Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Aptly, given its theme is that of doubles and doubling, Hogg’s is a twice-told tale. The first section, full of fights, town riots, slayings, cross-country escapes and who-knows-what hurly burly in a remote castle, and much else, is comic and rumbustious — the material is introduced as if for a newspaper, its readers avid for facts. The second section, by contrast, is intimate and terrifying — the drama lies not in any description of action, but in the relentless unfolding of Robert Wringhim Colwan’s meditations. The sinner’s confessions are a moment-to-moment diary of despair. We are suddenly on the other side of what it’s like to go insane. After that jaunty, enthralled opening (‘Great was the alarm and confusion that night in Edinburgh’), it’s like coming across a notebook left behind by Hamlet — for Robert, exactly like the Danish prince, has been urged on to commit a murder, coaxed and harried, by a ghost or goblin damned, with this result: ‘I was become a terror to myself … I wished myself non-existent.’

Part of Robert’s punishment is that he can’t even succeed in decomposing. As we discover in the journalistic coda (purportedly a letter in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
), the suicide/fratricide’s corpse refuses to disappear — the too-solid flesh hasn’t melted in a hundred years. For, a century after the events of the narrative, when grave robbers are hunting for buckles and buttons, Robert’s skin and clothes have neither mouldered nor lost their bloom. A group of intrigued archaeologists and local historians exhume him yet again; they remark on his old-fashioned costume (the garters look ‘as if they had been newly tied’) and stamp on his head and nose with their iron heels. Then, what is this overlooked package near the body? Why, the sheets of the confession are discovered, immaculate in their slipcase. And isn’t that a pocket diary of additional material, blowing in the wind amongst the shards of skull? The gathered leaves become Hogg’s novel: ‘an original document of a most singular nature … I offer no remarks on it, and make as few additions to it, leaving every one to judge for himself’.

It was in the spirit of Romanticism for its authors to pretend they were merely editors. This way, they could distance themselves from the toxic core of their visions: it was all imagined by somebody else, in the long ago. Honestly. The Ancient Mariner’s anecdotes were passed on to Coleridge by a man on his way to a wedding who’d been importuned by a crank; Keats’ ideas were sprung on him by a nightingale, a copy of
King Lear
, that Greek vase. His texts had pretexts. The archetypal practitioner remains Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, the year of Hogg’s birth. He passed off as medieval poet Thomas Rowley’s verses and plays of his own devising. He imitated the style of parish archives, their spelling and calligraphy, forging his own work on sooty paper with sepia inks. (The issue of imitation and translation, with its links to the psychopathology of the actor, is a subject to which we’ll return.) Chatterton reasoned that suicide was preferable to owning up as an original poet — he thus took his visions to the edge of dissociation, and beyond. His death, according to the survivors, was a martyrdom. Wordsworth wrote a poem (‘The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth’ etc.) and in our own time, Peter Ackroyd has used Chatterton as the eponym of a novel, to examine the moral implications of art’s deceits and many inventions.

In Scotland, the confidence trickery of scholarship was manifested by the Ossian controversy. Was Ossian an historically verifiable Gaelic bard of the third-century glens, or a late-eighteenth-century hoax? James Macpherson’s
Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland
(1760), which was apparently translated from the Erse, was, along with
Fingal
(1762), an ‘Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books’, scoffed at by Dr Johnson as a pile of ‘impudent forgeries’. But what offended the Augustan lexicographer and sage delighted the Romantic heart — the impudence of Macpherson’s Ossian was Chatterton’s model, for example, and the wild seas and mountain tops of the Ossianic world were what people now wanted: Goethe’s Werther and Charlotte study Macpherson’s Ossian edition and weep over the ballads; Monk Lewis, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley and Mrs Radcliffe used the turbulence and ancient temples as habitats and habits for their characters — a sublime landscape that also mapped inner states, or souls, from the fear of the maidens in Otranto and Udolpho to Dr Frankenstein himself, putting up a lightning rod in an electrical storm in a bid to bring the dead back to life.

When Macpherson was asked to produce Ossian’s original manuscripts, he obligingly (and laboriously) concocted them. Through forgery and editorializing he brought back to life a dead poet who’d never (perhaps) existed. His probable sources for the myths and legends were the songs, folk tales and apocrypha of rustic recitation — such as were collected, collated and adapted by Scott for
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
between 1802 and 1803. Scott’s collaborator was James Hogg. Hogg, a year Scott’s senior, had been born amongst the peasantry of the Ettrick valley. He’d worked most of his life as a shepherd and didn’t read or write until 1794, when he started to try and set down the ballads and pastorals, the winter evening tales, which he had absorbed. He was thus at the centre of the Romantic interest in seeing literature make its way out of the oral tradition to become drafts and printed books. Scott himself was much interested in printing methods and the economics of publishing; so too was Hogg. Robert Wringhim Colwan, towards the end of his career, seeks refuge in a printer’s shop and works as a compositor, where he secretly sets up his memoirs in type. Bound as a book, his confessions will have greater authority and a wider audience — he’s thrilled when ‘I saw what numbers of my works were to go abroad among mankind …’ Unfortunately, the edition is destroyed by fire, save for that set of proofs the antiquarians find in the grave.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
thus filters through to us and is introduced as a combination of chanced-upon manuscript and scholarly apparatus — anything to push it back into the past. The first edition of 1824 even omitted Hogg’s name on the title page. Ten years later he explained, ‘it being a story replete with horrors, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it’. What constitutes the horrors is devil-worship. The book up-ends conventional religious notions; it satirizes the behaviour and aspirations of the devout; it extends the puritanical logic of John Knox to a surreal extreme — so that holiness becomes an ingenious way of justifying slaughter and creating a hell on earth. Over all, the novel is a condemnation of non-benevolent Calvinism — Jean Chauvin (1509-64), or John Calvin, being an influential proponent of predestination: a few of us will be blessed with ‘efficacious grace and the gift of perseverance’ and will enjoy salvation; the rest of us are damned from the outset and no amount of prayers or good offices will protect us from eternal torment. (The biblical authority is John, 10, 26-9: ‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.’)