wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
of the _Noctes_ is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
_Confessions of a Sinner_, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
as the best prose passages assigned to him in the _Noctes_. They are
what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
this--that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
_Remains_ for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate habit of writing
rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
a biography and of selecting and editing _Remains_ so distasteful from
different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
were few men better qualified.
And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
life this Ettrick Shepherd really was--the Shepherd whom Scott not only
befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
him--that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to
London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.
The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril--these
surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
term we can find between them.
The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the
richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
provision of poetical _clichés_ (the sternest purist may admit a French
word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets--one in the
vernacular, one in the literary language--who are rich enough to keep a
bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:--
Light on her airy steed she sprung,
Around with golden tassels hung.
No chieftain there rode half so free,
Or half so light and gracefully.
How sweet to see her ringlets pale
Wide-waving in the southland gale,
Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen
What beauties in her form were seen!
And when her courser's mane it swung,
A thousand silver bells were rung.
A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
A Scot shall never see again.
I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often
parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:--
O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:
She took the cup, no word she spake,
She had even wished that very night
To sleep and never more to wake.
Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--
Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,
Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,
The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
· · · · ·
Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
As still was her look and as still was her ee
As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.
No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
poetry--such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being written (at least
in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
of himself in the _Poetic Mirror_, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory--the glory attached to the literary
department--hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When the kye comes hame"
everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
Balmaquhapple."
D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?
The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?
'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,
An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?
Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
certain persons such as
Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,
And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her--
ending with the milder prayer:
But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,
Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.
· · · · ·
And save, without word of confession auricular,
The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;
For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple
Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!
"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
coursing;
Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;
Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:
Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;
Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!
· · · · ·
Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,
Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;
Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery
Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.
Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.
Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!
"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"
Where the pools are bright and deep,
Where the grey trout lies asleep,
Up the river and over the lea,
That's the way for Billy and me--
and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
Village of Balmaquhapple."
Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
us to pay no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
sings, even the single stanza in _Guy Mannering_, "Are these the Links
of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.
Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
same fashion--a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
written. _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Three Perils of Man_ (which
appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as _The Siege of
Roxburgh_), _The Three Perils of Woman_, _The Shepherd's Calendar_ and
numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
abundant stores of unpublished folklore, he could invent more when
wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
look at the sixth chapter of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, "The Souters of
Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
like Scott, let him read _The Bridal of Polmood_.
In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
ever written--a story which, as I have said before, is not only
extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
called _The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic_, but by its
proper and original title, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_.
Hogg's reference to it in his _Autobiography_ is sufficiently odd. "The
next year (1824)," he says, "I published _The Confessions of a Fanatic
[Sinner]_, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
written it I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well--so at least
I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
volumes were put to press," and who had published the _Confessions_ on
half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
"his last publication (the _Confessions_) had been found fault with in
some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
been much more reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
than his usual work.
For, in truth, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, while it has all
Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
grasp of character: the few personages of the _Confessions_ are
consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
story consists of an editor's narrative and of the _Confessions_ proper
imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
Robert Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
mystery than ever.
To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
some time, though an accomplished Pharisee, he is not assured of
salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
assurance.
Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
hints that he is some great one--perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
and, going to Edinburgh, is led by his Illustrious Friend without
difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
life. This of course ends the _Memoir_, or rather the _Memoir_ ends just
before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in _Blackwood_ of the
searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
editor), his friend Mr. L----t of C----d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
L----w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
discussing the authenticity of the _Memoirs_, and concluding that they
are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
skill.