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Until fairly recently James Hogg has been known mainly as a poet. But he wrote several very different novels of astonishingly high quality; he is one of the finest of Scottish short story writers; and in The Three Perils of Man he created a work which goes beyond any of these categories – a work which he rightly called a Border romance. The fact that this comic, fantastic, and extravagant epic was dismissed as a trivial production in 1822 by Edinburgh literary circles, and by Walter Scott himself, can only be understood by looking briefly at the prejudiced and discouraging way in which Hogg’s fiction (and indeed Hogg’s presence) was received in polite Edinburgh. For its rich and varied living examples of folk lore and legend alone, his work should have excited at least the antiquarian interest of Scott and his contemporaries, yet the truth would seem to be that from the moment of his entry into literary Edinburgh in 1810, Hogg, as a serious writer of fiction, was doomed to misunderstanding and misdirection. This was tragic for Scottish literature since his genius was, in its unique way, as remarkable as that of Scott himself. Hogg was a victim of the ever-growing Edinburgh and Scottish upper-and middle-class snobbery of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns had met this snobbery – indeed that feature common to them all, what David Daiches has called a ‘crisis of identity’, arose directly out of these writers’ unsureness as to where their audience and their significant critics were to be found. There has indeed been much discussion about the general Scottish cultural background to Hogg and his contemporaries, but the significance of his personal and literary relationships is only now being recognised.

In his influential Scott and Scotland (1936) Edwin Muir claimed that no complete and healthy critical awareness existed in Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that this was replaced by the doctrinaire disagreements of the great periodicals of the day, the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine. Contemporary criticism now challenges such a sweeping and denigratory view of Scottish literature in the period, but nevertheless sees real harm to creative effort coming from the adverse effect of the new genteel and Anglicised standards of taste and politeness which then held sway in the polite circles of the capital. Scott’s unique and yet popular vision commanded, of course, the admiration of all classes. Susan Ferrier, on the other hand, abandoned fiction after 1832 because of a sense of the activity being socially unacceptable. The same sensibility made her refuse to read John Galt’s fiction because its vulgarity ‘beats print’. John Gibson Lockhart’s two considerable attempts at serious investigation of the darker aspects of Scottish psychology, Adam Blair (1822) and Matthew Wald (1824), caused shock and disapproval to a degree which we now find difficult to understand, and which may have persuaded him to try other forms of writing. The refined Edinburgh which admired the fiction of John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) was bound to find Hogg’s tales offensive, with their rude Border health and their directness of expression.

In 1810 Hogg came into this society like a bull into a china shop, with his plan to run a weekly magazine, The Spy. With his Border background of rich oral poetry and story, and his wholeness of attitude, which integrated manual labour and poetic vision, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ was an anachronism in nineteenth-century Edinburgh. His directness and honesty of approach attracted patrons at first, and then embarrassed them. And a curious and distasteful element emerges from his relations with some of his patrons. They kept up the pretence of being his friend, when they were in fact exploiting him.

While Walter Scott was not one of these false friends, and did help Hogg frequently, it was nevertheless always as Hogg’s cultural and social superior. His letters are littered with allusions to the ‘great Caledonian Boar’ and the ‘hog’s pearls’ (referring to Hogg’s novel The Three Perils of Women). Hogg was annoyed at how Scott would manage him in public; and on one occasion the great man’s help was offered on the condition that Hogg put his poetical talent under lock and key forever. Scott would give money and well-meant criticism about the lack of planning in Hogg’s stories, but in terms of a full and frank interchange of ideas between literary and intellectual equals he failed him. The Scott of Hogg’s Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott (1834) had ‘a too strong leaning to the old aristocracy’, ‘a prodigious devotion for titled rank, amounting almost to adoration’. This Scott was bored at shepherds’ discussions and quizzed his simple hosts in superior fashion, and supervised Hogg’s table manners on public occasions. The relationship is found in a nutshell in Scott’s dinner joke – ‘If ye reave the Hoggs o’ Fauldshope / Ye Harry Harden’s gear…’ – that is, you insult Scott’s vassal.

And if Scott, the counsellor of writers the world over, could often ignore or fail to see the real talent of Hogg, it is not surprising to find lesser Edinburgh figures following his lead. Hogg’s highly complex relations with Blackwood’s Magazine illustrate this perfectly. He appears to have had a major hand in starting the magazine in 1817, beginning the famous parody of biblical writing in the scandalous ‘Chaldee manuscript’, which lampooned most of the Edinburgh notables of the time. His new friends, John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, fresh from Oxford, lacking Hogg’s geniality, then reworked this, and allowed the savage note which came to be attributed as much to Hogg as to themselves. It is ironic in the light of this and later exploitation, that in 1817 Hogg had advised William Blackwood that

Wilson’s papers have a masterly cast about them; a little custom would make him the best periodical writer of the age – keep hold of him.

It seems that as Wilson and Lockhart grew more friendly with Blackwood, Hogg was increasingly viewed through glasses coloured by snobbery. Lockhart was not so bad – indeed he paid a marvellous tribute to Hogg’s ‘unaffected simplicity… modesty and confidence such as well becomes a man of genius’, along with his ‘noble consciousness of perfect independence’, in his Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1818). But is there not still something here of the ritual of praising the Scottish peasant-poet that was enacted with Burns? There is no doubt about the attitude of John Wilson, whom modern critics increasingly identify as an embodiment of unhealthy and pre-Kailyard developments in Scottish literature of the period, with his warped genius, his double-dealing, and his sentimental verse and politically biased and melodramatic fiction – all the more influential in the ’twenties and ’thirties for Wilson’s being editor of Blackwood’s as well as the politically appointed and sadly underqualified Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1820. Here is a typically ambiguous Wilson treatment of Hogg in Blackwood’s:

You, James, are the rough diamond he [the author of an article on Hogg in The Scots Magazine] proposes to describe with mathematical exactness. Really, I felt, during the solemn note of preparation, much as one feels in a drawing room, when, the stupid servant having forgotten to announce the name, the door slowly moves on its hinges, and some splendid stranger is expected to appear; but when, to the pleased surprise of the assembled company, in bounced you yourself, the worthy and most ingenious shepherd, rubbing your ungloved hands (would I were a glove on that hand!) as if you were washing them, with a good humoured smile on your honest face, enough to win every heart, and with a pair of top boots… instantly recalling the shining imagery of Day and Martin’s patent blacking.

This combines the depiction of Hogg as buffoon with an appearance of affection in a way which the Noctes Ambrosianae, that series of imaginary evenings of drink and wayward discussion involving Wilson as ‘Christopher North’, with assorted friends and the Ettrick Shepherd, was to continue throughout the 1820s, a treatment particularly poisonous in its exploitation of its victim’s good nature. Hogg wrote about this to Blackwood:

I am almost ruing the day that I ever saw you. I have had letters, newspapers, and magazines poured in upon me… The country is full of impatience. No-one has any right to publish aught in my name without consulting me… It is confoundedly hard that I should be made a tennis ball between contending parties. If you can find out by the writ or otherwise who the shabby scoundrel is that writes the enclosed, pray return it to him in a blank cover.

Wilson could be even more direct. In 1821 he wrote:

Pray, who wishes to know anything about his life? Who indeed cares a single farthing, whether he be at this blessed moment dead or alive? Only picture to yourself a stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, enveloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of immeasurable tusks, and a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance, lumbering in suddenly upon the elegant retirement of Mr. Miller’s back shop… What would he [Hogg] himself have thought if a large surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast?

Wilson’s statement about the country lout lumbering in on a scene of elegant retirement represents polite Edinburgh’s heartfelt attitude to Hogg. And Hogg in his turn was bound to clash with the Edinburgh Literati. Of the trio who wrote the ‘Chaldee manuscript’, he alone managed to stay friendly with the Whigs who were satirised therein. Of an older generation, straightforward and without affectation, he was incapable of snobbery. This is charmingly revealed in the description by a contemporary of a typical Hogg gathering of the kind he used to hold in later life whenever he came up from the Borders to Edinburgh: Grassmarket meal dealers, genteel and slender young men from Parliament House, printers from the Cowgate, book-sellers from the New Town, all rubbed shoulders.

Between a couple of young advocates sits a decent grocer from Bristo Street, and amidst a host of shop lads from the Luckenbooths is perched a stiffish young probationer who scarcely knows whether he should be here or not… jolly, honest-like bakers in pepper-and-salt coats give great uneasiness to squads of black coats in juxtaposition with them; and several dainty looking youths in white neckcloths and black silk eyeglass ribbons are evidently much discomposed by a rough type of horsedealer, who has got in amongst them and keeps calling out all kinds of coarse jokes to a crony… Many of Mr. Hogg’s Selkirkshire store farming friends are there with their well oxygenated complexions and Dandy-Dinmont-like bulk of figure… If a representative assembly had been made up from all the classes of the community, it could not have been more miscellaneous than this company assembled by a man to whom, in the simplicity of his heart, all company seemed alike acceptable.1

Hogg’s first fiction appeared in his magazine The Spy, which began in 1810 and lasted for only a year. In a way that is reminiscent of the polarised English and Scots roles adopted in their work by Ramsay and Burns, he wrote in a dual persona. In one role he was ‘the Spy’, inventing a background of gentle birth fallen on evil days, taking an observer’s interest in psychological quirks, showing already his acute interest in morbid thought and action. Here also, however, was a contrived point of view, which, in its attempt to be at one with polite Edinburgh, produced unconvincing stories of rakes’ progresses and vice punished. But defiantly another persona quickly foIlowed, that of the robust and honest teller of country tales, ‘John Miller’, the Nithsdale Shepherd. Insecurity about his social and cultural position had created a form of split creative personality.

Criticism of Hogg’s magazine followed shortly. It was considered too coarse; when girls were pregnant Hogg said so directly. This, amongst a lot of lively as well as hack writing, is all that can be found to account for the desertion of Hogg’s generally deserving magazine by his subscribers. He admitted his mistake in one of his autobiographical accounts.

I despised the fastidiousness and affectation of the people … the literary ladies in particular agreed … that I would never write a sentence which deserved to be read.

And in the final number of The Spy he wrote that

The learned, the enlightened, and polite circles of this flourishing metropolis disdained either to be amused or instructed by the ebulitions of humble genius. Enemies, swelling with the most rancorous spite, grunted in every corner … Pretended friends … liberal in their advices … took every method in their power to lessen the work in the esteem of others by branding its author with designs the most subversive of all civility and decorum …

Thus from the beginning of Hogg’s fiction adverse criticism was to inhibit his instinctive creativity. Already critics had adopted an attitude to Hogg which accepted his pleasant country songs, his moments of poetic genius, his sketches of the shepherd’s life, but advised him not to attempt more. But Hogg was resilient in these early years in Edinburgh. He decided not to give in to the literary ladies and sensitive gentlemen, and between 1810 and 1821 added to and amended the early Spy stories for his collection, Winter Evening Tales. It is fascinating to compare the later with the earlier versions. Ghost stories are cut down to a stark simplicity, and their sense of threatening mystery deepened. And a recurrent theme emerges of dark inscrutable forces, powerful and aristocratic, surrounding and trapping an innocent protagonist. This may echo Hogg’s own feelings about a ‘conspiracy’ of the gentry against him; but it could be argued that Literati criticism of Hogg’s work and personality for once (and accidentally) contributed positively here, as it is predominantly this sense of inexorable and unknown powers conspiring against a vulnerable protagonist which makes so many of his stories compelling, from The Justified Sinner to An Edinburgh Baillie.

One story is remarkable for its time. Hogg extensively added to a Spy story called ‘On Instability in One’s Calling’ to create the short novel Basil Lee. This was the tale which had caused most offence with its frank declaration of pregnancy. It illustrates admirably the direction Hogg was moving in, and should have been encouraged to move in. The original was a short description of the misadventures of a young fellow psychologically incapable of settling to any one job. Hogg capably linked a genuine interest in abnormal psychology with a very funny anti-romantic account of how his anti-hero continually dreams of new roles. Basil sees himself as a shepherd, taking lassies under his plaid, making up songs, living an Arcadian tradition – but the rain pours down, the job proves a dirty one, Jessie slaps his face. He tries life as a grocer – but sells vitriol by mistake for whisky. After trying many jobs, exhausting his father’s patience, Basil gets sent abroad. He meets a beautiful young lady on the ship – who turns out to be an Inverness prostitute. Hogg reversed all conventions here by sensitively and effectively making her the most genuinely dignified person in the story and defining her relationship with the braggart Basil with a delicacy of control and insight unusual for the time.

In other ways, too, Basil Lee mocks the conventional romance. Basil becomes a hero of the American Wars when he gets entangled in the British flags while fleeing. He tries to kill the standard bearer, and when the smoke of battle clears he is mistaken as the saviour of the colours and promoted for valour. And much of this spirit of subversion, parodic mockery and satiric fun lies behind The Three Perils of Man, with its fundamentally anti-romantic bias. But Edinburgh was not ready for a story where the ending had the prostitute as the real heroine, redeeming a worthless good-for-nothing, with the pair squabbling happily ever after. The Winter Evening Tales (1820) in which this appeared were not unsuccessful; but invariably Hogg was reproached for the ‘indelicacies’ of stories like this, and applauded for the collection’s simple Border anecdotes of the shepherd’s life, with the occasional ghost story permitted. Social satire and rumbustious anti-heroics were not appreciated by literary Edinburgh.

By this time Hogg must have begun to wonder if there existed a significant prose form in which he could succeed; for in 1817 his first major novel had appeared (although it was in fact written after most of the stories which became Winter Evening Tales). The Brownie of Bodsbeck tells of Claverhouse’s atrocities during the ‘killing time’. The action is terse and vivid, the horrors described in a realistic, shocking and dramatic style, while the Border characters are as good as anything of the kind created by Scott. Moreover, Hogg experimented with techniques nowhere else found so early in the development of the novel. He used flashbacks and sudden cuts from time past to time present, admittedly causing some confusion to the reader, but occasionally achieving vivid moments of real success. His novel deserved a better reception than it received. Critics assumed that the shepherd was trespassing on the grounds of historical fiction, and Scott for one did not like Hogg’s adoption of a view of the period so different from his own. He called it ‘a false and unfair picture of the times and the existing characters, altogether’. Hogg replied: ‘I dinna ken, Mr. Scott. It is the picture I have been brought up in the belief o’ sin’ ever I was born, and I had it frae them whom I was most bound to honour and believe …’ and, alleging the atrocities to have happened, he continued, ‘and that’s great deal mair than you can say for your tale “Auld Mortality”.’

Hogg certainly had some cause for annoyance in the casual way his efforts at fiction were dismissed, when the more conventional and melodramatic historical novels of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and John Galt’s treatment of the same topic, the qualitatively comparable Ringan Gilhaize (1823), were taken seriously. The Brownie of Bodsbeck may not be as good as Old Mortality, but it is better than Scott’s lesser Scottish historical romances like The Abbot or The Monastery. Indeed, Scott’s attitude speaks worlds in his letter to Laidlaw at the time, when, referring to The Brownie and its companion pieces, he says, ‘The cubs have not succeeded well … but they are sadly vulgar, to be sure.’

Thus by 1822 Hogg had tried to break into historical romance, and to develop a vigorous vein of psychological anti-romance. His efforts were not appreciated, but he still wanted to write full-length, serious fiction. For his next effort he decided to join a loose historical background with his deep knowledge of Border legend and tradition, and to place both within the perspective of his fantastic imagination. The result was the astonishingly under-estimated The Three Perils of Man (1822). The Noctes Ambrosianae of the period set the tone of casual prejudgment: ‘I dare say ’twill be like all his things, – a mixture of the admirable, the execrable, and the tolerable …’ This was probably Lockhart, as Wilson said elsewhere that he would ‘write a page or two rather funny on Hogg’s romance’ – obviously not in praise, as he went on to say, ‘though averse to being cut up myself, I like to abuse my friends.’ Hogg was lucky that Wilson did not follow this up.

What is more difficult to understand is Walter Scott’s dislike. The man who had himself used goblins, astrologers and the devil in his poems and tales, told Hogg that he had ruined ‘one of the best tales in the world’ with his ‘extravagance in demonology’. One would have thought that even for the romance’s use of legend and folk lore alone the favour of Scott, the antiquary, would have been secured. But it would appear that his conception of the kind of supernatural material permissible or desirable for a novelist underwent considerable change throughout the 1820s. Hogg remarked on Scott’s turning ‘renegade’ with his stories ‘made up of half-and-half, like Nathaniel Gow’s toddy’, that is, with the supernatural content watered down to such a point that its very existence became ambiguous.

In a review of John Galt’s The Omen, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1826, Scott made this change of view explicit, when he laid down a clear distinction between two kinds of fictional supernatural. Galt’s novel presented an aristocratic protagonist whose sensitivity of soul is such that he receives mysterious and mystic premonitions which allow him to ‘gaze beyond the curtain of futurity’. This Gothic supernatural sensibility, the product of good breeding, Scott approves; Byron and Sheridan shared it, he claims. But for the other kind of supernatural, that of folk tradition and legend, Scott by 1826, surprisingly, has less time. Now he condemns as unworthy of a man of breeding and education ‘any belief in the superstition of the olden time, which believed in spectres, fairies, and other supernatural apparitions. These airy squadrons have been long routed, and are banished to the cottage and the nursery’. – Poor Hogg! The living connection of his romance with the Ballad tradition, with folk-tale and the world of vividly realised and colourfully diverse creatures of the folk tradition, is here by implication condemned. Arguably, Scott’s attitude stands as a watershed in Scottish literature – with Hogg on the wrong side.

Now, uncertain and casting about for yet another fictional mode to try for success, Hogg wrote the three tales which form The Three Perils of Women (1823). It is possible that for the first tale, on the perils of love, he began by adopting as his model the novel of manners; and to an extent the result was a grotesque parody of Jane Austen’s and Susan Ferrier’s modes of social satire. In this, the main tale, what started out as a light-hearted study of the relationship of two girls, Gatty Bell and Cherry Elliott, became rather horrible, as if Hogg were already moving on to the gloomy ideas of The Justified Sinner. Gatty steals Cherry’s lover and marries him; the betrayed Cherry dies of grief, and as punishment for her man-theft Gatty falls into a coma for three years, in the course of which she gives birth to a healthy boy, and lies uncorrupted till she awakes abandoned by whatever demon or mental disturbance had possessed her. As with The Justified Sinner, psychological sickness and supernatural agency are allowed to co-exist; in his afterword to the 1995 edition of the novel, David Groves finds a realistic depiction of the psychological state of catatonia, and it is unusually true of Hogg’s fiction that it allows men and women to sin and suffer alike. In addition to this unique variation on the novel of manners there are two other tales: one, on the peril of ‘leasing’, being a savage assault on middle-class Edinburgh’s appetite for slander, and the other, on the peril of jealousy, becoming a strange mixture of parodic Highland comedy and post-Culloden tragedy.

Hogg’s aims in these tales are complex; in addition to their women protagonists suffering from the conventional symptoms of romantic love like jealousy and swooning, they foreground the perils of death from prostitution, adultery, and pregnancy. It is not surprising that the novel, ostensibly aiming at the readership of the polite ladies of Edinburgh, received damning reviews, Wilson being particularly vicious on this occasion. However justified their dislike – and modern critics are divided as to the intentions and achievement of the work as a whole – Hogg was demoralised. By this time, as well as frequently asking Lockhart and Scott to advise him and to read his proofs, Hogg finally admitted to loss of self-confidence.

I am grown to have no confidence whatever in my own taste or discernment in what is to be well or ill taken by the world or individuals. Indeed it appears that were I to make my calculations by inverse proportion I would be oftener right than I am …

And yet, even with this evidence of creative unsureness, the following year saw publication of the astonishing Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Brilliantly it fused together all Hogg’s previous kinds of fiction, yet avoided falling into any one of the categories that critics had hitherto attacked. Consider the supernatural treatment. Always there is the possibility that the devil and other supernatural apparitions exist only in the mind of Wringhim. Thus to the critic who would attack the novel for its ‘diablerie and nonsense’, Hogg could reply that the story was a psychological study of a religious fanatic. Conversely, if the novel were attacked as the distasteful study of a lunatic, Hogg could reply that his work was in fact a supernatural tale, a nightmare Pilgrim’s Progress. Hogg thus hoped to ride with the hares and hounds of contemporary criticism. It may be that Lockhart, with whom Hogg had joined before in literary trickery, and to whom he dedicated his previous novel, helped him think out the plan. Lockhart’s fiction of this period shows an overlap with Hogg’s in its interest in morbid psychological conditions. But there is nothing in the novel that is not prefigured in many of Hogg’s stories before this. It was a clever, brave, and predictably sly attempt by Hogg to break free of the ‘conspiracy’ of critics against him. Nevertheless, further condemnation was his reward; for example, The Westminster Review regretted

… that the author did not employ himself better than in uselessly and disgustingly abusing his imagination, to invent wicked tricks for a mongrel devil, and blasphemous lucubrations for an insane fanatic …

––and generally his novel was seen as a boorish aberration and a betrayal of his ‘sweet land of poetry’.

Hogg could develop no further. For the rest of his life he retreated into sketches, short ghost stories, and occasional poems. Some of the stories in his 1829 collection, The Shepherd’s Calendar, are excellent, but they merely illustrate how grievous a loss the Scottish novel had suffered. The final sign of his demoralisation came when he was encouraged in 1832 to collect his work. It is an indication of the shallowness of contemporary criticism and of his own lack of self-confidence that he decided to savage The Three Perils of Man. He cut it to one third of its original length. He stripped away all the magnificent folk lore and colourful supernatural extravaganza, leaving merely the Border skirmish which he called, for the purposes of the collection, The Siege of Roxburgh, the only version published till 1971, when The Association for Scottish Literary Studies chose to produce the full Perils of Man as its inaugural annual volume.2

The Three Perils of Man is Hogg’s most ambitious work of fiction. Its range, its variety of characters, its wealth of fast action, are all on a scale far beyond even The Justified Sinner or The Brownie of Bodsbeck. But more significant still, it marks Hogg’s courageous and epic attempt to work in the oral and popular tradition which had produced the Ballads, folk-tales and legends. It also marks the passing of this tradition as a living force. Ironically, the society which had been wildly enthusiastic about MacPherson’s ‘translations’ from the Gaelic of the ancient bard Ossian, and which marvelled at the colourful natives of ‘Scottland’, had little time for the genuine and living popular tradition which Hogg represented. The stimulus for Hogg’s new novel-romance may owe much to Scott’s marvellous poetry (in particular, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1810), or to one of the first and most influential historical epics (which Hogg would certainly know and admire for its giant folk-heroes and forceful disguised heroines), namely Jane Porter’s seminal The Scottish Chiefs (1810). That said, Hogg is too original to be seen as seriously indebted to his predecessors. In the context of Hogg’s own development, The Three Perils of Man represents the burgeoning of his deep interest in that other class of the supernatural, the world of ‘diablerie’ and demonology, the world of Barnaby’s tales in ‘The Wool-gatherer’, or ‘The Hunt of Eildon’, the world which he had treated with rationalistic reservations in The Brownie of Bodsbeck. It is the world of Will o’ Phaup, his grandfather, who had spoken on sundry occasions with the fairies; not just of ‘spectres, ghosts, fairies, brownies … seen and heard … in the Glen o’ Phaup’, but a larger imaginative world which included long tales of ‘kings, knights, fairies, kelpies …’ where history is transmuted to legend and recorded in the Ballad idiom of timeless, racy, understated simplicity. It is important to understand how solid a foundation this is to the romance. To dismiss the work as mere cloak-and-dagger nonsense is to betray ignorance of the difference between the traditional and folk treatment of things supernatural and the neo-gothic treatment of a production such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), an ignorance that critics in Hogg’s time and since have frequently betrayed in assessing his fiction. The opening of the novel is in Scott’s manner:

The days of the Stuarts … were the days of chivalry and romance. The long and bloody contest that the nation maintained against the whole power of England, for the recovery of its independence – of those rights which had been most unwarrantably wrested from our fathers by the greatest and most treacherous sovereign of that age – laid the foundation [of this chivalry] … The deeds of the Douglases, the Randolphs, and other border barons of that day, are not to be equalled …

This is indeed Scott-like, but there is a difference, for Hogg’s unnamed editor (basing his account on a manuscript inherited from old Isaac, the curate of Mireton) is altogether more racy and terse and more recently critics like de Groot have pointed out the contrast between the modern ‘editor’s’ voice and that of the chivalric and romanticising curate. Isaac is the biased Borderer, seeing the King of England as ‘treacherous’, remembering epic stories of the Randolphs and Douglases, as Barbour, Blind Hary, and the Border Ballads told them. He describes how anti-English and chivalrous games spread from barons to schoolboys, even to the very ploughmen and peasants. And thus the whole of his story of the chivalric Game of the Siege of Roxburgh is based on ‘national mania’, beginning an ironic commentary which runs as a major counter-theme, mocking the superficial romance of chivalry. This pattern of romance offset by realism begins immediately. First we are given the romantic and fairy-tale opening:

There was once a noble king and queen of Scotland, as many in that land have been, beloved by all their subjects … and loved and favoured them in return; and the country enjoyed happiness and peace …

This is Isaac’s voice, but it is surely how Hogg’s mother began her stories too. And the signs of a traditional mode of storytelling are abundant. There is, for example, the Ballad emphasis on number; the castle of Roxburgh – though history tells very differently –

… had been five times taken by the English, and three times by the Scots, in less than seventeen months, and was then held by the gallant Lord Musgrave for Richard King of England.3

The King of Scotland’s daughter, ‘of exquisite beauty and accomplishments’, is ‘the flower of all Scotland’. The Game of Chivalry is set in motion by the folk-tale condition Margaret lays down for the winning of her hand. The King, as in Sir Patrick Spens, ‘sat gloomy and sad’, and asks which of his nobles will revenge him on Musgrave, the English captain of Roxburgh castle. Predictably, the price of failure is to be the forfeiture of ‘lands, castles, towns and towers’. And the richness of detail of the folk-tale is there too – Margaret’s left arm swings a scarf of gold, while her right ‘gleamed with bracelets of rubies and diamonds’. This is the world of romance and nobility. But as in so many folk-tales and Ballads, the action now moves on to more down-to-earth and forceful characters. We meet Sir Ringan Redhough and his Border reivers, with their blunt realism. On being asked to help in the Game, Ringan’s attitude is in explicit ironic contrast with the previous chivalry.

What, man, are a’I my brave lads to lie in bloody claes that the Douglas may lie i’ snow-white sheets wi’ a bonny bed-fellow? … Tell him to keep their hands fu’; and their haunches toom, an’ they’ll soon be blithe to leave the lass an’ loup at the ladle …

The ‘flower’ of Scotland is reduced to a ‘bonny bedfellow’, while romantic love is seen as a curable disease. Women, even royal princesses, are recognised as physical and sexual beings in contrast to the stylised paragons of conventional romance. Ringan’s recommendations are to use ‘wiles’ instead of chivalric methods. And in the savage irony of the juxtaposition of ‘bloody claes’ (death) and ‘snow-white sheets’ (sexual pleasure), the one being the price of the other, we meet again the idiom of Sir Patrick Spens, with its ironic juxtaposition of the ‘fingers white’ and ‘goud kaims’ with the floating hats and feather beds at the ballad’s end. Similarly, when we meet the main ‘hero’ of the romance, Charlie Scott of Yardbire, the amiable giant, he is breaking up the courtly pattern of the Game. With colossal strength he hurls a knight and his horse backwards; and his ‘tak ye that, master, for whistling o’ Sundays’ exactly sums up the reductive idiom of much of Hogg’s anti-romantic theme. It is all in the peasant tradition of wry humour and worldliness found in the Ballads, the chapbooks, and the fabliau tales of medieval Europe, with something of the pace and ferocity of Smollett’s action; while, to late twentieth-century readers, it must surely anticipate postmodernist notions of parody and subversion and Bakhtinian carnival. But it would certainly have seemed ‘vulgar’ to most of Hogg’s literary contemporaries.

There is one question to be asked concerning Hogg’s contrast of these two worlds. How sure is he of his artistic intentions and of his own sympathies as he deals with Douglas and Musgrave on the one hand, Redhough and Charlie on the other? While it is valid to identify an ironic attitude to chivalry in Hogg’s comments through Redhough, the Chisholm family, or Charlie, it may be wrong to conclude that Hogg intended us to mock at the world of kings and knights in toto. Sometimes it seems that real sympathy for Douglas or Margaret is intended, and that certain aspects of their chivalrous undertaking are at least countenanced by him. The opposing attitudes of Isaac the curate and the ‘editor’ may go some way to explaining these inconsistencies of moral and artistic position, with Hogg (as so often) utilising fictional narrators to safeguard himself against charges of bad taste and loss of control. Contemporary defenders of Hogg would argue that it is precisely Hogg’s refusal to allow binary opposites to destroy each other in his fiction, that is his unique strength. Contrarily, the irony is perhaps simply less controlled, more local and episodic, than that, say, in Scott’s Waverley and may reflect Hogg’s own divided loyalties and insecurity about his social position. Whatever the source of this insecurity, it blurs the dividing line between straightforward presentation of romance and ironic comment upon it. But it would be a parsimonious reading of Hogg’s romance that failed to realise that its unity lies not in aspects of plot structure, or carefully planned revelation of character through action, but in something looser, larger, and much more uncommon in the nineteenth century. C.S. Lewis made a special plea that another Scottish writer of profound and vivid imagination, George MacDonald, should be assessed on the special consideration that his work went far beyond the conventions of fiction, to become myth. Hogg is just such a special case. And the strange unity that his work possesses comes, not from qualities of myth (although it occasionally attains to this) but from its sheer extravagance and fantastic gusto and the obvious enjoyment of the author in allowing his imagination free rein. Thus most readers will not object to the ridiculous disguises of Princess Margaret and Lady Jane Howard when they arrive at the Chisholm’s house; and thus Hogg gets away with the more serious ambiguity underlying the later scene when Margaret, discovering who ‘Sir Jasper’ is, sends her prisoner, in the care of Charlie Scott, to Douglas.

This is a typically difficult and ambiguous passage. On one side it would seem that Hogg is ironically reducing his knights and ladies to the level of barbarians and fishwives, as when the two girls coarsely and spitefully attack each other and become merely spoiled brats. Similarly Douglas, knowing full well the identity of his captive, ignores her appeals to his ‘honour and generosity as a knight’, threatens to strip her and later promises to cause her to be ‘exhibited in a state not to be named’ on a stage erected in sight of the western tower, raped publicly (‘disgrace which barbarians only could have conceived’), ‘and then to have her nose cut off, her eyes put out, and her beauteous frame otherwise disfigured’. How are we to read this? It is tempting to find here a rich anti-romantic irony; but on the other hand there is plenty of description of Douglas and the ladies as genuinely noble and romantic creatures, while the end of the novel has Charlie and Sir Ringan rewarded by these very princes and ladies. Perhaps, however, we should read such noble descriptions and endings as parodic? Perhaps, too, the final case for the greatness of the work lies beyond consideration of the sophistication or otherwise of the ironic structure, in the sheer carnival zest of the presentation and the speed of the metamorphoses and reversals of fortune. In the end the main grounds for the tale’s worth may lie in its qualities as a tale to be told as Hogg’s mother told him tales.

The irony is recognisably deliberate and fine at many other points. There can be no doubt of Hogg’s meaning and where his sympathies lie in the hanging of the servants of Lady Jane. The Game of Roxburgh is death to the English peasant Heaton and his friends; the spoiled heiresses of Scotland and England have more or less murdered many like him by the time the Game is over. Immediately following this, as though to prove the point, is the passage involving the old Border fisherman, Sandy Yellowlees, one of Hogg’s well-loved, independent heroes. Hogg tricks us into identifying with Sandy. His peasant humour, his comic fears when he starts finding sirloins of beef on the end of his fishing-line, and the fact that he is permitted to use the dramatic monologue to tell his story – a method Hogg generally reserves for favourites – contribute towards our shock at his sudden death and our revulsion against the chivalrous siege, when, with the sword-stroke suddenness of the Ballads, Sandy is captured and hung from the walls of Roxburgh castle.

And Part One ends on this cynical note. War is no longer a game, if it ever has been. This peril has been shown to have a horrific and deadly reality. Savagery and madness dominate the starving castle. A group of mutineers are ‘hanged like dogs, amid shouts of execration, and their bodies flung into a pit’; the remainder would eat their own flesh rather than surrender. Chivalry has become nightmare. Hogg now draws the English under Musgrave in a stylised, grotesque fashion, portraying them as bestial gargoyles, the very opposite of paragons of courtly love.

There they sat, a silent circle, in bitter and obstinate rumination. Their brows were plaited down, so as to almost cover their eyes; their underlips were bent upwards and every mouth shaped like a curve, and their arms were crossed on their breasts, while every man’s right hand instinctively rested on the hilt of his sword … a wild gleam of ferocity fired every haggard countenance.

The second part of the novel, that concerning the comic embassy’s journey to the wizard Sir Michael Scott, introduces the peril of witchcraft (more properly the peril of wizards and warlockry) to the romance. This section releases Hogg from the juxtaposition of romantic and realistic attitudes. Indeed the term ‘release’ well describes the extended nightmare, comic and fantastic, which follows with the pace and spirit of Dunbar’s ‘Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis’ and Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Sir Ringan, needing to know something of the outcome of the struggle before he decides which side to favour, sends his representatives to find out. His embassy is grotesque, a collection of oddities and misfits freakish enough to please the unnatural tastes of Michael Scott. He sends

As a bard, or minstrel.… Colley Carol, a man that is fit to charm the spirits out of the heart of the earth, or the bowels of the cloud … As a man of crabbed wit and endless absurdity … the Deil’s Tam: As a true natural and moral philosopher, the Laird o’ the Peatstacknowe: As one versed in all the mysteries of religion, and many mysteries besides, or some tell lies, we can send the gospel friar. All these are men of spirit, and can handle the sword and the bow … And as a man of unequalled strength and courage, and a guard and captain over all the rest, we can send Charlie o’ Yardbire – and I will defy all the kingdoms of Europe to send out sic another quorum either to emperor, Turk, wizard, or the devil himself.

Add the captive maiden Delany, and the beautiful boy Elias, and the embassy is complete. The motley crew on its fantastic quest may be enjoyed equally as a parody of the usual reiving party and as a travesty of a Canterbury pilgrimage. The story has now become a mock-epic. Not only is the medieval device of a journey used to comic effect, but sometimes even the various characters, the Deil’s Tam especially, seem to be almost medieval personifications of human qualities. Tam, standing for Greed and Famine in one, takes part in a Dunbar-like dance of sin, although, unlike Dunbar, Hogg mixes good and bad in his increasingly wild movement. Adventure follows adventure with the speed of Smollett; violence flares suddenly and dies as quickly. There is little complexity of situation now, apart from the pretty obvious hints that the dour and mysterious friar is more than he seems. And yet – probably because the embassy is mainly made up of Borderers and dominated by the refreshingly unusual hero, Charlie Scott – there is complete clarity of character delineation within the group, even down to the mule, wilful and almost human (and considered by Lockhart to be the real hero of the romance).

We begin to have a feeling of significant completeness in this group of contrasting characters. A pattern emerges, with Charlie as Honesty and Strength, the Friar as Faith, Gibby as Clownish Weakness (for which he is claimed as temporary servant by Scott), and Tam as Greed and Fleshly Lust (he signs his soul away to the devil). The framework is at once definite and yet loose enough to permit the contrasting idioms – the Friar’s Chaldee style, a mixture of the biblical and Ossianic, the poet’s flowery excesses, Charlie’s blunt but compassionate realism, and Tam’s crude, yet horrifically honest directness. We have moved from the world of chivalry, with its rules and conditions, to a world where these rules are subverted and turned upside-down; in this carnival of contrasts, Michael Scott and his master the devil will be the Lords of a Dance of Misrule. Hogg achieves the transition by capturing the unnatural atmosphere around Scott’s castle of Aikwood at sunset:

It was one of those dead calm winter evenings, not uncommon at that season, when the slightest noise is heard at a distance, and the echoes are all abroad. As they drew near to the huge dark looking pile, silence prevailed among them more and more. All was so still that even the beautiful valley seemed a waste. There was no bird whistling at the plough; no cattle or sheep grazing on the holms of Aikwood; no bustle of servants, kinsmen, of their grooms, as at the castles of other knights. It seemed as if the breath of the enchanter, or his eye, had been infectious, and had withered all within its influence, whether of vegetable, animal, or human life. The castle itself scarcely seemed to be the abode of man; the massy gates were all locked … and there was only one small piping smoke issuing from one of the turrets …

From now on metamorphoses occur on every second page. Gourlay is transformed by Scott by way of punishment into a hare, and frenziedly pursued by the attendant devils Prim, Prig and Pricker, who transform themselves with bewildering speed. An army of retainers marches from the wainscotting of the deserted castle to serve breakfast to the embassy, who are struck by their ‘rattan faces’. And in one of the funniest of these transformations, the company are led from the raw and misty morning up into a tower room which blazes with light; the table offers a beautiful smoking sirloin of beef, with a gentle brown crust around it, and half swimming in gravy. Most of the embassy start without saying grace:

… the friar, later to enter, lifted up his spread hands, closed his eyes, and leaning forward above the beef so closely that he actually breathed upon it, felt the flavour of health and joy ascending by his nostrils [and] in that fervent and respectful attitude he blessed the beef in the name of Jesus. Never had blessing a more dolorous effect. When the friar opened his eyes, the beef was gone. There was nothing left on the wooden plate before him but a small insignificant thing resembling the joint of a frog’s leg, or that of a rat; and perhaps two or three drops of gravy.

Metamorphosis dominates this part, from the curious use of the magic lantern (which, in its balancing with Michael Scott’s genuine wizardry anticipates Hogg’s juxtapositioning of rational explanation with supernatural horror in the devilish apparition by the Salisbury crags in The Justified Sinner) to the final banquet with the devil and Michael Scott, where hags with withered chops are transformed into beauteous ladies, and the men of the embassy into bellowing bulls. Slowly, from the apparently formless, though vastly entertaining, riot of diablerie and nightmare, the theme of this part emerges. We are witnessing an epic, yet still comic, struggle between the powers of light and dark. First of all the lieutenants meet. The monstrous Gourlay, Scott’s seneschal-zombie, possessed of superhuman strength, clashes with the benevolent giant Charlie Scott. Their epic battle takes place in a vault where the giant bones of a previous victim lie gleaming in the moonlight. With an almost archetypal clash, like that of Beowulf and Grendel, they meet in titanic battle. Gourlay’s back and ribs sound as they crack; his face grows hideous; they fall ponderously amidst the bones of the giant skeleton. The entire situation recalls Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, with Gourlay as Giant Despair.

Following this preparatory round, we anticipate the confrontation of the friar, that holy man of mysterious depths, and the satanic wizard. Both have epic features, but paradoxically it is Michael Scott who commands attention and even admiration, with his dignity, his respect for courage, his occasional sympathy, as when he hears the friar’s tragic tale, contrasting with his unholy glee or despair, or his inability, like Faust, to repent. There is greatness in Hogg’s imagination here; Michael is conceived on a superhuman scale, as is the account at the end of the romance of his cataclysmic exit from this world. His battle with the friar lives up to our expectations. Indeed, it may not be stretching the scene too much to find a deeper layer within it. The friar uses science: the magic lantern, tricks with chemicals, and finally his superbly fitting and comic removal of the monster Gourlay by blowing him up with gunpowder (which, as the exiled Roger Bacon, he is supposed to have invented). In contrast Scott uses sheer wizardry and the power of his master, Satan. Do we see here the division in Hogg’s own allegiance to nineteenth-century rationalism and scientific achievement on the one hand, and to a belief in the supernatural forces of the past on the other, as in the subtler psychological and supernatural ambiguity of The Justified Sinner? In any event, although the friar is allowed a kind of victory, there is no doubt that Hogg’s deepest sympathies are with Michael, goaded by the friar beyond endurance, to the point where he almost overstretches his remit from the devil.

Hogg’s imagination blends here in superb fashion with his awareness of Border legend. He postulates a single and rounded Eildon hill, a great cone, prior to the battle. The wizard orders Prim, Prig and Pricker to twist it into three (as, of course, it is now). The ensuing storm is a colossal reversal of nature (significantly, it is the storm in which the Scots were attacked by the maddened English at the end of the first part). What makes this sensational ‘diablerie’ so acceptable is the comic but realistic and matter-of-fact way Hogg tells it all. It is exactly right for the extravagant, richly coloured imaginary world he has made, and sustains the supernatural so well that the effect has nothing of the neo-gothic melodrama of The Castle of Otranto. Hogg is saved from this by the fact that his own rich imagination is based firmly on folk tradition, which he uses in a vital and creative way. The Eildon hill scene is the best of these. Hogg’s picture of the pallid, unnatural dawn following the turmoil of the night, with the friar and Charlie frozen in astonishment at the three peaks towering over new rivers is a magnificent climax, almost mythic in quality. His imagination sees it surely, and follows through without faltering:

It was a scene of wonder not to be understood, and awfully impressive. The two rivers flowed down their respective valleys, and met below the castle like two branching seas, and every little streamlet roared and foamed like a river. The hills had a wan, bleached appearance, many of the trees of the forest were shivered, and towering up against the eastern sky, there stood the three … hills … of Eildon, where before there was but one …

The next part, which begins with the discovery that the embassy and Scott are trapped in the castle tower, perhaps looms too large in the overall story. It may be that Hogg, remembering his great success with a competition of raconteurs in The Queen’s Wake, his long poem of 1813, tried to repeat it here. He certainly loved the exercise of adopting different styles and personae in storytelling (witness The Spy and the three points of view in The Justified Sinner) and poetry (witness his Poetic Mirror of 1816). Or it may simply be the case that he had some of these short stories already written, and decided to incorporate them, using the simple expedient of Scott’s proposal, that they should relieve their plight by storytelling, the best storyteller winning Delany, the worst being eaten by the others. That said, it can be argued that these stories, like those of the Canterbury Tales, play a part in telling us something about the tellers. The friar’s tale solves the mystery of the strange affinity between himself and the innocent Delany – she is the daughter of his sweetheart. And the Ossianic style has the function of contrasting refreshingly with the romance’s usual, more direct idiom. Hogg’s romance is loose enough in structure, and fantastic enough in content, to stand casual storytelling and highly coincidental revelations like this. Indeed, the story has a certain tragic pathos and power. It reveals yet again Charlie’s sentimental nature. It causes the poet to change his mind about hating the friar. And when Delany reveals she is the friar’s sweetheart’s daughter, ‘even Master Michael Scott once drew the back of his hand across his eyes …’.

In stark contrast is the savage tale told by the Laird of Peatstacknowe: harsh, unsentimental, chapbookish in its crude caricature of Marion’s son Jock, who ‘fought to be at meat, and Marion to keep him from it; and many hard clouts and claws there passed’. Jock is a recurrent type in Hogg’s stories. There is something unnatural in his demonic hunger and his utter amorality, an unnatural and obsessive motivation which sets him alongside Basil Lee, or Merodach, the Brownie of the Black Haggs, or Robert Wringhim, the justified sinner. And Hogg is unsurpassed when it comes to describing sordid violence with sickeningly convincing detail. Jock’s master wants to kick and beat him, and then murder him; he drags him to the lamb Jock has murdered, where again the remains, like those of a violated daughter, outrage him; he throws him down, kneels on him, and punches till Jock ‘got hold of his master’s cheek with his left hand, and his nails being very long, was like to tear it off. His master capered up with his head …’ – and, unable to free himself, gets out his knife to cut off Jock’s hand and then his head. The savagery is conveyed in the factual imagery, the bald statement of fact; the battle is ‘like a battle between an inveterate terrier and a bull dog’, and is ended suddenly and shockingly when Jock (whom we remember is, after all, little more than a child)

… whipped out his own knife, his old dangerous friend, and struck it into the goodman’s belly to the haft. The moment he received the wound he sprang up as if he had been going to fly into the air, uttered a loud roar, and fell back above his dead pet lamb …

The scene recalls the violent end of the sensual fox in Robert Henryson’s ‘The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger’. The slightly comic tone accentuates the violence (Jock uses his ‘dangerous friend’ to kill the goodman) as does the understatement. And, as in Henryson’s Fables, the violence is all the more shocking, coming as it does in a pastoral setting; Jock’s anxious mother, the scene in the goodman’s cottage of the family eating, the shepherding, all assert the rhythms of peaceful countryside quietly repeating themselves. The violence is in horrible contrast to all this, as are the sensual descriptions of Jock’s hunger and the goodman’s nauseating and unnatural grief over his pet lamb. And all this is embodied in the main development of the surrounding story. Hogg reveals that Jock, this monster of carnal hunger, this unnatural child-demon, is in fact the Deil’s Tam. With one easy move Tam’s evil takes on a new depth and his fate grows darker. And again the reactions of the others reveal their characters. Charlie thinks it a good tale – ‘o’ the kind’, he stresses; the poet, sensitive plant that he is, accepts the lamb-daughter equation, and is horrified at the eating of ‘the flower of all the flock … her lovely form that’s fairer than the snow’. And in fact many of the others accept this symbolism too; as Michael Scott says:

The maid Delany is the favourite lamb, whom he wished you to kill and feast on and I am the Goodman whom you are to stick afterwards …

Charlie Scott’s tale is a good example of Hogg’s mastery of the story of action. Charlie Scott of Yardbire is a Border type Hogg loves, akin to the homely, honest, yet powerful giant hero of The Brownie of Bodsbeck, Wat o’ Chapelhope. His tale illustrates the same qualities of stern bravery and feudal devotion that are found in the ballad of ‘The Battle of Otterbourne’. It also serves to reveal Charlie’s goodness, in his saving of a child in a raid – who turns out to be the poet. Thus like the others it relates to the main theme, in that it extends our knowledge of the characters in the embassy and supplies answers to Hogg’s beloved mysteries. Its merits are such as recur abundantly in Hogg’s story-telling, notably in the later ‘Mary Montgomery’ and ‘Wat Pringle o’ the Yair’. Then Tam’s tale reveals that he is the ‘Marion’s Jock’ of Gibby’s story. His character as personified Greed and Lust is completed by it. The story, with its savagery and cruelty and anti-heroic qualities, provides a contrast to Charlie’s tale of healthy heroism, in the same way that Basil Lee and Robert Wringhim are utter opposites to that most natural of men, Wat o’ Chapelhope. These types are recurrent polarities in Hogg’s fiction, and Tam’s story is one of Hogg’s many horrifying pictures of amoral, lustful and utterly wicked men.

Nevertheless, although many of the tales are good in themselves (the poet’s, ironically enough, being the weakest), and taken together contribute towards the development of relationships amongst the group, they do distract us from the main, hitherto swift-moving plot. And while Hogg may in this authorial self-indulgence be mocking the historical fiction of his time, it is nevertheless a relief for the reader, as well as for the trapped embassy, when Dan Chisholm and his Border friends arrive at the castle. Hogg now links his two projects, and we see Scott’s wizardry through fresh eyes. Dan asks:

Do nae ye ken that the world’s amaist turned upside down sin ye left us? The trees hae turned their wrang ends upmost – the waters hae drowned the towns, and the hills hae been rent asunder … Tis thought that there has been a siege o’ hell …

But the reign of Disorder is not yet over: Dan and Charlie now meet a mysterious friend of Sir Michael Scott. Unlike the friend Gilmartin, who is sinister from his very bland sophistication, this devil is in the best manner of Hogg’s and Ballad demonology.

It appeared about double the human size … its whole body being of the colour of bronze, as well as the crown upon its head. The skin appeared shrivelled, as if seared with fire, but over that there was a polish that glittered and shone. Its eyes had no pupil nor circle of white; they appeared like burning lamps deep in their sockets; and when it gazed, they rolled round … There was a hairy mantle that hung down and covered its feet … every finger terminated in a long crooked talon that seemed of the colour of molten gold … It had neither teeth, tongue, nor throat, its whole inside being hollow, and the colour of burning glass …

It pursues them, vomiting burning sulphur, and, as the nightmare climax of Disorder is reached, ‘immense snakes, bears, tigers and lions, all with eyes like burning candles’ threaten the heroes. Hogg here draws from sources as diverse as Bunyan, the Ballads and contemporary Gothic novels.

This supernatural climax, with its strange, glittering beauty of imagery, so close to the clarity and concrete visualisation of the Ballads, proves completely Hogg’s right to claim that he was ‘king of the mountain and fairy school’ of poets. He achieves new heights of imagination in its description of how Dan meets the Devil with his agents, disguised as a Black Abbot and all on terrible white horses; of how the Devil wanders in a village as a great shaggy black dog, terrifying peasants; of how Dan and his friends undergo a nightmare ride through the firmament; of how the devil plays on the weakness of Charlie and his friends for drink and lovely women, seducing their senses with a superficial beauty such as Dunbar exposes in ‘The Two Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, with the essential foulness of this beauty revealed when the drunken Borderers realise that the lovely girls are hags with rotten teeth and wizened faces. The Devil, in a final, glorious flourish of Disorder, finishes the long dance by transforming them all into bulls. All this is told with a dry attention to details, along with a strange and beautiful description of the trappings of evil. As in ‘The Daemon Lover’, with its fascination for gold and silver, and the ‘taffetie’ of the sails, Hogg sees clearly and enjoys the rich colours of his devils. This delight in the physical and supernatural grotesque is a counterpoint to the etiquette of chivalry elsewhere in the romance; the horrors are vivid, but accompanied by a sense of release through carnal and carnival enjoyment, so that the reader almost shares the ‘hellish delight’ of the withered hags. Yet for all this, Hogg does not forget more homely and human matters, such as Charlie’s consideration for his horse, Corby, or his honest joy at realising that his Border lord and friends had not forgotten him. It is Charlie, of course, who characteristically persists through all terrors to secure the prophecy for Sir Ringan which is the point of his embassy, while Gibby is claimed by Sir Michael to replace Gourlay, and ‘the Deil’s Tam’ fulfils his destiny in a scene which foreshadows the nightmare climax of The Justified Sinner.

There is nothing in the final part of the narrative to match this richness of fantasy and diablerie, but the return to the Siege of Roxburgh has at least two episodes – the affair of Dan Chisholm and the cattle skins, and the taking of the castle by Borderers disguised as cattle – which for sheer speed of action, racy dialogue and character, are as enjoyable as any of Hogg’s short stories. This last episode marks the final irony of the Siege, for Douglas at last confesses that the chivalrous Game has beaten him. He has to descend to ‘wiles’ and beg Sir Ringan’s aid. The chivalrous pattern has finally been wrecked. Musgrave, the dour defender of the besieged castle, has not been taken captive but has killed himself. Princess Margaret is believed to have been hanged. If Douglas finally obtains his desire, it is not in his intended chivalric way, nor by his own doing. And Lady Howard becomes the wife of the homely Borderer Charlie!

One aspect of this outcome that Hogg emphasises is its unity with the demonology of the middle parts. Sir Ringan acts because of the success of Charlie’s embassy and Sir Michael’s (and the devil’s) advice; and his ruse of disguising his men as cattle connects with the metamorphosis of Charlie and his men into bulls. The wizard of the north and the devil have, in a manner, kept faith till the end. Hogg was aware of the strain imposed by his range of plots and characters, and he thought it necessary to make his ‘editor’ remind the reader that the final ironic burst of Border warfare which finishes the siege was

… wholly owing to the weird read by the great enchanter master Michael Scott, so that though the reader must have felt that Isaac kept his guests too long in that horrible place the Castle of Aikwood, it will now appear that not one iota of that long interlude of his could have been omitted; for till the weird was read, and the transformation consummated the embassy could not depart – and unless these had been effected, the castle could not have been taken …

Thus the perils of War and Witchcraft are shown to be inextricably linked in the events and shape of the novel. There is of course a third peril, that of Women. While this peril is handled with humour and ambiguity, it is still true that women are throughout dangerous to men. They prompt to war, they disguise themselves, they turn out to be withered hags, and they use such deception for their own ends. They are also, however, given as rewards. Charlie, because of his goodness and strength, is given Lady Jane Howard, Douglas gains Princess Margaret, and Delaney is the prize for the storytelling contest. Hogg’s fiction continually, and unusually for his time, emphasises the complexity and reality of women; and while the three heroic virgins of the poet’s tale may be little more than the idealised feminine creatures of chivalric romance, in contrast Margaret, Lady Jane, and the Chisholm daughters, have full, sensual, and highly unconventional roles to play. The cross-dressing of these girls complicates both the action and the conventional notions of femininity presented by Isaac and the poet. Douglas’s elfin page, Colin/Margaret, is one of Hogg’s most teasing inventions, with his/her exploitation of male/female codes. The transformations of men are thus balanced with transformations of women, an important part of the rich and complex patterning of Hogg’s epic.

In the end Hogg does succeed in holding together his three perils in this loose-woven romance, despite his many authorial and ‘editorial’ problems. His ‘editor’ had likened his problem in controlling his multitude of characters and situations to that of the waggoner who has to take his load up a steep hill in stages, going back to collect what had to be left behind. It is precisely the want of his waggoner’s patience that has been most objected to in Hogg’s immense undertaking. He tells us in The Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott that he and the great novelist discussed the romance, Scott accusing him of rushing impatiently on in random fashion, and thus spoiling a potentially good tale. Whether we agree with Scott or not, Hogg’s statement in the same place about his method of composition is highly significant. He told Scott that when he started the first line of a tale or a novel, he never knew what the second was to be, and that this continued throughout. But he made an important qualification:

When my tale is traditionary, the work is easy, as I then see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so short, but in all my prose works of the imagination, knowing little of the world, I sail on without star or compass.

In spite of the last statement there is a real sense of direction in The Three Perils of Man, and an impressive enough destination, but it is indeed at the several points where he has tradition to help him that Hogg sees his way best. These are found especially in the scenes set in the Borders and the scenes relating to Sir Michael Scott. It is in working out a path between one such familiar point and another that his uncertainties show. Yet paradoxically it is in the originality of such working-out which makes revaluation of Hogg in the twentieth century such an exciting and on-going process. Seen in the lights of post-structuralist criticism, revisions of Romanticism, Bakhtinian readings – and even feminist theories – Hogg’s fiction generally, and not least The Three Perils of Man, reveals striking and challenging features which command respect and multi-faceted reassessment. And one particular implication of Hogg’s statement few readers will be disposed to accept – seeming to give all the credit for his success to tradition, he belittles his own imagination and is grossly unfair to himself and his romance. For when one has pointed out Hogg’s awareness of the Ballad and folk-tale tradition, when one has drawn parallels with The Pilgrim’s Progress or the chapbooks, one vital factor remains to astonish the critic. It is the sheer fecundity, immensity and colour of Hogg’s imagination, which, working on all kinds of traditional material, creates a living world which needs no other justification than its own unique blend of irony, racy humour, fantasy and romance.

The final ironic reduction comes with the reader’s dawning realisation (confirmed when a map of the Borders is consulted), after following the epic journey of the comic embassy through danger, darkness and leagues of Border mountains, that their entire romantic journey has been something of a storm in a teacup, and that a daylight’s ride through passes in the hills would easily have sufficed to take Charlie and his companions the shortest route to Sir Michael Scott’s castle. Hogg of course is fully aware of his grotesque inflation of the distance and the dangers: since when have the great journeys of imagination taken the shortest route? And conjecture as to the extent of Hogg’s ironies leads the reader to a final and intriguing consideration concerning this troubled, love-hate journey to seek the advice of that medieval wizard of the north, Sir Michael Scott: given Walter Scott’s complex and sometimes dubiously productive relationship with the shepherd, is Hogg playing games yet again, in variation of the Chaldee Manuscript, with his own quest for advice regarding his future development from his illustrious contemporary, that other wizard of the Borders and the north?

The achievement has no parallel. It is the last major effort of the dying, centuries-old tradition which produced the ballads, but it is something more. It is wonderful and refreshing entertainment, and is now recognised as an outstanding contribution, along with Hogg’s other novels, stories and poetry, to the traditions of Scottish literature which the twentieth century has been recovering ever since.

Douglas Gifford