Confessions of a Justified Sinner (2 page)

Being a man who overcame his origins with literacy, Hogg was never going to believe in a doctrine that branded people with original sin and excluded them from achievement. He may have known his place, the Ettrick Shepherd who said he believed in fairies, patronized and indulged by intellectuals like J. G. Lockhart, editor of
Blackwood’s
, John Wilson, who held Edinburgh’s Chair of Moral Philosophy, and William Maginn, an essayist — but he had no intention of staying in it. (Indeed, as a farmer and agriculturalist he was a disaster, going bust any number of times.) Having altered the course and direction of his life, becoming something of a celebrity who was even offered a knighthood, he was an exemplar of free will — as sketched in his story ‘The Poachers’, published in
Ackerman’s Juvenile Forget Me Not
, Volume II (1831), where an orphaned boy of the forest attends a dame school and puts himself through college: ‘there is not at this time a more respectable presbyterian clergyman that I know of’. A rise in station that was a fantasy version of Hogg’s own.

Free will, for Hogg, means the best deployment of one’s nature and lights; it is almost a figurative freedom of spirit — as portrayed by George Colwan, Robert’s sporty brother, heir to the Dalcastle estates, his superior ‘in personal prowess, form, feature, and all that constitutes gentility in deportment and appearance’. Against such worldliness and popularity, the madness of Robert’s religion is enviously set. The warfare between the brothers is a continuation, moreover, of the enmity between the parents. Mrs Colwan, Lady Dalcastle, is an ice-queen who flees from her husband on their wedding night. She objects to his enjoyment of dancing and the fiddle (‘I will sooner lay down my life than be subjected to your godless will’). Behind her denial of happiness is a fear of sex — a fear which foreshadows Robert’s own repulsions and repressions. When, having been beaten by her own father for her desertion (‘His strokes were not indeed very deadly, but he made a mighty flourish in the infliction’), she returns to ‘the heathenish Laird of Dalcastle’, the manor house was to be rebuilt. She has a sort of personal nunnery (an ‘elevated sanctuary’) upstairs, linking to its own gardens by concealed doors. From this vantage point she spies upon her husband’s normal life, doing little except censure, reproach, scold. She sees everywhere profligacy, everywhere iniquity.

Her only visitor, up in the tower, is the Rev. Wringhim, a fire-breathing divine, her match in theological debate. (He is like a witch’s familiar.) Wringhim maintains that they are amongst Calvin’s lucky elect. Their nauseating sense of superiority, coupled with their endless arguifying, grows so impassioned, Hogg is plainly giving us an allegory of an affair — the feminine ‘sweet spiritual converse’ mixing and mating with a masculine alacrity; that is, with the ‘heat of his zeal’. Robert is the result. He is raised to hate the laird and his elder half-brother George (quite how George was conceived is passed over) and he is quick to disclaim the family name of Colwan — he becomes a Wringhim, doing whatever he pleases all the hours there are: ‘How delightful to think that a justified person can do no wrong!’ If there are to be no rewards for the non-elect, no matter how they might strive, similarly, if a person is pre-ordained for salvation, he is above mankind’s laws — and this is shown when the devil tempts Robert into becoming a killer. Tormenting other people is a game and being ‘an assassin in the cause of Christ’ a vocation.

The brothers, though brought up under what is technically the same roof, are kept apart. The first time they meet is during some sports in Edinburgh — and Robert, his ‘face as demure as death’, haunts and harasses George, tripping him up, getting him to miss the ball. He keeps as close to his victim as the Rev. Wringhim did to his mother — and as the devil will to him. Wherever George goes, ‘the same devilish-looking youth attended him as constantly as his shadow’. He spoils George’s tennis and cricket playing; he invades his parties; he insults his friends — who start to withdraw from his society. ‘A fiend of … malignant aspect was ever at his elbow.’ They become like good and evil twins. Whether he is in church, the theatres, in the streets or in the fields — Robert is there too, scowling — ‘like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction’. Whether it is really Robert, or the devil impersonating Robert (and they do become interchangeable), we are never told. What does happen is that the Rev. Wringhim’s prayers, when condemning the innocent George on behalf of his own illegitimate son, take on the frenzy of a black mass —

— and of course it is young Robert who takes up his station ‘at his brother’s right hand’. When they meet alone on the mountain top, all the trappings of high Romantic drama are present — storm clouds and a sunburst, waterfalls and a magical coloured misty light (gravity’s rainbow). It is a scene out of a Casper David Friedrich painting. If set to music, Berlioz would have been the composer. George, hoping at last to be by himself, goes ‘to converse with nature without disturbance’, but Robert manages to materialize through the fogs — an apparition amongst the shadows and declivities of the hill. This persecutor is like a genie, a ‘dilated frame of disembodied air, exhaled from the caverns of death’.

When the men move in to attack, the mood passes from the gothic to the slapstick (‘Eh! Egh! murder! murder! & tc.’) and it is George who is arrested and charged as the aggressor, for he has plenty of ‘moving cause and motive’. But he is acquitted. (Hogg, like Scott, who was Sherrif of Selkirkshire and Clerk to the Court of Session, enjoys the thrust and parry of legal argument.) And then that night his body is discovered, the old laird dies of grief (‘his father never more held up his head’) and Robert takes possession of the title and inheritance. He becomes a lunatic misanthropist, filling his days in wanting ‘to denounce all men and women to destruction’.

At this point we feel that a pact or deal has found expression in the fratricide. Robert, as more of a rakehell now and ‘a limb of Satan’, does the devil’s work. But he encounters an opponent. His adversary is Mrs Logan, the old laird’s helpmeet. In her wanting to solve the mystery of George’s death, the tone of the novel changes again — this time to detective fiction. ‘I will spend my days,’ the old lady vouchsafes, ‘in endeavours to … expose the unnatural deed.’ She tracks down a prostitute, now in gaol, called Bell Calvert, who was on duty at the time and place of George’s murder. After much more legal pettifoggery, to do with her being an accessory for burglary, Bell says it would have been impossible for Thomas Drummond, who is wanted for questioning, to have committed the crime, as he was with her — but that she did see his double: ‘I had seen the one going and the other approaching at the same time.’ Released from prison, Bell joins Miss Logan (interestingly they are both called Arabella) on her quest and they travel to Dalcastle. Robert is seen to be arm in arm with the murdered man — ‘it is a phantasy of our disturbed imaginations,’ reason the women — and they are followed by the (it seems) ghosts, as George himself had been by the shape of his brother. In great personal danger, the women manage to report back to the Lord Justice Clerk, who despatches officers to Dalcastle — but Robert Wringhim Colwan is not to be found.

We move now to the actual confessions. It is a measure of Hogg’s maturity as an artist that he makes no attempt to let Robert present himself sympathetically. He engineers the sacking of a trusted servant (‘I rejoiced in his riddance’) and the downfall of fellow pupils — when another boy bests him in Latin, ‘I succeeded several times in getting him severely beaten for faults of which he was innocent.’ He enjoys lying and glories in ‘a labyrinth of deceit’ — all of which he does ‘as a duty’. The character’s over-mastering arrogance never mellows. (Tenderness is a sin and, like compassion, a temptation to be resisted.) Wounded and on the run he has no humility — taken on by the printer ‘I could not but despise the man in my heart’; and his last words are a farewell to ‘woman, whom I have despised and shunned; and man, whom I have hated’. His unwholesome rages, as mentioned above, mirror his mother’s. His own fear of sex seems to have originated in his conception — copulating to produce him, his parents sinned — and before long ‘I brought myself to despise, if not to abhor, the beauty of women … to this day I am thankful for having escaped the most dangerous of all snares.’ This is not to say that Robert has no lustful urges. Far from it. What transfixes the reader of
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
is its presentation of the eroticism of evil.

To dance with the devil in the pale moonlight is a rich theme in literature. When somebody is as clever as Faustus or as socially rebellious as Don Juan, the devil rides out to meet his blood brother. Diabolists, moreover, don’t blunder into wrong-doing, as if to commit a secular crime; rather, their transgressions are purposeful and insolent. Faustus experiments with the limits of his brain power; Don Juan, inviting the Stone Guest to dinner, the ghost of a man he’s killed, the father of a girl he’s seduced, is seeing how much he can get away with. Hence, Robert Wringhim Colwan. Though the character of his real father, the fire and brimstone preacher, predicts the devil’s mannerisms, the devil actually makes his first direct appearance in the text during a moment of religious ecstasy. The Rev. Wringhim anoints Robert as one of ‘the just made perfect’, and as ‘a justified person’ he gambols across the landscape — ‘I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men.’ At which juncture he meets his sinister double. It is love at first sight: ‘I can never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my whole frame at that impressive moment.’

What ensues may be as endlessly argued as Hamlet’s antic disposition. Is Robert a schizophrenic to be pitied or a psychopath to be actively hated? Is the apparition of the devil an emanation of what is already latent in Robert’s nature (as Mr Hyde is the self-confident and vivid version of meek and masochistic Dr Jekyll) or is he supernaturally possessed by demons? To what extent is he responsible for his actions? Is Robert the devil’s double, or is he, as a prig and bigot, simply victimized? Is Robert, in fact, removed from the scene altogether — his body invaded and snatched away, to be replaced by an unholy simulacrum? After his first meeting with the stranger in the wild woods, for example, he returns home and upsets his parents — they find him altered, ‘translated’. How so? And if we try and match the chronology of the confession with the action of the editorial sections, we see that just when George was haunted and humiliated, Robert was bedridden with fever and hallucinations for a month.

Hogg has space, here and there, for all these bewitching possibilities. Sometimes Robert’s companion is, ‘as the shadow is cast from the substance’, alongside him; at other moments he is internalized (‘our beings are amalgamated’) and the voice of insanity (which ‘tyrannized over every spontaneous movement of my heart’); then again he retires into the background, forlorn and degenerating, ‘raging with despair at his fallen and decayed majesty’. The fact of his fluidity, however, now in Robert’s mind, now his room, now in the shape of George, or Thomas Drummond, or anybody, witnessed by strangers or invisible to them, is constant — and never naturalistic. And it is in the dark intensity and languor of the devil’s magical transformations that the eroticism is to be found; in his disappearances, the way people’s bodies are merging and deliquescing, one into the other. Satan sets up a rhythm with which Robert complies and to which, increasingly exhausted, he yields — ‘the power was not in me to separate myself from him’.

Robert’s relationship with the devil, therefore, is presented as a sexual bond. (His being trussed upside down and beaten by a weaver and being tethered and whipped by the two Arabellas are other, minor, delicacies out of de Sade.) This becomes explicit when, back as the new laird of Dalcastle, Robert is obliterated for a spell (he seems to suffer a six-month narcoleptic trance) and some ‘second self … some other being who appears in my likeness’, roams the countryside, depraved, drunk, despoiling. As the devil never admits that he’s been the one getting up to ‘the basest and most ungenerous of purposes’, raping a village wench, forging legal documents to acquire neighbouring estates, and so on, it is as if Robert’s released and violent inner self has been carrying out the crimes and misdemeanours, fulfilling its appetites whilst he sleeps — a nightmare self. (The devil stands back, sombre and disgusted, merely reminding Robert of his promise that ‘no human hand shall ever henceforth be able to injure your life, or shed one drop of your precious blood’. If he doesn’t realize this is the devil talking it is only because he doesn’t want to.) The culmination of the orgy is the murder of his mother, who had become ‘exceedingly obnoxious to me’, after which he flees into the night, creating commotion wherever he goes — horses are maddened, cats with talons out fling themselves at him, etc.

The justified sinner’s surrender to Satan’s fascination, with the opportunities for character renewal, leaving your body, and, as he hopes, moral indemnity, connects Hogg’s novel with that other flirtation of the Romantic age — after the imitations and translations of books and papers — the actor. Actors (like lunatics) were licensed for extravagance and excess. There was an element of mystery to their art — and they were full of the gusto which Hazlitt, for example, also detected in, as it might be, Indian jugglers or a prize fight. Coleridge famously complimented Edward Kean’s Hamlet on being like a reading of Shakespeare carried out between lightning flashes. Actors had a transformative genius. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s would-be husband, saw Kean play Othello in 1825 and remembered a small man who was yet enlarged by the emotions the role made him feel — Kean grew into Othello, the eloquence of the lines and the strength of the drama (‘this is all the witchcraft I have used’) converting him mentally, therefore physically. This is the witchery of theatre, to be found also in
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, for the devil is a master mummer: ‘My countenance changes with my studies and sensations … If I contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character … I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.’ This could be a description of the processes whereby actors absorb their roles; and it is also in tune with the sympathy and versatility the Romantic writers found in Hamlet, an unstable acid of a man, who ‘sees evil hovering near him like a spectre’ (Hazlitt), who ‘gives substance to shadows, and throws a mist over all commonplace actualities’ (Coleridge), whose speeches ‘are the effusions of his solitary musings’ (Lamb) — and who is, of course, being death-obsessed and misanthropic, the ancestor of Robert Wringhim Colwan.