The Three Perils Of Man. James Hogg

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