesn't know who he is. He is supposed to have killed his mother and seduced a neighboring girl but he has no recollection of such things. There are typical schizophrenic manifestations: indeed Hogg's book can be partly discussed in modern psychological terms.

At the end of the book Hogg, or rather the narrator, writes as follows:

Were the relation at all consistent with reason, it corresponds so minutely with traditionary facts that it could scarcely have missed to have been received as authentic; but in this day, and with the present generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow-creature; and at length lured to self-destruction, in the hopes that this same fiend and tormentor was to suffer and fall along with him. It was a bold theme for an allegory, and would have suited that age well had it been taken up by one fully qualified for the task, which this writer was not. In short, we must either conceive him not only the greatest fool, but the greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or, that he was a religious maniac, who wrote and wrote about a deluded creature, till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed himself the very object whom he had been all along describing.

                                 (pp. 229-30)

Now clearly the latter part cannot be true. The woman called Calvert (and her male accomplice) did see Robert Wringhim and a companion kill George. There are other phenomena that can only be explained on the basis that there was a real physical person, Devil or otherwise.

Nevertheless, parts of the narrative reveal perfectly explicable psychological phenomena of a modern kind.

There is no reason for doubting that Robert might, without consciously knowing it, have killed his own mother. By the time that she was killed he was beginning to repent of his association with a person whom he believed to be the Devil and, recognizing perhaps that his mother by her religious bigotry was partly the cause of his own spiritual destruction, he might indeed have killed her. Similarly he might have seduced the neighboring girl. The suffocated Id might have taken its revenge on the Superego. The novel does give a continuous impression of psychological insight as when Robert sees himself divided into two persons, none of them his own, one George and the other his new friend, the Devil.

It would, in fact, have been of the greatest interest to have had a Freudian analysis of this novel which has come out of that country where for long periods the Superego has been rampant. It is clear for instance that the suicide at the end is psychologically right. If all is predestined, the mind can only prove that it is not a machine by asserting at least its right to suicide—if that too is not predestined.

In the second half of the Memoirs we feel a certain pity for this tortured being, Robert Wringhim, who has gone irretrievably to the good which at a certain point turns into the bad. It reminds one of the pity one feels for the Frankenstein's monster of Mary Shelley. The righteousness of the parents is visited upon Robert with a vengeance.

Trying to escape, he is at the end enmeshed in a weaver's web and is relentlessly pursued by the Devil with a friendship which is really hatred. One can quite clearly imagine a mind so imprisoned by the Superego of a Calvinism carried to extremes that it would in fact follow the logic contained in this book. The Id would presumably emerge in aggression and pride. Burns's "Holy Willie" occasionally lifted a leg on various girls. Robert doesn't even do this and consequently he might later have seduced the neighboring girl (losing the memory of it in the process).

The possibility of schizophrenia is always present but Hogg didn't as yet have the knowledge to be consistently accurate. One feels, however, that his imagination had seized the essentials of it. If one, for instance, compares this book with Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one recognizes that the latter emerges from a cardboard world manufactured in a metaphysical void.

A very interesting and specially Scottish paragraph is this:

There was only one boy at Mr Wilson's class who kept always the upper hand of me in every part of education. I strove against him from year to year … and I was convinced he had dealings with the Devil … and I was at length convinced that it was no human ingenuity that beat me with so much ease in the Latin, after I had often sat up a whole night with my reverend father, studying my lesson in all its bearings.

                                       (p. 99)

Altogether, in his use of shifting identity, ambiguity as a deliberate device, the cult of the superior mind, a possibly traumatic loss of memory and other methods, Hogg's novel impresses one as being a manifestation of hallucinatory genius which has resulted from intense concentration on a specifically Scottish theme projected itself into the future. It might be worth reminding ourselves once again of the work of Mrs. Radcliffe and Walpole to realize how essentially different Hogg's book is. What he has in fact done is to pursue a logic to its conclusion and then uncover what he finds. The device of describing the events externally in the third person and then shifting to the first person works extremely well especially for this kind of book. He has instinctively realized that a standard of external reality must be given before the Memoir itself is quoted. Otherwise, it would be difficult for the reader to establish himself.

There is however one other point which might be profitably discussed and that is the use to which Scots has been put in this novel.

Clearly an important thing that Hogg has to do is to establish a mean by which the inhumanity of Robert can be judged. I believe that he has done this by using the Scottish language.

If English is alien to the Scottish consciousness (especially in the eighteenth century) then why not let the alienation of a particular consciousness be expressed in it? Similarly if the Scottish language is the natural language of the Scottish consciousness why not let the normal, the average, the human, be expressed in it?

Consider this passage:

"Ineffectual Calling? There is no such thing, Robert," said she. [i.e. his mother]

"But there is, madam," said I, "and that answer proves how much you say these fundamental precepts by rote, and without any consideration. Ineffectual Calling is the outward call of the gospel without any effect on the hearts of unregenerated and impenitent sinners. Have not all these the same calls, warnings, doctrines, and reproofs, that we have? And is not this Ineffectual Calling? Has not Ardinferry the same? Has not Patrick M'Lure the same? Has not the Laird of Dalcastle and his reprobate heir the same? And will any tell me that this is not Ineffectual Calling?"

"What a wonderful boy he is!" said my mother.

"I'm feared he turn out to be a conceited gowk," said old Barnet, the minister's man.

                                          (p. 90)

Now I believe that this last sentence establishes by the use of the Scottish language the reaction of ordinary humanity when confronted by what it senses to be abstract ideological nonsense. And I believe farther that only the Scottish language at this point could have had the power to be so curt and precise and yet at the same time so intimate. The very words recall even in their contempt a human intimacy which Robert has lost. Even more, their gestures, while to be considered as an impatient demolition, invite him into a world which he has abandoned, imprisoned as he is in a language—representative of a world—that will destroy him. Consider another passage: Robert has told Wringhim that Barnet has been insulting him (that is Wringhim). The latter cross-examines Barnet; and concludes as follows in what I consider to be a crucial linguistic confrontation:

"Hear then my determination, John. If you do not promise to me, in faith and honour, that you never will say, or insinuate such a thing again in your life, as that that boy is my natural son, I will take the keys of the church from you, and dismiss you from my service."

John pulled out the keys, and dashed them on the gravel at the reverend minister's feet. "There are the keys o' your kirk, sir! I hae never had muckle mense o' them sin' ye entered the door o't. I hae carried them this three and thretty year, but they hae aye been like to burn a hole i' my pouch sin' ever they were turned for your admittance. Tak them again, an' gie them to wha you will, and muckle gude may he get o' them. Auld John may dee a beggar in a hay barn, or at the back of a dike, but he sall aye be master o' his ain thoughts an' gie them vent or no, as he likes."

                                          (pp. 97-8)

This last sentence I consider of particular importance. It represents the assertion of human freedom against abstract repression true for all ages and all times. It is life rebelling against the ideological.

One further instance should be enough to show this use of the Scots language. Mrs. Logan has lost some valuables and a woman called Calvert has been accused of stealing them. Mrs. Logan's maid refuses to identify certain of the stolen objects in court as belonging to her mistress so that Calvert may not be hanged. Here the values of ordinary humanity—unpredictable and comic—are established again and again in the maid's intimate Scots language. In this passage she talks about herself and Mrs. Logan.

"What passed, say ye? O, there wasna muckle: I was in a great passion, but she was dung doitrified a wee. When she gaed to put the key i' the door, up it flew to the fer wa'. 'Bless ye, jaud, what's the meaning o' this?' quo she. 'Ye hae left the door open, ye tawpie!' quo she. 'The ne'er o' that I did,' quo I, 'or may my shakel bane never turn another key.' When we got the candle lightit, a' the house was in a hoad-road. 'Bessy, my woman,' quo she, 'we are baith ruined and undone creatures.' 'The deil a bit,' quo I; 'that I deny positively. H'mh! to speak o' a lass o' my age being ruined and undone! I never had muckle except what was within a good jerkin, an' let the thief ruin me there wha can.'"

                                             (p. 61)

Later there is the passage:

"Perhaps you are not aware, girl, that this scrupulousness of yours is likely to thwart the purposes of justice, and bereave your mistress of property to the amount of a thousand merks." (From the Judge.)

"I canna help that, my lord: that's her look-out. For my part, I am resolved to keep a clear conscience, till I be married, at any rate."

"Look over these things and see if there is any one article among them which you can fix on as the property of your mistress."

"No ane o' them, sir, no ane o' them. An oath is an awfu' thing, especially when it is for life or death. Gie the poor woman her things again, an' let my mistress pick up the next she finds: that's my advice."

                                        (pp. 62-3)

It is unnecessary to indicate the relevance of this scene (apparently discursive) to the rest of the book. The maid has a sense of proportion: she realizes that a human life is worth more than a thousand marks.

What in effect the Scots language does is to keep things in proportion. It is, as in The House with the Green Shutters, a marvellous instrument for deflation, though it can also be cruel.

What then does this book teach us? It teaches us that to go beyond the bounds of humanity is to lose oneself so utterly that one cannot tell God from the Devil.

In a long section about the Cameronian sect this ambiguity is discussed. Apparent irrelevancies in this book turn out not to be irrelevant at all as the book is beautifully made. This is not true of many of Hogg's other stories.

A careful reading of Hogg's other prose shows nothing comparable to the Memoirs. The stories, though always readable, are often rambling. One at least, "Welldean Hall," which depends on a ghost who has left a will among the classics in a library, reminds one of Mrs. Radcliffe. However, Hogg tends to be more humorous than she is and less portentous. "The Bridal of Polmood" has a very funny multiple bedroom scene and an interesting detective-story denouement dependent on two bodies both of whose heads have disappeared.

Many of the stories are about devils or wraiths but none shows the metaphysical treatment found in the Memoirs. The Brownie of Bodsbeck, though apparently about the supernatural, is not: the events are cleared up in a perfectly rational manner at the end. It is interesting too that this story is about the Covenanters, a harried sect almost as fanatical as Robert himself. Though the story tends to ramble a bit I think that, outside of the Memoirs, it is his best. The Covenanters are saved by the daughter of a man who is himself on the other side and when praising his daughter for saving them in spite of his own ideological hostility he expresses the humanity which transcends ideas: "Deil care what side they war on, Kate!" cried Walter, in the same vehement voice; "ye hae taen the side o' human nature; the suffering and the humble side, an' the side o' feeling, my woman …"⁴ The story is notable too for the portrait of Claverhouse but above all for the marvellous Highland soldier, Daniel Roy MacPherson, who says: "Any man will stand py me when I am in te right, put wit a phrother I must always pe in te right."⁵

"The Wool Gatherer" is a nice romantic story with the inevitable happy ending. The stories show interesting though conventional invention. In them Hogg is always strongest on his home ground around the Borders and in Scots of which he has a remarkable command.

However, there is nothing in them to prepare us for the Memoirs, though they contain, scattered here and there, many of the themes treated on in that book—including stories about the Devil and the supernatural, stories about religious extremists and ambiguities of motive.

Only, however, in the Memoirs do all these themes take on a logical rigor and undeviating development. Only in the Memoirs do we sense the continuous shadow of metaphysical meaning running below the external one.

All that this proves is that the productions of genius are ultimately inexplicable.

Notes

1. George Douglas, James Hogg (Edinburgh & London, 1899), p. 104.

2. Ibid., p. 109. The quotation is from Hogg's Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott.

3. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (New York, 1959), pp. 23-4. Further references will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

4. James Hogg, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, ed. Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh and London, 1976), p. 163.

5. Ibid., p. 144.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Bligh, John. "The Doctrinal Premises of Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 19 (1984): 148-64.

Interprets The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as a didactic but finally ambivalent attack on Antinomian Calvinism and the associated theological doctrine of Predestination.

Campbell, Ian. "James Hogg and the Bible." Scottish Literary Journal 10, no. 1 (May 1983): 14-29.

Considers Hogg's understanding of the Bible and his use of this knowledge for artistic and satirical ends in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Gide, André. Introduction to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, pp. ix-xvi. London: The Cresset Press, 1947.

Influential introduction, in which Gide pioneered the concept of the psychological nature of Hogg's personal demon. Gide's comments triggered a resurgence of interest in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and provided a foundation for later critics' interpretations of the work.

Gosse, Edmund. "The Confessions of a Justified Sinner." In Silhouettes, pp. 121-30. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925.

Grudging appraisal of Hogg's novel that finds fault with its ambiguity and reckless introduction of the supernatural.

Groves, David. "Allusions to Dr. Faustus in James Hogg's A Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 18 (1983): 157-65.

Explores the ways in which Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is reflected in the imagery, theme, and structure of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

―――――. "Other Prose Writings of James Hogg in Relation to A Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 262-66.

Emphasizes the theme of Christian moderation in Hogg's writing, concluding that neither of the narrators in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner entirely represent the author's own beliefs.

―――――. James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988. 160 p.

Study of Hogg's self-education and development as a writer.

Heinritz, Reinhard Silvia Mergenthal. "Hogg, Hoffmann, and Their Diabolical Elixirs." Studies in Hogg and his World, no. 7 (1996): 47-58.

Considers Hogg's relationship to the Gothic tradition and compares his work to that of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Hutton, Clark. "Kierkegaard, Antinomianism, and James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner." Scottish Literary Journal 20, no. 1 (May 1993): 37-48.

Compares Hogg's treatment of antinomianism in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with that of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Jackson, Richard D. "James Hogg and the Unfathomable Hell." Romanticism on the Net, no. 28 (November 2002): 〈http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2002/v/n28/007206ar.html〉.

Examines Hogg's depiction of opium use in the nightmarish experiences of Robert Wringhim in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Jones, Douglas. "Double Jeopardy and the Chameleon Art in James Hogg's Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 23 (1988): 164-85.

Argues against psychoanalytic interpretations of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, concentrating instead on the narrative's concern with subjectivity, ambiguity, circularity, and disguise

Mack, Douglas S. "James Hogg in 2000 and Beyond." Romanticism on the Net, no. 19 (August 2000): 〈http://users.ox.ac.uk/∼scat0385/19mack.html〉.

Maintains that despite Hogg's status as a disenfranchised marginal writer, his texts have a part to play at the heart of current discussion of British literature of the Romantic era because they give voice to the insights, culture, and concerns of non-elite, subaltern Scotland.

Mackenzie, Scott. "Confessions of a Gentrified Sinner: Secrets in Scott and Hogg." Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 1 (spring 2002): 3-32.

Discusses the allusions in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Walter Scott's authorship of the Waverley novels.

Oost, Regina B. "'False Friends, Squeamish Readers, and Foolish Critics': The Subtext of Authorship in Hogg's Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature 31 (1999): 86-106.

Contends that in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Hogg comments on the writing profession and the act of authorship.

Pope, Rebecca A. "Hogg, Wordsworth, and Gothic Autobiography." Studies in Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 218-40.

Argues that The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner parodies William Wordsworth, undermines conventional realism, and utilizes a Gothic logic of ironic reversal.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner." In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, pp. 97-117. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Examines the articulations of male paranoia in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Simpson, Louis. James Hogg: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962, 222 p.

Detailed analysis of Hogg's life and works.

Smith, Nelson C. James Hogg. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980, 183 p.

Critical study of Hogg's life and works.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Hogg's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 10; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 93, 116, 159; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 4, 109; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1.