The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the editors of Hogg’s Collected Works, who have brought a new depth to Hogg studies, and I am grateful in particular to one of them, Gillian Hughes, for good advice and the benefit of her immense knowledge of the field. Her three volumes of his letters are now in the process of publication. Meiko O’Halloran’s doctoral thesis on Hogg (Oxford University, 2004) refers to his ‘kaleidoscopic art’, and I am obliged to her for the arguments she presents. Passages of the Introduction formed part of a lecture, ‘Who wrote James Hogg?’, given at the University of Stirling on 4 May 2005.

Chronology

1770 Born at Ettrickhall farmhouse in the Scottish Borders and baptized on 9 December. Son of a farmer, Robert Hogg, and his wife Margaret (née Laidlaw). Soon put to the herding of cattle and sheep, and to an acquaintance with hunger and fatigue. His early education was restricted to two spells of some six months in all. At the age of sixteen he served at the farm of Willenslee, where there was a library.

1790 To the farm of Blackhouse, where the master’s son was the poet William Laidlaw, who became his closest friend. Around 1793 he started to write poems. A poem was taken by the Scots Magazine the following year, and his first book of verse, Scottish Pastorals, crept out in Edinburgh in 1801.

1800 Moved to run Ettrickhouse farm for his father, and presently met Walter Scott, to whose Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border he contributed ballad material, together with his mother, and who became his friend and mentor. From the turn of the century he paid visits to the Highlands and Western Isles, and in 1803 he offered for a farm in Harris. The venture fell through for legal reasons.

1807 A book of poems, The Mountain Bard, and an essay on the care of sheep, The Shepherd’s Guide, were brought out by Constable. Having herded ewes on Queensbury Hill in Nithsdale, he acquired two Dumfriesshire farms, Corfardin and Locherben, which failed. Bankrupt. Love affairs with two Border girls produced one daughter, and perhaps a second. The kirk session took note of this ‘uncleanness’, and Hogg was summoned for rebuke.

1810 And so, for several years, to Edinburgh, where he launched and largely wrote a literary magazine, the Spy, a testing-ground for themes and preoccupations that were to remain with him. A mild attention to sexual matters affronted his precarious readership. The Forest Minstrel of this year was an anthology of poems by himself and others. In 1811 he climbed and slid down Ben More in the Western Highlands, from whose summit he surveyed the haunts of Scott’s Lady of the Lake and much of Hogg’s beloved Scotland.

1813 The Queen’s Wake – a series of narrative poems, which are set within the framework of a literary competition ordained by Mary Queen of Scots – was published by George Goldie. Among these are his most celebrated poem, which tells of the maid Kilmeny’s translation to Heaven, and the fine ballad ‘The Witch of Fife’. Goldie then went bankrupt. William Blackwood, a trustee for the ensuing settlement, purchased surviving copies of the third edition, and went on, for good and ill, to become Hogg’s publisher-in-chief.

1814 Having been introduced to Wordsworth in Edinburgh that summer, he travelled with him about the Borders and visited his house of Rydal Mount in the Lake District, where, beneath a brilliant night sky, he experienced a snub at the hand of his ‘superior being’. Hogg served for three years as secretary of the Forum, a debating society, which he saw as completing his belated education.

1815 The fourth Duke of Buccleuch leased him rent-free the cottage of Altrive Lake, where he was to spend the rest of his life. The following year he brought out his remarkable book of verse parodies, The Poetic Mirror, in which Wordsworth is mocked. It had been hoped that Scott and Hogg’s new friend Byron would contribute to the project in its original form.

1817 Drawn into Edinburgh’s magazine wars, where Constable and Blackwood were contending potentates, rival ‘bibliopoles’. In October 1817 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine started to appear. The inaugural number carried ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’, an explosive Biblical parody, initiated by Hogg, and charged with politico-religious provocation, in which these wars were evoked. Blackwood laughed at it, while removing it from the number in perfect fear of the consequences: but it was to make the journal’s name. Hogg worked on the paper with John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, who presently enrolled him as a star of its serial feature, the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, imaginary conversations sited in Ambrose’s tavern. Hogg’s words were, for the most part, scripted for him by these two, and his equivocal relations with them were to dominate the rest of his life. His Covenanter novel, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, was published in 1818.

1820 Married Margaret Phillips, a pious woman from a wealthy south-west farming family. Her dowry failed when her father’s finances did. Margaret’s parents came to live with the Hoggs at Altrive, where a son and four daughters were born. A collection of country pieces, evolved from earlier work, Winter Evening Tales, was published in the same year. In 1821 he obtained from the Buccleuchs the nine-year lease of the adjacent farm of Mount Benger. His Poetic Works was issued in four volumes by Constable the year after that, while his phantasmagoric medieval romance, The Three Perils of Man, was published by Longman in London. This was followed by The Three Perils of Woman. Both of these wild and busy works have found a niche in post-modernist taste.

1823 Wrote the Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which would one day be reckoned his principal achievement. Published, anonymously, by Longman, in 1824, it made no stir at the time. Nor did his mock-epic poem Queen Hynde, whose Dark Age Argyllshire projects a foundation myth, a Scots cosmogony.

1827 Inaugural meeting, at Innerleithen, of the St Ronan’s Games. He was a leading light of these ‘Scottish Olympics’ and a lifelong sportsman: a runner, fisherman and curler, captain of the Bowmen of the Border.

1832 To London for three months, to promote a collected edition of his prose fiction, which got no farther than Altrive Tales, and to be fêted by the Anglo-Scottish aristocracy and literati. He was led to think that he might be in mind for a knighthood, an honour presaged in his writings but distinctly unacceptable to his wife. A Scottish fête was later held at the Tontine Hotel in Peebles, where he reviewed his career and was reported to say of his ‘literary fame’: ‘I hae got it at last.’ While curling on Duddingston Loch, he fell through the ice and felt he would never be the same again. He no longer cut the famous figure he had once done on the streets of Edinburgh. In 1832 there appeared A Queer Book, ballads done in his ‘ancient style’.

1834 There appeared, in two versions, his anecdotes of Scott, mortally offensive to Scott’s biographer, Lockhart.

1835 Died calmly, in poverty, at Altrive. Born again a century later, when his literary fame acquired a new lease of life.

Introduction

In the summer of 2003, a friend of mine murmured that he’d read the first three chapters of Electric Shepherd, a book I’d published on James Hogg, and still didn’t understand how this man could have written the novel, the Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Shortly afterwards, James Buchan brought out his book, Capital of the Mind, an account of Enlightenment Edinburgh in which Hogg keeps a low profile, and in which the novel is said to have been, not by, but merely attributed to Hogg.¹

The Confessions is a book about uncertainty which is itself uncertain, and whose very authorship has sometimes been questioned – with John Gibson Lockhart nominated, at times, as a contender for the title; and there are questioners who may or must have felt that a poor man from the country, a man of simplicities, slips and inequalities, or that a graduate of the school of nature, an ‘inspired’, untutored lyric poet, could not have written it. Hogg belonged, moreover, to a coterie of writers – those responsible for Blackwood’s Magazine – whose tricks, mysteries, attributions, denials, joint authorship, anonymity and pseudonymity became, for a while, habitual. So why is it now generally and confidently believed that he wrote the novel? Well, he did claim it, despite publishing it anonymously, and the publishers dealt with him as its author. He was not, or not for long, its hidden or absent author, in the way that Walter Scott, at this same time, was the ‘Great Unknown’ of the Waver-ley novels. It has in it his native scenes, his shepherd places. And he discussed it, as his, with Mary Ann Hughes, the Scott-adoring, true-blue Tory wife of a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.² Mrs Hughes is one of the very few of his contemporaries who is on record as appreciating it.

Visiting the Borders in 1824, the year the Confessions was published, Mrs Hughes talked to Hogg’s uncle, William Laidlaw, an old shepherd who had deserted his ballads for religion, and who observed in his forthright Ettrick way that his nephew had shown no ‘particular indication of talent’, as she phrased it, when he was young: ‘Na, na he was e’en like other laddies, but na ill chiel’ and ‘ready at his bible – the readiest ever I saw’. Not a bad lad, but a book by him was ‘full of lees’, which was not the only time that Hogg was blamed for lying. Four years later she met the man himself, at Scott’s baronial country house of Abbotsford, catching him at the centre of that part of his life which revolved round his relations with the friend, mentor, fellow artist and semi-feudal superior who lived there. ‘Hogg,’ she thought, ‘is a very simple-mannered, pleasant person, much less rough in exterior than I expected, and has an open, good-humoured face which must prepossess every one in his favour.’

He and Scott are noticed, in her recollections of the two, laughing over a local worthy known as ‘the daft Laird’, who once called to his servant: ‘Jock, I saw an Otter in yon Pool.’ Jock splashed about for it, until the laird let fall that the sighting was thirty-two years ago. Hogg the song-writer and ‘proficient’ fiddler is remembered talking ‘very eagerly’ in the drawing-room at Abbotsford. Of a woman’s rendering of Venetian ballads in the library he says: ‘Oh this is just Etawlian singing which I canna understand… if it had na been a thing of ceveelity I had far rather sat and had our cracks here.’ But he, too, gets to sing for his supper. Mistaken for Hogg the writer, Mrs Hughes learns, his brother, the master of Scott’s sheep, was embraced by a daft French count, who was elegantly advised: ‘I’m wae to think ye’ll be sorry to ken I hae na manner of right to receive’ the Count’s compliments. Hogg’s brother reckoned that he paid undue attention to those poems of his, neglecting his flock.

During her 1828 visit to the North she discussed the novel with Hogg, who reported: ‘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 was ever written.’ She had found in Scotland a genial, storytelling man who had written a sovereign Gothic novel.

Given the tricks of the time, it may not be decisive, for a confirmation of his authorship, that a manuscript of the novel in Hogg’s hand was formerly known to exist; nor is it impossible that other hands may have helped with its composition. But there are many different reasons for believing it to be his. Those which are internal to the novel itself, and to which I shall turn in a moment, are reasons which help one to understand it, and to enjoy its uncertainty. Writers’ lives, which create their works of art, can be read there, difficult as such readings may often prove, and the attempt can certainly be made with Hogg’s work of art.

Its sinner predicts that his adventures will puzzle the readers of the future, and they did so. But posterity came round to his adventures: the tide began to turn in favour of the book when an edition appeared in 1947 with the endorsement of the French novelist André Gide. In earlier times Hogg could be thought a strange compound of sense and nonsense, coarseness and delicacy, and his writings had lain open to the condescension and contempt which have been directed at the simple soul from the country who has had the nerve to write a book. ‘Him write a book? I kent his faither.’ Scotland’s proverbial mockery of an ancient prejudice. The history of Hogg’s contested claim to the novel commemorates a view of his writings which has now been subdued by a new regard for his achievement.

Hogg was born in 1770 at the heart of the Border lands, by the parallel streams of Yarrow and Ettrick, and spent his youth as a farm labourer and then as a shepherd, denied the schooling earlier available to Robert Burns. His so-called ‘wilderness’, rough and tough as it was for the poor, was also ‘elegant and agreeable’ – his words for it – and convivial, richly customary and legendary. It had more than its share of likely lads whose energies could surmount educational slow starts and a rigorous, a visceral class distinction. The Borders were a history and a civilization, in which violence, songs and sport had long been pursued, and in which hardship and hunger had survived the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century and the prosperity it delivered to the enterprising. Hogg was never to be financially secure, and more than once became insolvent – a fate that also overtook Walter Scott and other eminent Scotsmen of the day.

In his mid-thirties this friend and neighbour of Scott was still to be found in a hole in the ground, his hillside bothy. Soon after this, having fathered a child, or two perhaps, Hogg set off for Edinburgh, travelling the thirty-seven miles to arrive in the metropolis at starvation point, and, nothing loth, to launch a literary magazine, the Spy. Seven years later he took up with the Tory publisher William Blackwood and his rising stars, Lockhart and John Wilson. Three years later still, in 1820, he got married to a pious woman from a well-to-do farming family in Nithsdale, who bore him four daughters and a son. His life was divided between Ettrick and Edinburgh, and suspended between social classes. It can be said of him that this was his world, the one world he inhabited. It can also be said of him that he inhabited two worlds, which made two and more of the man in his book, the author of the Confessions.

He wrote poems and stories for Blackwood’s journal for the rest of his life, falling out with it at intervals, and he took part, mostly by proxy, in its series of published conversations, the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, where literary cronies, in various stages of disguise, mingled with outright ‘messieurs de l’imagination’. Wilson, alias Christopher North, was the principal Ambrosianist, and Wilson and Lockhart, in the main, were Hogg’s scriptwriters, his ghosts. He was dramatized by his ‘madcap Tories’, who would also write or rewrite material published in his name. They were both his cronies and his enemies. ‘O sus, quando te aspiciam?’ they asked. ‘When shall I see you, you swine?’ This is the voice of friendship, which is rarely unequivocal. But his grand young friends effected a betrayal of the man they liked, and meant to celebrate, and they were sometimes to ‘banish’ him, as he put it, from their brotherhood. An affinity with Shakespeare’s Falstaff makes an appearance in the record. Falstaff was ‘banished’, as Shakespeare put it, from the society of the young friend who became king, and, like James Hogg, he was both witty and the cause of wit in others. And there is another affinity to speak of.

In the Classical world, the upstart musician Marsyas was punished for his temerity by the god Apollo. Titian painted his picture, and so did the Ambrosians, in their treatment of Hogg. Nor did they omit to mention the flaying of Marsyas in their discussions. Hogg wasn’t proof to the pain inflicted by this mockery and masquerading. There were failures of confidence which left their mark in the course of his later years. Marsyas had the last word, though, a hundred years later.³

Hogg’s urban experience encompassed conflicts in the province of ideas. Enlightenment values shared a sky with the crescent moon of Romance, and there were magazines which fought on opposite sides of the dispute that emerged between the two, with the matter of supremacy and succession by no means free from doubt in generations to come. The Scottish Enlightenment did not disappear with the eighteenth century; it can be caught, along with its flamboyant negation, in the Blackwood’s Magazine of this time. Neither of these lights was to leave the sky, and they have survived as a living duality, a rivalry and mutuality, for readers of the present time. The contest of Whig and Tory over the extension of the franchise achieved by the Reform Bill of 1832 was a further feature of his urban experience, as was the return of evangelical religion personified by his wife. Meanwhile the wisdom and superstition of the countryside, and of the oral tradition, continued to command the sympathy of the Ettrick Shepherd, as he became known to his public.

He was a watcher of the skies, and this contest and confluence of forces was written there by what transpired on his way from the Borders to Edinburgh in 1801. He passed the night at the inn in the village of Straiton, which afforded, for his contemplation, a romantic scene. The landlord’s disturbed son had been baying at the moon, telling it off, as it hung in its splendour over the Pentland Hills. Conscious, perhaps, of Wordsworth’s recent lyric about his ‘idiot boy’, there was to be a poem of Hogg’s, ‘Sandy Tod’, about this Midlothian lad and about himself. Benighted in Straiton, Hogg shared the moon, as you might say, with its detractor, his eyes to the hills, his back to the shepherds, lairds, weavers, wizards and fairies of his wilderness, with its now treeless Ettrick Forest. Below him in the moonlight lay Edinburgh, ‘Capital of the Mind’, alias the ‘metropolis of mind’ seriously and satirically so called by the novelist John Galt at the time of Hogg’s Confessions.

At about the time of this episode the Ettrick Shepherd made it to the moon, according to Hogg’s extravaganza, ‘Dr David Dale’s Account of a Grand Aerial Voyage’, published much later, in 1830. The flight is fuelled by hydrogen gas, and its Ettrick Shepherd, ‘this thirsty and ravenous son of the mountains’, talks of scientific calculation, rather as Hogg refers, elsewhere in his writings, to the optics of his friend Sir David Brewster. This Hogg reveals a serio-comic acquaintance with the principles both of geometry (logarithms, tangents, ‘the parabolic and the hyperbolic curves’, crop up) and of poetry. Poetry is called ‘a kind o’ representation o’ things by similitude’ – which forms part of a Wordsworthian definition employed in Hogg’s verse parodies. Enlightenment science made it to the moon in fact, eventually, and there could be no more graphic illustration of the, for some, scandalous proposition that we live in a world where the scientific mind has worked with the romantic imagination, several of whose hypotheses came true. Not only did Edgar Allan Poe, with his balloonist Hans Pfaall, emulate Hogg’s lunar flight. Science did.

There was a familiar term of the time which bore a special resonance for Hogg. He and his friends Lockhart and Wilson were ‘printers’ devils’ of a kind. He could see these friends as two devils, with himself as a third, feeling for Wilson a mixture of ‘terror, admiration and jealousy’. Such was the intimacy and ambivalence of their relationship, of the Blackwood’s collective, in which they copied one another, rewrote each other’s stuff, impersonated each other, in a welter of false names, parody, imposture, sport. The welter was referred to in the ‘Noctes’ as a ‘universal plagiarism’, which can be considered an aspect of the universal mystery and uncertainty imagined by the inner circle of these writers. An astonishing jamboree, all this, and a test of Hogg’s integrity. He feared that his integrity might be compromised if he went in for too much in the way of revising his work. But the ruthless brilliance of Blackwood’s journalism was a greater hazard for him than the ordeal of revision. His integrity is best expressed in the duality that invests the Confessions, where his life was spoken in ways impossible for most forms of autobiography.

An age of reason encountered what Coleridge called ‘an age of personality’. Hogg became a personality, both in the Borders and at Blackwood’s, where the word ‘personality’ became a pun. It could mean both an ad hominem insult and an individual human being, whether one person or two, homo simplex or homo duplex. And it was on its way to meaning, as in his case, a celebrity or star. The romantic reaction which had come about in this quarter of Edinburgh swore by personality and its uncertainties, and by error, and by nation and imagination, the nation being both Scotland and Britain, together with their empire, on which, as Wilson has been thought to have been the first to say, the sun never set.

The views of these writers, not least their views on the proximity or identity of truth and error, yield anticipations of Post-Modernist theory, while embodying a displayed adherence to the truths of Christianity. ‘There never was a baseless fiction,’ said the ‘Noctes’ diners, whose talk carried a message that was to recur in the writings of the modern American philosopher Richard Rorty. For Rorty, truth is made, rather than found or given. Like Rorty, the diners were in favour of nonsense, hero-worship, greatness and romance, and of Wordsworth. It isn’t clear how far the real Hogg would have gone with the more subversive propositions put into his mouth, for all the unsettling tendency of his novel, for all its theory of relativity, for all its placing in a state of indeterminacy contrasting versions of the same events. But it does seem clear that the novel can’t be thought irrelevant to the philosophizings heard at Ambrose’s tavern, that it makes sense to ask if the errors at issue in the novel can be associated with the love of error professed in the magazine, where error and accident can appear to offer an escape from the certainty of God’s will.

In the pages of the magazine, at certain times, romantic indeterminacy and indifferentism teach – and tease – that error is beautiful and truthful, and most things much the same. The ‘Noctes’ Shepherd is made to reflect: ‘Ae thing’s just as good as anither. It’s nae matter what ane pits in a book; my warst things aye sell best, I think. I’m resolved, I’ll try and write some awfu’ ill thing this winter.’ The real Hogg once said that he’d lost the ability to tell which of his things would ‘take’.⁴ This was expressed as a matter of regret, and it would be a mistake to suppose that he lost himself in the worship of error. But he was very interested in it, nowhere more than in the Confessions. The novel is a tragi-comedy of errors.

The Confessions consists of an editor’s story of the sinner’s life, followed by the sinner’s own word for what happened to him. An editorial postscript, which supplies an extract from a letter of Hogg’s published in the magazine, describes the opening up of a suicide’s grave on a hilltop near his house at Altrive in Ettrick. The participants in this gruesome souvenir hunt include the unnamed editor himself, Lockhart, and Hogg’s and Walter Scott’s friend Laidlaw – another William Laidlaw, a poet and a Whig sympathizer, whose brother James, said to have been helped with his lessons by Hogg, became a powerful Highland sheep-farmer and improver. The postscript is a corridor to the historical reality of Hogg’s personal relationships.

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novel The Devil’s Elixirs came out at this point, in 1824, having been translated for Blackwood from the German by Hogg’s friend R. P. Gillies, and may well have encouraged Hogg to write a book which implies that a person can be two persons or more; the double of the time owed much to Germany. Hogg was himself more men than one, and the idea of the double stands here in allegorical relation to the opposites and self-belyings perceptible in the story of his life, as in the lives of others. It’s possible to plead authority for this generic claim, alleging allegory. With Bunyan in mind, perhaps, Hogg spoke of certain of his fictions as allegories, while also making use of Bunyan’s and Wordsworth’s word ‘similitude’. Puritan election and predestination, puritan abhorrence of morals, merit, ‘filthy works’, in contradistinction to God’s grace, and gift of faith, are at stake in Hogg’s novel. They belong to the dualistic ‘involute’ of the novel, to use an expression coined by De Quincey, whose likeness takes part in the ‘Noctes’; and they have been seen in general, by Yvor Winters, as ‘a long step towards the allegorization of experience’.⁵ Hogg’s novel might well be seen as an allegory which confronts the allegory of justification by faith, whereby, as for the seventeenth-century Covenanter, salvation goes, fore-ordained and irreversible, to the true believer.

Hogg’s sinner is a Whig and a ‘fanatic of old’, as the enlightened and as Episcopalians tended to think of the Covenanters and their commemorators. The novel is dominated by its exposure of ultra-Calvinism’s antinomian excesses, of the errors that flow from the conviction that God’s chosen few are infallible, and will not be forsaken by their dualizing maker, with his sheep and his goats. Hogg had a cousin who felt that way, who hated the idea that a man may be saved and yet fall from it tomorrow. But there are other main meanings here too.

The novel is a response to the rival Christianities of the time – a blow for charity and tolerance. But it’s also an outcome of Hogg’s experience of the double life of poet and peasant, and of the multiple personality of the Blackwood’s collective. I can imagine the retort that he may have been no more double than the next man or woman, but I don’t see how anyone could deny that he was a man of contradictions. To make much of these contradictions has been thought to risk failing to convey what he was like as a person: but this is what persons are like. Their contradictions do not efface them, and to deny that this can be so is as much as to say that the novel has been written in vain, and that many subsequent novels have been written in vain. The Confessions is the work of someone who believed that personality and its appearances are uncertain, and his explorations fed into a variety of later approaches to the problem of human identity, including the psychoanalytic approach. A stress on the fragmentary, the momentary, on the multiple, mutual and mutable, on splitting and sharing and merging, on transference, and on performance, is now in widest commonalty spread. Edward St Aubyn has recently pointed, in one of his novels, to the possibility that identity may be ‘a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence’, a condition which abolishes the distinction between action and acting, and which he distinguishes from disintegration.⁶

Hogg’s novel tells, in its two different ways, of a young man, Robert Wringhim, whose real father is a predestinarian divine, and whose nominal father, a jolly laird, has a son, handsome and chivalrous George, as the editor portrays him. Robert takes up with a princely tempter and impersonator, Gil-Martin, who becomes his intimate friend and who tells him what he already knows about the immunity of the elect. Such a plot gives scope for uncertainty. Nevertheless, the novel has an expoundable aim, which has a great deal to do with its dislike of religious intolerance, with the ‘be not angry’ scornfully identified as the sum of Hogg’s morality by angry Thomas Carlyle. It’s a book about ‘the effects of puritanical superstition in destroying the moral feelings’. These are not Hogg’s words, but he would have responded to their purport. They are those of Lockhart, whose novel of the same time, Matthew Wald, has in it an antinomian fanatic, a justified sinner, who had been ‘permitted to make a sore stumble’, words that Hogg might have written. The novel’s objections to puritanical superstition are opposed by its diary of a madman. They are assisted by affirmations of a benign piety, of what Hogg referred to, in his novel The Three Perils of Woman, as ‘the religion of the heart’.⁷

Lockhart may have influenced Hogg’s interest in religious fanaticism. But they were very different people. Hogg’s novel is concerned with the troubles of an outcast, with banishment and betrayal, and with the seductions of rank and power. Lockhart was not indifferent to these seductions, but his experience of them was hardly Hogg’s: it is easier to think of him inflicting, rather than suffering, the attentions of Gil-Martin, and he could be evoked by his friends in a way that caused him to resemble this dark spirit. Of the two men, Hogg is the more likely author of the Confessions, and the canvassing of alternative authors comes to look like an intervention of the class police, like the punishment of an intruder among ‘better men’, as one twentieth-century critic characterized his Edinburgh friends. He felt that he was regarded as an intruder, and was aware that there was a school of thought which had difficulty in accepting that a poor man, without a degree and with supposed deficiencies in respect of sensitivity and self-discipline, could be a writer. They could also think, at times, as some others did, that there were poor men who made especially good writers. These poor men were inspired. Heaven helped them.

The novel’s concern with likeness furnishes another way of saying that it is by Hogg. Evidence of its being his includes the presence in the novel of passages which correspond to material in previous writings by him which have gone unchallenged as to authorship, and its treatment of likeness is a case in point. Robert follows his brother George about in the novel, and the demon Gil-Martin, who has the knack of looking like whoever he pleases, does the same for Robert. The real Hogg, a mimic, like Walter Scott and other choice spirits of the time, may be said to have possessed the knack too. In 1810, in the opening number of his magazine, he spoke, in the character of the Spy, of his ‘abominable propensity’ to look at other people and to take them over, become them. Fourteen years on, whether or not Hogg really regretted the propensity, which has the air of a supernatural gift, Gil-Martin was awarded it in his novel, where it frankly resembles the evil eye.

Looking ensures likeness, Gil-Martin explains, and, by assuming someone’s likeness, ‘I attain to possession of his most secret thoughts.’ He does not have ‘full control’ over this propensity, but it enables him to control and invade others. Lockhart took part in the vigilance of his circle, his frightening eye well known to his friends. So you could say that both he and Hogg shared Gil-Martin’s gift. This does not mean that Lockhart wrote the novel. And when Hogg began, as it were, to write it, with the likeness passage in the Spy, it was seven years before he and Lockhart first met.⁸

The editorial essays in the Spy borrow from other writers, notably from Samuel Johnson. Could the likeness passage have been derived from or instigated by some eighteenth-century periodical essay, the work of some stroller in the city and observer of its citizens? The ploys and preoccupations of Joseph Addison’s Spectator were responded to, played with, in the Spy, and the Spectator had more eyes than Argus, who is himself present there. It has the notorious jealous eye; it has the eye that penetrates, to the soul, the eye of others. Unlike Addison’s surrogate or persona, the Spectator, the Spy is not a club-man: the club came later, for Hogg, in Blackwood’s, whose Ambrosians were no less affected than the editor of the Spy by the performance of Addison, Steele and their imaginaries. The material recycled by Hogg for his journal was not all of importance to his developing literary purposes. This can’t be said, however, of the occasions when he recycled himself, as in the case of the likeness passage, taken for his novel from his own journalism, with or without some prompting from the journalism of an earlier time. Likeness, and imitation, continued to matter to him over the most productive years of his writing life, as did the uncertain self and the uncertain son.

His was an age of personality, of mimicry, and of physiognomy, with his own plaided person much spectated. Body and soul could each of them be invaded and hallucinated, mistaken, as Hogg’s brother was mistaken for Hogg. Identities could be shared and confused. ‘Like is an ill mark,’ said the marvellous maid Bessy Gillies in Hogg’s novel, meaning that it’s an unreliable sign, or a bad sign – hers was a society in which the Devil left his mark on people. ‘Like’ is a major preoccupation of the novel, and a function of its duality. It takes two to produce a likeness.

Hogg’s own doubleness includes the gaps between the subtlety and power of his best work and the more run-of-the-mill of his magazine pieces, his first-draft effusions, some of his tales of horror and of humour, his deplored lapses of taste and judgement. These disparities may be more marked than any that can be noticed in most writers of comparable worth, but they are scarcely an ill mark, and present no case for dispossessing him of his masterpiece.

A self-expressive, a personally revealing, an authorially revealing interest in the subject of duality is evident elsewhere in his work. His story ‘John Gray o’ Middleholm’ was published in 1820, four years before the Confessions. It’s a very funny fabliau, a folk tale which has in it the sophistication of Allemagne – the Germany of the Gothic imagination – and Edinburgh. Poor John is a hungry weaver who goes in search of treasure, who dreams of a cobbler no less zealous for treasure than himself, and who meets up with him in the town of Kelso. The two men conduct a dialogue of doubles on the uncertainties of personality and of what one person can know about another. ‘This is me,’ says the cobbler, ‘as sure as that is you; but wha either you or me is, I fancy me or you disna very weel ken.’

There must be few more resolute expressions, or exhibitions, of human indeterminacy than the one in a ballad of his done in the antique style he adopted from time to time. The ballad is about Robin Reid, athlete and star, with more in him than meets the eye. In this respect, as in some others, a portrait of the artist is implied. Robin’s father and mother are daft, and he’s hardly right himself. But he will yield to none that breathes beneath the heaven.

For I haif ane knolege at myne herte

From quhare I cannot telle

That I am double – I’m Rob Reidde

And I’m besyde myselle.

A further involvement on Hogg’s part in the drama of human indeterminacy has seen the light of publication in the last few months. ‘Jock Armstrong’⁹ is a study in likeness where a Scots-speaking Cumbrian family, the Wightmans, discovers that deer-stealing Jock has murdered his enemy half-brother, the nasty laird Fletcher, a Jacobite and a ‘rascal’ (for Walter Scott, Reform Whigs were ‘rascals’). ‘The squire it seems has lost his life and that by his own brother, his very image an’ likeness, and but two years and twenty days older than himself.’ Jock’s mother had been a maid in Fletcher’s house, and he himself had grown up, in other accommodation, as a wild devil. By now he is a Government man, a Whig poacher. What do the Wightmans then do but persuade Jock to go into the forest, change clothes with the corpse, and take over as the laird? Every man should live for his own benefit, thinks farmer Wightman – who may, the story sometimes seems to hint, be Jock’s real father. The new laird carries off the masquerade and marries Miss Sarah Wightman – his Byronic sister, if you follow me, and if you take the hint – while reverting to his old self, one moonlight night, on a trip to the greenwood. Two lads, deer-stalkers themselves, spy him as he seems to ‘eye a feeding deer’, one of the new laird’s own herd. A fine sentence states what happens next: ‘The surprised poacher turned his pale face quietly round toward them and said in a calm voice that chilled their hearts, “Weel callants I suppose you think ye hae me safe at last.”’ The lads head off, mistaking him for a ghost.

The tale rustles like any greenwood with intimations of Hogg. It offers a union of opposites and a divided self, and an illegitimate child. Jock never learns that he is (or may be) a blood relation of the bad proprietor, while an interpreter might want to say that he is the proprietor, on the grounds that Hogg’s equivocal rise in the world, and his suspension between Ettrick and Edinburgh, are pictured in the story. Jock is a James Hogg, that is to say, and the story also suggests that James Hogg is the author of the Confessions. John Wightman testifies before a judge that the dead body is very like the body of Jock Armstrong, ‘but he would not swear to the identity’ of the body and its belongings, ‘for like was but an ill mark’. Bessie Gillies of the Confessions said the same about her mistress’s belongings. And Wightman’s words may be felt to bear on the question of Jock’s paternity.

It’s hard to be quite right or quite sure about Hogg, and there are writings of his which seem intended to prevent this. He was a man who was interested in error and who made mistakes and who was the cause of mistakes in others. The Confessions is a devil of a book to write about. But it’s not hard to be moved by it. It has the energy, pathos and delusion of the human struggle, and it makes a virtue of its lifelike uncertainty. It is a work expressive of the life of a man who has met his double in the pages of a magazine, and been attacked by those in whom he has confided, who has moved among the warring outlooks, the warring religions and philosophies, of his time, and who has moved from one environment to another, and back again.

It’s hard to be quite right about what might seem obvious enough – this move from one corner of his society to another, a translation which contained reversions and a return, and was at no point a desertion. Like Jock Armstrong, he was held to be a poacher, towards the end of a life during which he became both a celebrity and an elder of the kirk. There is very much more to the Hogg enigma than the matter of his two environments, of the country boy, the child of nature, who fell among sophisticates. The Border lands of his lifetime were well stocked with men and women of talent, some of whom left their cottages in pursuit of their callings, just as the explorer Mungo Park left the region for the heart of darkness, for ‘Africa sae dreary oh’, as Hogg was to describe the continent. Moves, with their features of betrayal and hurt, their accidents of acquaintance, their strokes of luck and of the pen, their writing of books and sitting of exams, their seeking of asylum, are in most places ancient and frequent. Writers have been writers partly because they have moved off the hill and out of the country cottages to which there can now be a need for them to return. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Hogg’s inhabiting of two worlds, at once a liberation for him and a trouble, played a part in creating what we may feel there is in him of the elusive, the mutable, the mutual and the multiple.

Nor should we make light of the human interest of his flourishing at an interface between the old rural order and a metropolitan world of the clever and the well-off and the ambitious, of ‘factory publishing’ and ‘reviewer bitterness’ – terms of the time – of the rise of the media star, of personality and of ‘the personality’, in something like the modern sense of these expressions. His early pastoral poems can sound the note of a beautiful and ideal Borders, and can appear to define themselves in contrast with a magnetic urban excitement, to which he was finally drawn in 1810. His persona ‘Sandy’ sounds the note in addressing one of his two native streams:¹⁰

Flow, my Ettrick, it was thee

Into life wha first did drap me:

Thee I’ve sung, an’ when I dee

Thou wilt lend a sod to hap me.

And yet his early world remained with him, for all the excitement of Edinburgh – here once more is the syntax of duality, with its ‘for alls’ and its ‘and yets’. He returned to Selkirkshire after his years away, and died there. The Ettrick lent its sod. His first friends, his thrilling landscapes, his songs and his fiddle, his fireside stories, his sports, never became a paradise lost. During his later years he sponsored the Border Games, his ‘Scottish Olympics’, as they were christened in the press.

The thought of those two worlds of his which were also one suggests the workings of what I’ve been talking of, and has been talked of since the nineteenth century, as duality, where one thing can be seen as two and two things can be seen as one – as in the case of the Hogg who must often have felt himself to be leading the one life, for all his Ettrick and Edinburgh, for all the rival attractions of his precipitous class-divided Scotland. Duality promotes treacherous, though also advantageous, attitudes of mind. Among the quicksands is a suspension or slippage between the literal and the figurative, the true and the false, earnest and fun. But it’s an idea which has to be applied both to this novel and to the author of the novel, and which is brought to life in the novel. Hogg was supposed by some to be the simple soul who may or may not have written a deep book. But he was not that simple, to say the least. This was not the sancta simplicitas, the holy simplicity, of the religious past, an attribute which may nevertheless have contributed to the period understanding of who he was. His complex book was written by a complex man, who might remind you of a story about another Jock. Jock Gray was a member, as he felt, of a ‘stiffnecked and rebellious’ Border congregation, and he defied the minister whose pulpit he had invaded and who ordered him to come down. No, said Jock to the minister: ‘Come ye up. It’ll tak us baith.’ Two Hoggs and more were needed for the Confessions, which was written by just the one, an acute responder to the people and to the talent around him.