The Three Perils Of Man. James Hogg

now on metamorphoses occur on every second page. Gourlay is transformed by Scott by way of punishment into a hare, and frenziedly pursued by the attendant devils Prim, Prig and Pricker, who transform themselves with bewildering speed. An army of retainers marches from the wainscotting of the deserted castle to serve breakfast to the embassy, who are struck by their ‘rattan faces’. And in one of the funniest of these transformations, the company are led from the raw and misty morning up into a tower room which blazes with light; the table offers a beautiful smoking sirloin of beef, with a gentle brown crust around it, and half swimming in gravy. Most of the embassy start without saying grace:

      … the friar, later to enter, lifted up his spread hands, closed his eyes, and leaning forward above the beef so closely that he actually breathed upon it, felt the flavour of health and joy ascending by his nostrils [and] in that fervent and respectful attitude he blessed the beef in the name of Jesus. Never had blessing a more dolorous effect. When the friar opened his eyes, the beef was gone. There was nothing left on the wooden plate before him but a small insignificant thing resembling the joint of a frog’s leg, or that of a rat; and perhaps two or three drops of gravy.

      Metamorphosis dominates this part, from the curious use of the magic lantern (which, in its balancing with Michael Scott’s genuine wizardry anticipates Hogg’s juxtapositioning of rational explanation with supernatural horror in the devilish apparition by the Salisbury crags in The Justified Sinner) to the final banquet with the devil and Michael Scott, where hags with withered chops are transformed into beauteous ladies, and the men of the embassy into bellowing bulls. Slowly, from the apparently formless, though vastly entertaining, riot of diablerie and nightmare, the theme of this part emerges. We are witnessing an epic, yet still comic, struggle between the powers of light and dark. First of all the lieutenants meet. The monstrous Gourlay, Scott’s seneschal-zombie, possessed of superhuman strength, clashes with the benevolent giant Charlie Scott. Their epic battle takes place in a vault where the giant bones of a previous victim lie gleaming in the moonlight. With an almost archetypal clash, like that of Beowulf and Grendel, they meet in titanic battle. Gourlay’s back and ribs sound as they crack; his face grows hideous; they fall ponderously amidst the bones of the giant skeleton. The entire situation recalls Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, with Gourlay as Giant Despair.

      Following this preparatory round, we anticipate the confrontation of the friar, that holy man of mysterious depths, and the satanic wizard. Both have epic features, but paradoxically it is Michael Scott who commands attention and even admiration, with his dignity, his respect for courage, his occasional sympathy, as when he hears the friar’s tragic tale, contrasting with his unholy glee or despair, or his inability, like Faust, to repent. There is greatness in Hogg’s imagination here; Michael is conceived on a superhuman scale, as is the account at the end of the romance of his cataclysmic exit from this world. His battle with the friar lives up to our expectations. Indeed, it may not be stretching the scene too much to find a deeper layer within it. The friar uses science: the magic lantern, tricks with chemicals, and finally his superbly fitting and comic removal of the monster Gourlay by blowing him up with gunpowder (which, as the exiled Roger Bacon, he is supposed to have invented). In contrast Scott uses sheer wizardry and the power of his master, Satan. Do we see here the division in Hogg’s own allegiance to nineteenth-century rationalism and scientific achievement on the one hand, and to a belief in the supernatural forces of the past on the other, as in the subtler psychological and supernatural ambiguity of The Justified Sinner? In any event, although the friar is allowed a kind of victory, there is no doubt that Hogg’s deepest sympathies are with Michael, goaded by the friar beyond endurance, to the point where he almost overstretches his remit from the devil.

      Hogg’s imagination blends here in superb fashion with his awareness of Border legend. He postulates a single and rounded Eildon hill, a great cone, prior to the battle. The wizard orders Prim, Prig and Pricker to twist it into three (as, of course, it is now). The ensuing storm is a colossal reversal of nature (significantly, it is the storm in which the Scots were attacked by the maddened English at the end of the first part). What makes this sensational ‘diablerie’ so acceptable is the comic but realistic and matter-of-fact way Hogg tells it all. It is exactly right for the extravagant, richly coloured imaginary world he has made, and sustains the supernatural so well that the effect has nothing of the neo-gothic melodrama of The Castle of Otranto. Hogg is saved from this by the fact that his own rich imagination is based firmly on folk tradition, which he uses in a vital and creative way. The Eildon hill scene is the best of these. Hogg’s picture of the pallid, unnatural dawn following the turmoil of the night, with the friar and Charlie frozen in astonishment at the three peaks towering over new rivers is a magnificent climax, almost mythic in quality. His imagination sees it surely, and follows through without faltering:

      It was a scene of wonder not to be understood, and awfully impressive. The two rivers flowed down their respective valleys, and met below the castle like two branching seas, and every little streamlet roared and foamed like a river. The hills had a wan, bleached appearance, many of the trees of the forest were shivered, and towering up against the eastern sky, there stood the three … hills … of Eildon, where before there was but one …

      The next part, which begins with the discovery that the embassy and Scott are trapped in the castle tower, perhaps looms too large in the overall story. It may be that Hogg, remembering his great success with a competition of raconteurs in The Queen’s Wake, his long poem of 1813, tried to repeat it here. He certainly loved the exercise of adopting different styles and personae in storytelling (witness The Spy and the three points of view in The Justified Sinner) and poetry (witness his Poetic Mirror of 1816). Or it may simply be the case that he had some of these short stories already written, and decided to incorporate them, using the simple expedient of Scott’s proposal, that they should relieve their plight by storytelling, the best storyteller winning Delany, the worst being eaten by the others. That said, it can be argued that these stories, like those of the Canterbury Tales, play a part in telling us something about the tellers. The friar’s tale solves the mystery of the strange affinity between himself and the innocent Delany – she is the daughter of his sweetheart. And the Ossianic style has the function of contrasting refreshingly with the romance’s usual, more direct idiom. Hogg’s romance is loose enough in structure, and fantastic enough in content, to stand casual storytelling and highly coincidental revelations like this. Indeed, the story has a certain tragic pathos and power. It reveals yet again Charlie’s sentimental nature. It causes the poet to change his mind about hating the friar. And when Delany reveals she is the friar’s sweetheart’s daughter, ‘even Master Michael Scott once drew the back of his hand across his eyes …’.

      In stark contrast is the savage tale told by the Laird of Peatstacknowe: harsh, unsentimental, chapbookish in its crude caricature of Marion’s son Jock, who ‘fought to be at meat, and Marion to keep him from it; and many hard clouts and claws there passed’. Jock is a recurrent type in Hogg’s stories. There is something unnatural in his demonic hunger and his utter amorality, an unnatural and obsessive motivation which sets him alongside Basil Lee, or Merodach, the Brownie of the Black Haggs, or Robert Wringhim, the justified sinner. And Hogg is unsurpassed when it comes to describing sordid violence with sickeningly convincing detail. Jock’s master wants to kick and beat him, and then murder him; he drags him to the lamb Jock has murdered, where again the remains, like those of a violated daughter, outrage him; he throws him down, kneels on him, and punches till Jock ‘got hold of his master’s cheek with his left hand, and his nails being very long, was like to tear it off. His master capered up with his head …’ – and, unable to free himself, gets out his knife to cut off Jock’s hand and then his head. The savagery is conveyed in the factual imagery, the bald statement of fact; the battle is ‘like a battle between an inveterate terrier and a bull dog’, and is ended suddenly and shockingly when Jock (whom we remember is, after all, little more than a child)

      … whipped out his own knife, his old dangerous friend, and struck it into the goodman’s belly to the haft. The moment he received the wound he sprang up as if he had been going to fly into the air, uttered a loud roar, and fell back above his dead pet lamb …

      The scene recalls the violent end of the sensual fox in Robert Henryson’s