Hogg certainly had some cause for annoyance in the casual way his efforts at fiction were dismissed, when the more conventional and melodramatic historical novels of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and John Galt’s treatment of the same topic, the qualitatively comparable Ringan Gilhaize (1823), were taken seriously. The Brownie of Bodsbeck may not be as good as Old Mortality, but it is better than Scott’s lesser Scottish historical romances like The Abbot or The Monastery. Indeed, Scott’s attitude speaks worlds in his letter to Laidlaw at the time, when, referring to The Brownie and its companion pieces, he says, ‘The cubs have not succeeded well … but they are sadly vulgar, to be sure.’
Thus by 1822 Hogg had tried to break into historical romance, and to develop a vigorous vein of psychological anti-romance. His efforts were not appreciated, but he still wanted to write full-length, serious fiction. For his next effort he decided to join a loose historical background with his deep knowledge of Border legend and tradition, and to place both within the perspective of his fantastic imagination. The result was the astonishingly under-estimated The Three Perils of Man (1822). The Noctes Ambrosianae of the period set the tone of casual prejudgment: ‘I dare say ’twill be like all his things, – a mixture of the admirable, the execrable, and the tolerable …’ This was probably Lockhart, as Wilson said elsewhere that he would ‘write a page or two rather funny on Hogg’s romance’ – obviously not in praise, as he went on to say, ‘though averse to being cut up myself, I like to abuse my friends.’ Hogg was lucky that Wilson did not follow this up.
What is more difficult to understand is Walter Scott’s dislike. The man who had himself used goblins, astrologers and the devil in his poems and tales, told Hogg that he had ruined ‘one of the best tales in the world’ with his ‘extravagance in demonology’. One would have thought that even for the romance’s use of legend and folk lore alone the favour of Scott, the antiquary, would have been secured. But it would appear that his conception of the kind of supernatural material permissible or desirable for a novelist underwent considerable change throughout the 1820s. Hogg remarked on Scott’s turning ‘renegade’ with his stories ‘made up of half-and-half, like Nathaniel Gow’s toddy’, that is, with the supernatural content watered down to such a point that its very existence became ambiguous.
In a review of John Galt’s The Omen, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1826, Scott made this change of view explicit, when he laid down a clear distinction between two kinds of fictional supernatural. Galt’s novel presented an aristocratic protagonist whose sensitivity of soul is such that he receives mysterious and mystic premonitions which allow him to ‘gaze beyond the curtain of futurity’. This Gothic supernatural sensibility, the product of good breeding, Scott approves; Byron and Sheridan shared it, he claims. But for the other kind of supernatural, that of folk tradition and legend, Scott by 1826, surprisingly, has less time. Now he condemns as unworthy of a man of breeding and education ‘any belief in the superstition of the olden time, which believed in spectres, fairies, and other supernatural apparitions. These airy squadrons have been long routed, and are banished to the cottage and the nursery’. – Poor Hogg! The living connection of his romance with the Ballad tradition, with folk-tale and the world of vividly realised and colourfully diverse creatures of the folk tradition, is here by implication condemned. Arguably, Scott’s attitude stands as a watershed in Scottish literature – with Hogg on the wrong side.
Now, uncertain and casting about for yet another fictional mode to try for success, Hogg wrote the three tales which form The Three Perils of Women (1823). It is possible that for the first tale, on the perils of love, he began by adopting as his model the novel of manners; and to an extent the result was a grotesque parody of Jane Austen’s and Susan Ferrier’s modes of social satire. In this, the main tale, what started out as a light-hearted study of the relationship of two girls, Gatty Bell and Cherry Elliott, became rather horrible, as if Hogg were already moving on to the gloomy ideas of The Justified Sinner. Gatty steals Cherry’s lover and marries him; the betrayed Cherry dies of grief, and as punishment for her man-theft Gatty falls into a coma for three years, in the course of which she gives birth to a healthy boy, and lies uncorrupted till she awakes abandoned by whatever demon or mental disturbance had possessed her. As with The Justified Sinner, psychological sickness and supernatural agency are allowed to co-exist; in his afterword to the 1995 edition of the novel, David Groves finds a realistic depiction of the psychological state of catatonia, and it is unusually true of Hogg’s fiction that it allows men and women to sin and suffer alike. In addition to this unique variation on the novel of manners there are two other tales: one, on the peril of ‘leasing’, being a savage assault on middle-class Edinburgh’s appetite for slander, and the other, on the peril of jealousy, becoming a strange mixture of parodic Highland comedy and post-Culloden tragedy.
Hogg’s aims in these tales are complex; in addition to their women protagonists suffering from the conventional symptoms of romantic love like jealousy and swooning, they foreground the perils of death from prostitution, adultery, and pregnancy. It is not surprising that the novel, ostensibly aiming at the readership of the polite ladies of Edinburgh, received damning reviews, Wilson being particularly vicious on this occasion. However justified their dislike – and modern critics are divided as to the intentions and achievement of the work as a whole – Hogg was demoralised. By this time, as well as frequently asking Lockhart and Scott to advise him and to read his proofs, Hogg finally admitted to loss of self-confidence.
I am grown to have no confidence whatever in my own taste or discernment in what is to be well or ill taken by the world or individuals. Indeed it appears that were I to make my calculations by inverse proportion I would be oftener right than I am …
And yet, even with this evidence of creative unsureness, the following year saw publication of the astonishing Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Brilliantly it fused together all Hogg’s previous kinds of fiction, yet avoided falling into any one of the categories that critics had hitherto attacked. Consider the supernatural treatment. Always there is the possibility that the devil and other supernatural apparitions exist only in the mind of Wringhim. Thus to the critic who would attack the novel for its ‘diablerie and nonsense’, Hogg could reply that the story was a psychological study of a religious fanatic. Conversely, if the novel were attacked as the distasteful study of a lunatic, Hogg could reply that his work was in fact a supernatural tale, a nightmare Pilgrim’s Progress. Hogg thus hoped to ride with the hares and hounds of contemporary criticism. It may be that Lockhart, with whom Hogg had joined before in literary trickery, and to whom he dedicated his previous novel, helped him think out the plan. Lockhart’s fiction of this period shows an overlap with Hogg’s in its interest in morbid psychological conditions. But there is nothing in the novel that is not prefigured in many of Hogg’s stories before this. It was a clever, brave, and predictably sly attempt by Hogg to break free of the ‘conspiracy’ of critics against him. Nevertheless, further condemnation was his reward; for example, The Westminster Review regretted
… that the author did not employ himself better than in uselessly and disgustingly abusing his imagination, to invent wicked tricks for a mongrel devil, and blasphemous lucubrations for an insane fanatic …
––and generally his novel was seen as a boorish aberration and a betrayal of his ‘sweet land of poetry’.
Hogg could develop no further. For the rest of his life he retreated into sketches, short ghost stories, and occasional poems. Some of the stories in his 1829 collection, The Shepherd’s Calendar, are excellent, but they merely