This is a typically difficult and ambiguous passage. On one side it would seem that Hogg is ironically reducing his knights and ladies to the level of barbarians and fishwives, as when the two girls coarsely and spitefully attack each other and become merely spoiled brats. Similarly Douglas, knowing full well the identity of his captive, ignores her appeals to his ‘honour and generosity as a knight’, threatens to strip her and later promises to cause her to be ‘exhibited in a state not to be named’ on a stage erected in sight of the western tower, raped publicly (‘disgrace which barbarians only could have conceived’), ‘and then to have her nose cut off, her eyes put out, and her beauteous frame otherwise disfigured’. How are we to read this? It is tempting to find here a rich anti-romantic irony; but on the other hand there is plenty of description of Douglas and the ladies as genuinely noble and romantic creatures, while the end of the novel has Charlie and Sir Ringan rewarded by these very princes and ladies. Perhaps, however, we should read such noble descriptions and endings as parodic? Perhaps, too, the final case for the greatness of the work lies beyond consideration of the sophistication or otherwise of the ironic structure, in the sheer carnival zest of the presentation and the speed of the metamorphoses and reversals of fortune. In the end the main grounds for the tale’s worth may lie in its qualities as a tale to be told as Hogg’s mother told him tales.
The irony is recognisably deliberate and fine at many other points. There can be no doubt of Hogg’s meaning and where his sympathies lie in the hanging of the servants of Lady Jane. The Game of Roxburgh is death to the English peasant Heaton and his friends; the spoiled heiresses of Scotland and England have more or less murdered many like him by the time the Game is over. Immediately following this, as though to prove the point, is the passage involving the old Border fisherman, Sandy Yellowlees, one of Hogg’s well-loved, independent heroes. Hogg tricks us into identifying with Sandy. His peasant humour, his comic fears when he starts finding sirloins of beef on the end of his fishing-line, and the fact that he is permitted to use the dramatic monologue to tell his story – a method Hogg generally reserves for favourites – contribute towards our shock at his sudden death and our revulsion against the chivalrous siege, when, with the sword-stroke suddenness of the Ballads, Sandy is captured and hung from the walls of Roxburgh castle.
And Part One ends on this cynical note. War is no longer a game, if it ever has been. This peril has been shown to have a horrific and deadly reality. Savagery and madness dominate the starving castle. A group of mutineers are ‘hanged like dogs, amid shouts of execration, and their bodies flung into a pit’; the remainder would eat their own flesh rather than surrender. Chivalry has become nightmare. Hogg now draws the English under Musgrave in a stylised, grotesque fashion, portraying them as bestial gargoyles, the very opposite of paragons of courtly love.
There they sat, a silent circle, in bitter and obstinate rumination. Their brows were plaited down, so as to almost cover their eyes; their underlips were bent upwards and every mouth shaped like a curve, and their arms were crossed on their breasts, while every man’s right hand instinctively rested on the hilt of his sword … a wild gleam of ferocity fired every haggard countenance.
The second part of the novel, that concerning the comic embassy’s journey to the wizard Sir Michael Scott, introduces the peril of witchcraft (more properly the peril of wizards and warlockry) to the romance. This section releases Hogg from the juxtaposition of romantic and realistic attitudes. Indeed the term ‘release’ well describes the extended nightmare, comic and fantastic, which follows with the pace and spirit of Dunbar’s ‘Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis’ and Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Sir Ringan, needing to know something of the outcome of the struggle before he decides which side to favour, sends his representatives to find out. His embassy is grotesque, a collection of oddities and misfits freakish enough to please the unnatural tastes of Michael Scott. He sends
As a bard, or minstrel.… Colley Carol, a man that is fit to charm the spirits out of the heart of the earth, or the bowels of the cloud … As a man of crabbed wit and endless absurdity … the Deil’s Tam: As a true natural and moral philosopher, the Laird o’ the Peatstacknowe: As one versed in all the mysteries of religion, and many mysteries besides, or some tell lies, we can send the gospel friar. All these are men of spirit, and can handle the sword and the bow … And as a man of unequalled strength and courage, and a guard and captain over all the rest, we can send Charlie o’ Yardbire – and I will defy all the kingdoms of Europe to send out sic another quorum either to emperor, Turk, wizard, or the devil himself.
Add the captive maiden Delany, and the beautiful boy Elias, and the embassy is complete. The motley crew on its fantastic quest may be enjoyed equally as a parody of the usual reiving party and as a travesty of a Canterbury pilgrimage. The story has now become a mock-epic. Not only is the medieval device of a journey used to comic effect, but sometimes even the various characters, the Deil’s Tam especially, seem to be almost medieval personifications of human qualities. Tam, standing for Greed and Famine in one, takes part in a Dunbar-like dance of sin, although, unlike Dunbar, Hogg mixes good and bad in his increasingly wild movement. Adventure follows adventure with the speed of Smollett; violence flares suddenly and dies as quickly. There is little complexity of situation now, apart from the pretty obvious hints that the dour and mysterious friar is more than he seems. And yet – probably because the embassy is mainly made up of Borderers and dominated by the refreshingly unusual hero, Charlie Scott – there is complete clarity of character delineation within the group, even down to the mule, wilful and almost human (and considered by Lockhart to be the real hero of the romance).
We begin to have a feeling of significant completeness in this group of contrasting characters. A pattern emerges, with Charlie as Honesty and Strength, the Friar as Faith, Gibby as Clownish Weakness (for which he is claimed as temporary servant by Scott), and Tam as Greed and Fleshly Lust (he signs his soul away to the devil). The framework is at once definite and yet loose enough to permit the contrasting idioms – the Friar’s Chaldee style, a mixture of the biblical and Ossianic, the poet’s flowery excesses, Charlie’s blunt but compassionate realism, and Tam’s crude, yet horrifically honest directness. We have moved from the world of chivalry, with its rules and conditions, to a world where these rules are subverted and turned upside-down; in this carnival of contrasts, Michael Scott and his master the devil will be the Lords of a Dance of Misrule. Hogg achieves the transition by capturing the unnatural atmosphere around Scott’s castle of Aikwood at sunset:
It was one of those dead calm winter evenings, not uncommon at that season, when the slightest noise is heard at a distance, and the echoes are all abroad. As they drew near to the huge dark looking pile, silence prevailed among them more and more. All was so still that even the beautiful valley seemed a waste. There was no bird whistling at the plough; no cattle or sheep grazing on the holms of Aikwood; no bustle of servants, kinsmen, of their grooms, as at the castles of other knights. It seemed as if the breath of the enchanter, or his eye, had been infectious, and had withered all within its influence, whether of vegetable, animal, or human life. The castle itself scarcely seemed to be the abode of man; the massy gates were