SOURCE: Oakleaf, David. “‘Not the Truth’: The Doubleness of Hogg's Confessions and the Eighteenth-Century Tradition.” Studies in Scottish Literature 18 (1983): 59-74.

[In the following essay, Oakleaf analyzes the double narrative of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in terms of eighteenth-century conceptions of empirical and subjective experience and of the sublime and the beautiful.]

The double perspective of Editor and Justified Sinner is the central critical problem in Hogg's Confessions [The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner]. Certainly the two versions of the story are not in complete agreement and the ambiguity is related to the ambiguous relationships between Robert and his doubles, George and Gil-Martin. These ambiguities have obvious connections to contemporary Romantic fiction and poetry, so that it is all the more suggestive that the Confessions presents a logical extreme development of the dominant philosophical tradition of the eighteenth century. The Editor's Narrative and Robert's memoir belong largely to the realms of the beautiful and the sublime respectively, emphasizing the social passions and terror as their bases. This division in turn exploits a distinction between inner and outer experience that Locke memorably explores as a distinction between the man as an empirically observable social agent and man as self, or experiencing consciousness. The Confessions is an ironic exploration of the tragic consequences of the attempt to rely on only one of these perspectives. Robert is driven to suicide because he rejects the social world to find himself imprisoned in the self; Hogg's humorous skepticism underlines the importance of recognizing the limitations of both the pedantically empirical editor and his self-centered subject.

The two narratives of the Confessions insist on a double falseness. When George is tried for assaulting Robert because Robert has attempted to murder him, Robert says of the testimony: “His declaration was mere romance: mine was not the truth.”¹ He readily feels that his opponents present fiction to defend themselves, but he is more baffled by the falseness of his own testimony. Nevertheless, Robert's most reliable statement, supported by events, is that he “was particularly prone to lying” (p. 108). In addition to recording catastrophic lapses of consciousness, Robert's memoir is inconsistent. During his escape from Dalcastle, for example, he feels “a certain pride of heart in being supposed the perpetrator of the unnatural crimes laid to [his] charge” (p. 208), blaming the clothes borrowed from Gil-Martin for what he claims is an uncharacteristic feeling. Despite this claim, he has responded to an earlier accusation of seduction with “a sort of indefinite pleasure, an ungracious delight in having a beautiful woman solely at [his] disposal” (p. 181). For all its attention to psychological detail, the memoir does not offer a reliable account of events.

The Editor's Narrative too is uncertain. It begins with “it appears” and we are quickly told that the Colwans were “supposed” to be related to the Colquhouns, and that the elder George was rich or “supposed to be so” (p. 1).² When the Editor records the birth of a second son after husband and wife have separated following the birth of the first, he records suspicions of the child's legitimacy, but adds unconvincingly that the child was the elder's brother “in the eye of the law, and it is more than probable that he was his brother in reality” (p. 18). Since this probability is no more than a pious hope, the reader may well agree with John Barnet's later shrewd comments on the boy's uncanny resemblance to his mother's minister, perhaps recalling that mother and minister agree that “to the just all things are just and right” (p. 13).

The Editor's Narrative is therefore no more reliable than Robert's personal memory. But the Editor's Narrative is based not only on the interpretation of history and justiciary records (p. 92), but on the complexity and ambivalence of folk memory. Robert's memoir contains the folk-tale of the devil of Auchtermuchty, who appears as a preacher but is recognized when his gown is lifted revealing cloven hoofs. Robert anxiously examines Gil-Martin but observes only “the foot of a gentleman, in every respect, so far as appearances went” (p. 204). The prince of darkness is a gentleman,³ of course, but the folklore expectations denied here are more fully indulged in the Editor's Narrative itself, where Arabella Calvert asserts that she can recognize Robert by his walk:

“He walked as if he had been flat-soled, and his legs made of steel, without any joints in his feet or ancles.”

(p. 80)

The tradition that the Editor relies on is recorded among the descendants of the mob that destroys Dalcastle; they transform the wicked landlord into a folk demon. Even the Editor's conclusion, which rejects the traditional location of the grave at the junction of three estates, ascribes its actual location to the folk custom of burying suicides before sunrise (p. 248).⁴

In short, inconsistencies in the narratives in the Confessions constantly insist on the unreliability of appearances. Even the witness to Robert's suicide says only that “he could almost give his oath that he saw two people busily engaged at the hay-rick” (p. 242; Hogg's italics). These inconsistencies, and the frequent assertions that evidence is hearsay or based on appearance, dramatize two fundamentally incompatible and unreliable points of view. The Editor's reliance on traditional report and on appearances expresses a perspective that is primarily social and empirical: he inevitably relies on observation and focuses on George's public, sociable, colorful appearance. Robert's view, on the other hand, is private, personal, even selfish. He relies on memory of subjective experience. The Editor sees him as a malignant persecutor, but he reveals himself as the suffering victim of forces he cannot understand, as his baffled comment on the testimony at George's trial suggests. Neither Robert nor the Editor can bridge the gap between these opposed perspectives.

These discrepancies and uncertainties originate in the dualities of eighteenth-century culture, although, as criticism has shown, Hogg exploits them to explore both personal, psychological divisions and contemporary Scottish social divisions.⁵ The most important of these eighteenth-century divisions in the Confessions is that between the sublime and the beautiful. In Burke's Enquiry, the basis of this distinction is the contrast between the purely personal emotions focused on self-preservation and the less self-interested emotions focused on society.⁶ This latter realm, in Burke the origin of the beautiful, includes the appetites we share with the animals but is also distinctively social:

I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, … they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them. …⁷

The beautiful is therefore the realm not only of love but also of general social passions based on shared feeling and relationship. In Hogg, the world of sympathy and fellow-feeling is largely confined to the Editor's Narrative.

The sublime, on the other hand, is the realm of self-preservation and consequently is based specifically on pain and terror:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.⁸

The sublime appeals directly to the self apart from the social passions. Burke makes its opposition to society direct when he points out that the idea of a life of entire solitude is one of the most terrifying possible. Because it appeals to fear, the sublime results from direct danger or “some modification of power,”⁹ the source of the sublime in much of the Gothic fiction contemporary with Hogg's Confessions. These emotions can be the source of aesthetic pleasure, but they are in marked contrast to the basis of the beautiful in social passions. In Hogg, they are the dominant emotions of Robert's memoir.

Hogg's Confessions exploits not only this distinction between the sublime and the beautiful but also the more fundamental duality of inner and outer experience. In Locke, at the start of this tradition of empirical philosophy, even our experience of matter is divided between perception of primary qualities inherent in matter itself (solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number) and of secondary qualities existing only in the mind of the perceiver (color, sound, taste, and so on).¹⁰ Secondary qualities figure most largely in the experience of beauty, while the sublime—especially in nature—relies for its effect on the extension in space of, for example, the sea or mountains. Similarly, Locke divides man himself into the man—the observable social agent—and the person or self, personal identity based on subjective consciousness. This is the distinction between subjective experience of self and objective observation of and by other men:

But if it be possible for the same man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same man would at different times make different persons; which, we see, is the sense of mankind in the solemnest declaration of their opinions, human laws not punishing the mad man for the sober man's actions, nor the sober man for what the mad man did,—thereby making them two persons: which is somewhat explained by our way of speaking in English when we say such an one is ‘not himself,’ or is ‘beside himself’. …¹¹

In other words, the empirical perspective itself suggests the duality of man and raises the dilemma of different “selves” motivating the same “man”. Demonstrable madness is a clear case, but there are more troubling possibilities, like the sober man who does not remember his drunken actions. According to Locke, “human judicatures justly punish him; because the fact is proved against him, but want of consciousness cannot be proved for him.”¹² Robert's experiences after his debauches raise exactly this problem: the double perspective of the Confessions is a development of eighteenth-century cultural assumptions.

This empirical tradition illuminates many aspects of the Confessions. The Editor's Narrative belongs primarily to the world of the social passions, the social agent, and those emotions that are the basis of the beautiful. Robert's memoir, on the other hand, belongs to the world of the self, of power, and of the emotion of terror that is the basis of the sublime. The Editor's Narrative presents a beautiful world interrupted by the sublime; Robert's memoir presents a sublime world glancing wistfully at beauty. Careful reading demonstrates how precisely and thoroughly Hogg's novel explores its intellectual context.

The Editor concentrates on George because his hero, like himself, is an empiricist closely related to the world of beauty and the social passions. George is a cavalier, a high-church supporter associated with spirited, aristocratic games like tennis in the lively social world of Edinburgh. His solitary walk to Arthur's Seat demonstrates his sensitivity to the empirical world of beautiful appearance:

The grass and the flowers were loaden with dew; and, on taking off his hat to wipe his forehead, he perceived that the black glossy fur of which his chaperon was wrought, was all covered with a tissue of the most delicate silver—a fairy web, composed of little spheres, so minute that no eye could discern any one of them; yet there they were shining in lovely millions. Afraid of defacing so beautiful and so delicate a garnish, he replaced his hat with the greatest caution, and went on his way light of heart.

(p. 39)

This sensitivity to beauty leads him to admire “a bright halo in the cloud of haze, that rose in a semi-circle over his head like a pale rainbow” (pp. 39-40), while his empirical cast of mind leads him to speculate on its origin. The entire scene stresses the beautiful in the form of radiant haloes and color, one of Locke's secondary qualities.

On the other hand, color and radiance are not the only aspects of Hogg's description. George's attractive world of beauty is interrupted by the sublime, which Burke reminds us “is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”¹³ When George seats himself “on the pinnacle of the rocky precipice” (p. 41), he is troubled by “the idea of his brother's dark and malevolent looks.” He glances to the right and sees an “apparition” of “the face of his brother” magnified in the mist: “Its dark eyes gleamed on him through the mist, while every furrow of its hideous brow frowned deep as the ravines on the brow of the hill.” This “giant apparition” suggest not only an aspect of himself summoned up by his thought, but the sublimity of the landscape itself. George naturally reacts with terror to an apparition that expresses both “murderous malice” and a “fear and trembling” that seems a reflection of his own terror. The sublime George has cheerfully neglected has violently interrupted the beautiful empirical world of the Editor's Narrative.¹⁴

Robert and George are obviously aspects of each other, with George embodying the beautiful and Robert the sublime, both of which ought to be—like Wordsworth's beauty and fear—aspects of a unified experience.¹⁵ David Eggenschwiler analyzes the psychological relationship between Robert and George in this scene and suggests that it is more important than the possibility of an empirical explanation for the projected shadow; but both the Editor's pedestrian defence of the man of science's sensitivity to beauty (p. 40) and the assertion by George's friend that the phenomenon can be explained (pp. 46-47) suggest the actual phenomenon recorded by Hogg himself in “Nature's Magic Lantern.”¹⁶ Coleridge records a similar connection between a psychological interest and empirical observation in his Aids to Reflection, saying that the beholder of genius either “recognizes it as a projected Form of his own Being, that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from it as from a Spectre.” He then adds a gloss to suggest that his image is based on observation of the natural world, indicating his fascination with the very same phenomenon that Hogg exploits and, like Hogg, exploring its psychological suggestiveness.¹⁷ But Hogg's description not only stresses the scientific basis for George's experience, it also emphasizes George's sensitivity to the radiant world of beauty, especially the “halo of glory,” “this sublunary rainbow, this terrestrial glory, … spread in its most vivid hues beneath his feet” (p. 40). For Hogg, the image of the halo or glory is emphatically associated with the “man of science” who confronts beauty with a delight strengthened by empirical observation.

But the sublime and the beautiful are not restricted to the world of empirical observation. Blanchard, Robert's first victim, reminds him that religion ought to be beautiful as well as sublime: “Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bond of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature” (p. 131). Robert tends to be aware only of the sublimity of an all-powerful God, who demands from his worshippers the very fear and trembling that Robert's apparition expresses on Arthur's Seat; Robert's obsession is so great that he forgets that religious truth ought also to be a source of beauty and fellow-feeling. George's social world, therefore, is not necessarily at odds with religion. On the one occasion when George appears in church, he has been interrupted on the way to the service he usually attends to accompany a friend to a different church to see the friend's “sweetheart”; nevertheless, “after taking his seat, he leaned his head forward on the pew to repeat over to himself a short ejaculatory prayer, as had always been his custom on entering the house of God” (p. 37). In George the religious and the social cooperate. His willingness to worship with a different congregation is a social strength at odds with his brother's narrow sectarianism. The sublimity of God does not blind George to His glory, to the beauty that can also be part of social life.

The emphasis on beauty and society in the Editor's Narrative is therefore entirely consistent with his empirical perspective. It is, however, incomplete, as Hogg's shifts of tone suggest. During her comic testimony at the trial of Arabella Calvert for theft from Mrs. Logan, Bessie Gillies reminds us that appearance is a deceptive guide by refusing to identify the stolen goods on the grounds that “like is an ill mark” (p. 67). When the judge reminds her that human justice depends upon such probabilities as appearance offers, she shrewdly replies that “an oath is an awfu' thing, especially when it is for life or death” (p. 68). After all, reasoning from appearances leads to the execution of an innocent man for the murder of Blanchard and to the pursuit of the innocent Drummond for George's death: appearances are too deceitful to lead to certain judgment. This trial scene alone would demand a skeptical approach to appearances, but Bessie's point is emphasized later by Arabella Calvert herself, who exclaims, “We have nothing on earth but our senses to depend upon: if these deceive us, what are we to do” (p. 80). Her desperate assertion reinforces the servant's point because she knows that the “apparition” (p. 74) present at George's murder cannot be Drummond, although she witnessed the murder with a man who would testify that it was and who “never mistook one man for another in his life” (p. 79). The empiricism of the Editor's Narrative is based on the evidence of the senses, but such knowledge is far from certain.

Robert's memoir complements this empirical account by giving the subjective vision of the self in a particularly radical form: Robert rejects the realm of the beautiful to live in a sublime world of terror and power. In significant contrast to his brother, he brings himself “to despise, if not to abhor, the beauty of women” (p. 113), one of the bases for the beautiful in Burke. Even at school, the academic rival he persecutes is characterized by a sensitive response to external beauty, being, “at all his leisure hours, engaged in drawing profane pictures of beasts, men, women, houses, and trees, and, in short, of all things that his eye encountered” (p. 109). He thus anticipates his hatred of George, preferring to beauty the religion of Gil-Martin, who promises him “a portion of the only happiness which I enjoy, sublime in its motions, and splendid in its attainments” (p. 192). This echoes Blanchard, who remarked of this faith that “there is a sublimity in his ideas, with which there is to me a mixture of terror; and when he talks of religion, he does it as one that rather dreads its truths than reverences them” (p. 131).

Robert's surrender to the being who appears as a projection of his certainty of election is complete. His account of his brother's murder is based on Gil-Martin rather than on the evidence of his senses:

I will not deny, that my own immediate impressions of this affair in some degree differed from this statement. But this is precisely as my illustrious friend described it to me afterwards, and I can rely implicitly on his information, as he was at that time a looker-on, and my senses all in a state of agitation, and he could have no motive for saying what was not the positive truth.

(p. 171)

Robert literally takes leave of his senses in his pursuit of subjective certainty. He suspects that Gil-Martin's account may not be the truth but is drawn to the mere romance that presents him as a Christian hero vanquishing a powerful foe. Abandoning the empirical world of beauty, he finds himself in a desolate mental landscape:

Thus was I sojourning in the midst of a chaos of confusion. I looked back on my bypast life with pain, as one looks back on a perilous journey, in which he has attained his end, without gaining any advantage either to himself, or others and I looked forward, as on a darksome waste, full of repulsive and terrific shapes, pitfalls, and precipices, to which there was no definite bourne, and from which I turned with disgust.

(p. 183)

Rejecting beauty, he confines himself to terror and the sublime.

The religious vision that leads Robert to this desolation is based on power and is therefore a source of terror. He sees God as an absolute and arbitrary power, but defines his religious community as one that would in turn grant power to him. He is attracted to Gil-Martin, whose characteristic dress is a “green frock coat, buff belt, and a sort of a turban … somewhat resembling a bishop's mitre” (p. 208). The turban nicely combines suggestions of absolute oriental despotism and ecclesiastical power, and Robert longs for power from the “potentate” he suspects to be Czar Peter of Russia:

it instantly struck me that this was no other than the Czar Peter of Russia, having heard that he had been travelling through Europe in disguise, and I cannot say that I had not thenceforward great and mighty hopes of high preferment, as a defender and avenger of the oppressed Christian Church, under the influence of this great potentate.

(p. 130)

Even Robert's allusions to the Psalms may suggest his identification with David, the wretched outcast who became a powerful monarch. After all, even the pistols offered him before the murder of Blanchard are regal: they are “pure beaten gold” (p. 139). He can conceive of society only as a structure of power with himself near the top, and when he once tests his ideals against the “golden” rule, he is appalled by the result (pp. 203-4).

Robert commands sympathy as well as horror because he so longs for the social aspect of himself that he excludes. He defines himself through his pursuit of religious community, “the society of the just made perfect” (p. 115). Before being assured of his election, he is tormented by a fear of “excluding sins” (p. 113). Ironically, he murders everyone close to him and is driven to solitary suicide by isolating himself in the self. Gil-Martin becomes an image of the sociable brother Robert has murdered, adopting “the figure, air, and features of my late brother, … mixed with an appearance of misery, chagrin, and despair” (p. 188), and warning him that “sooner shall you … cause the shadow to relinquish the substance, than separate me from your side” (p. 189).¹⁸ In short, Gil-Martin becomes a tormenting shadow of the substance Robert has rejected, stressing by his tenacious presence that the social longings of human nature may be perverted but not totally denied.

This is the point emphasized by the suggestions that Robert, George, and Gil-Martin are divided aspects of a single character. George is freed from his brother's persecutions after he resolves to greet him charitably (p. 38), and he sees him in church only after first thinking of him with horror (p. 37); as we have seen, Robert's menacing shadow appears on Arthur's Seat only when George glances anxiously to his right (p. 41). During a long delirium in which Robert seems to become a detached consciousness watching a struggle within himself, he sees someone always on his left (p. 154) just as he appears on George's right hand in fulfillment of the verses from Psalm 109 used to curse George (pp. 32-3) in a carelessness of family relationship typical of his self-obsession. As David Eggenschwiler argues, the book presents a single character fallen into division.

Hogg's presentation of this psychological split, however, explores with unusual clarity the origin of this psychological doubling in the dualities of the eighteenth-century tradition itself. In Locke's terms, the “person” (self) Robert rejects emerges during his periods of drunkenness as Laird of Dalcastle. He twice awakens from such debauches to find himself accused of crimes of which he has no memory, first of seduction and expropriation and then of murdering both his mother and the girl he has seduced (pp. 174-7, 185-7). The occasion of each lapse is a moment of social festivity, the first celebrating his inheritance, the second the arrival of his mother and his “worthy and reverend parent” (Robert Wringhim) at a moment of great loneliness and longing for society: “I had so few who cared for me, or for whom I cared, that I felt rather gratified at seeing him” (p. 184). Since he bases his conception of society on power, however, it is no surprise that he is a brutal and selfish landlord, as the accusations suggest, but the very fact that he awakens from his second debauch in “gaudy and glaring” clothing (p. 187) suggests his longing for the colorful world of beauty and society that he has repressed.

Accused of crimes he cannot remember, he is in the position of the drunken man cited by Locke, unable to prove the want of consciousness that is his only defense against crimes proven against him:

But, of all my troubles, this was the chief: I was every day and every hour assailed with accusations of deeds of which I was wholly ignorant; of acts of cruelty, injustice, defamation, and deceit; of pieces of business which I could not be made to comprehend; with law-suits, details, arrestments of judgment, and a thousand interminable quibbles from the mouth of my loquacious and conceited attorney. So miserable was my life rendered by these continued attacks, that I was often obliged to lock myself up for days together. …

(p. 193)

Robert even conjectures a second self inhabiting his body: “If this that you tell me be true, … then is it as true that I have two souls, which take possession of my bodily frame by turns, the one being all unconscious of what the other performs” (pp. 191-2). The reader recognizes that the other soul is the social “self” Robert has rejected. Gil-Martin makes this point while stressing the religious irony that Robert serves Satan rather than God. He mockingly reminds his victim that “we are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person,” saying: “The spirit that now directs my energies is not that with which I was endowed at my creation” (p. 192). Hogg's emphasis on empiricism and psychological division allows the comment to stress other dualities inherited from the eighteenth century.

Robert's fate dramatizes the destructiveness of a retreat into pure assertion of the self. The burden of consciousness, the source of personal identity, becomes unbearable:

… it was for utter oblivion that I longed. I desired to sleep; but it was for a deeper and longer sleep, than that in which the senses were nightly steeped. I longed to be at rest and quiet, and close my eyes on the past and the future alike, as far as this frail life was concerned.

(p. 184)

His only escape is the suicide proposed by Gil-Martin, the mocking shadow of the social self he has repressed.

Hogg's Confessions thus explores the inadequacy of two complementary but inadequate perspectives. Even his comedy and irony often focus on their ambiguity, as during Bessie Gillies's testimony recorded in the Editor's Narrative, and also through such comic scenes as Robert's encounter with John Barnet or the testimony of his Cameronian servant. Most consistent of these comic techniques is the satiric use of Robert's frequent allusions to scripture: Robert uses them in one sense, but Hogg clearly intends the reader to understand them differently. Even Robert's fear of “those [sins] mentioned in the Revelations as excluding sins” (p. 113), for example, foreshadows his fate:

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

(Rev. 21:8)

This is presumably why he is in such despair at his habit of lying before he is assured of election, the assurance that eventually also leads him to commit so many of these crimes. He is a coward throughout, but also becomes a murderer, a fornicator (whoremonger), and an idolater of the self. His appeal to the golden rule, which he rejects, also makes him an unbeliever: he is even a sorcerer to the extent that he calls up the devil in the form of Gil-Martin.

Hogg thus constantly insists on the double perspective and the skepticism necessary to divided man. In doing so, he combines the double tradition of eighteenth-century fiction, which frequently explores ways of bridging the gap between the person and the man. Marius Bewley associates the Editor's Narrative with Swift and Robert's memoir with Bunyan.¹⁹ The memoir is related not only to Bunyan's emblematic, allegorical tradition but, one of its affinities with Gothic fiction, to the tradition of sensibility perfected by Richardson. This tradition seeks moral and social effect, but concentrates on the subjective experience of the self although sometimes broadening the perspective by recording several selves, as in Clarissa or Humphry Clinker. Hogg's commonsense humor and his use of satiric allusion also relate him to the tradition of Swift and Fielding, writers who stress the interplay between author and reader. Such writers focus on the social agent to demand a shared judgment of action. Hogg may even recall Fielding's contrast between a good-natured and sociable but impulsive man and his hypocritical, methodistical brother in Tom Jones. Both Blifil and Robert goad their brothers into bloodying their noses and then try to have them punished; both also appear with suggestions that they were conceived out of wedlock and later scorn female beauty while giving evidence of repressed sexuality. Any specific debt is a creative one, however, for Hogg's brothers are psychological complements rather than dramatic foils.²⁰ Emphasis must fall on Hogg's exploration of the underlying duality of the empirical tradition of the eighteenth century as well as its techniques of fiction. He allusively and comically undercuts both his narratives and intrudes his Gothic doubling into the sublime and beautiful landscape of Arthur's Seat. We may have nothing but our senses to depend on, but they are unreliable. Robert's theological system, on the other hand, traps the power-hungry self in a mental prison that divides doctrine into “thousands of undistinguishable films” (p. 15) under the influence of what Robert calls, in a finely empirical phrase, “the least tangible of Christian tenets, … the infallibility of the elect” (p. 147). Trapped in the perspective of the self, Robert can only regard his brother's world as “mere romance,” although he uneasily senses that his own self-obsession, too, is “not the truth.”

Notes

1. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. John Carey (London, 1969), pp. 162-3. Henceforth references to this edition will be cited in the text.

2. In his perspective article, “Hogg, Melville and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Scottish Literary Journal, 4 (December 1977), 27-8, Andrew Hook attributes this tentativeness to the Editor's scholarly disinterestedness and relates it to the Scottish Enlightenment. I would like to explore further the eighteenth-century roots of Hogg's fiction.

3. Compare L. L. Lee, “The Devil's Figure: James Hogg's Justified Sinner,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1966), 230, an important article that explores the devil's appearance in the Confessions.

4. Michael York Mason shrewdly relates this aspect of the Confessions to its psychological themes; see his “The Three Burials in Hogg's Justified Sinner,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 13 (1978), 15-23, especially p. 17 where he observes that the Editor's reliability is less questionable than the reliability of his evidence.

5. See Hook on cultural division and Barbara Royle Bloedé, “James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: The Genesis of the Double,” Etudes anglaises, 26 (1973), 174-86, on the biographical origins of the double.

6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London, 1958), p. 38.

7. Burke, pp. 42-3; for my next sentence see p. 40.

8. Burke, p. 39.

9. Burke, p. 64.

10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1894; rpt. New York, 1959), I, 170 (II.viii.9-10).

11. Locke, I, 460-1 (II.xxvii.20); he develops the distinction in the immediately preceding paragraphs.

12. Locke, I, 463 (II.xxvii.22).

13. Burke, p. 39.

14. Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel from Smollett to Spark (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 24, suggests that sublimity is common in the Confessions as a description of the diabolic. “Fear and trembling,” a biblical phrase that often describes the reaction to divine power, occurs as part of the vision described in Job 4:12-21, part of which supplies Burke, p. 63, with an example of the sublime. George's hair—which “stood up in bristles”—echoes Job 4:15, while Robert's fear and trembling ironically remind the reader that the logic of justification driving Robert to murder is false: “Shall mortal man be more just than God?” (Job 4:17).

15. See Prelude (1850), I, 301-2; Wordsworth constantly stresses the dual face of Nature, which is both sublime and beautiful.

16. Tales and Sketches by the Ettrick Shepherd (London and Edinburgh, 1878), IV, 352-4, a reference for which I am indebted to the anonymous scholar who read this paper for Studies in Scottish Literature. David Eggenschwiler—“James Hogg's Confessions and the Fall into Division,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 9 (1971), 26-39—helpfully studies unity and the fall into partial selves with an eye alert to Romantic analogies. His comment on the unimportance of empirical verification—p. 31—is challenged by Michael S. Kearns—“Intuition and Narration in James Hogg's Confessions,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 13 (1978), 82—who argues that the desire to explain the phenomenon is part of the characterization of the Editor. It seems to me characteristic of George as well; although he has distinguished his own shadow from Robert's frightening projection, he remains curious and open to demonstration.

17. Coleridge's comment suggests the Romantic interest in projections of psychological states; compare Blake's lyric, “My Spectre around me night & day,” which contrasts the Spectre with a more positive “Emanation.” Coleridge's poetry explores the psychological suggestiveness of haloes and glories, like the “fair luminous cloud” that embodies Joy in his “Dejection: An Ode”; compare the “clouds of glory” in Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations.” Eggenschwiler explores this pattern on p. 30. Coleridge's gloss defends the accurate observation of nature behind his metaphor:

    This refers to a curious phaenomenon which occurs occasionally when the air is filled with fine particles of frozen Snow, constituting an almost invisibly subtle Snow-mist, and a Person is walking with the Sun behind his Back. His Shadow is projected and he sees a figure moving before him with a glory round its Head. I have myself seen it twice: and it is described in the first or second Volume of the Manchester Philosophical Transactions.

    See Kathleen Coburn, ed., Inquiring Spirit: A Coleridge Reader (1951; rpt. 1968), p. 243.

18. Gil-Martin appears at first as a version of Robert, and demonstrates the ability to assume the features of anyone who interests him, sometimes as a way of reading thoughts (pp. 124-5). Shape-changing is an attribute of the devil at least as old as Chaucer's Friar's Tale, but Hogg was also interested in assuming facial expressions to read thoughts as early as 1810; see Bloedé, p. 177, which quotes The Spy. Given this interest, Hogg may well have remembered a similar anecdote in Burke, who attributes this ability to Campanella. In this context it is part of the eighteenth-century interest in sympathy or fellow-feeling as a way of breaking out of the self into the feelings of others; see Burke, pp. 133 and xli-xliii.

19. “The Society of the Just,” New Statesman, 64 (26 October 1962), 580-2. The connections to Bunyan are more fully explored in Douglas S. Mack, “The Devil's Pilgrim: A Note on Wringhim's Private Memoirs in James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” Scottish Literary Journal, 2 (July 1975), 36-40.

20. The English novels of the eighteenth century were popular in the Scottish circulating libraries by the end of the century; see David Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680-1830 (London, 1961), pp. 208-9.