“THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS
OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER” by James Hogg (first published 1824)
You
expect a classic work of literature to be well-wrought and to be something
that, at least over time, has acquired a large readership – that triumph of the
“common reader” that I once talked about on this blog. [Look up “Here’s to the Common Reader!” on the
index at right.] But there are some classics that endure without ever finding a
mass audience. Caviar to the general, they go on being read by a small group of
devotees and somehow manage never to fade away.
I
think this is the case with the book I choose as this week’s “Something Old”.
James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner is a genuinely weird and offbeat book with a knotty
and difficult texture, clumsily written in places, repetitive and far from
straightforward. Yet it is a strangely powerful book and its elements of the
(apparently) supernatural are genuinely unsettling.
A
little background first. James Hogg (1770-1835) was like his fellow Scotsman
Robert Burns in coming from a lower-class background and making his name as a
poet on peasant themes. For a time he mixed with the Scottish literary elite
and was the friend of Sir Walter Scott. His work appeared in the prestigious
Tory Blackwood’s magazine. He
acquired the nickname “the Ettrick Shepherd”, but this seems to have been used
as much in mockery as in affection. When he lost his job on Blackwood’s he fell on hard times and
(with a family to support) churned out much hack-work.
It
was in this later period of Hogg’s life that his The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was
produced. Apart from being denounced as an un-Godly and immoral work, the book
was no particular success. It was largely forgotten for over a century until it
was “re-discovered” in the late 1940s and began to be re-printed in new
editions. It has maintained its reputation as an offbeat classic ever since and
is frequently taught in senior university Eng Lit classes.
If
I say it is a clumsy work, it’s because it essentially tells the same story
twice over, from two different perspectives. Perhaps it could be said to
anticipate the concept of the “unreliable narrator” that did not become
commonplace until the early twentieth century.
It
begins with the convention that it is a true story which the author has merely
“edited”, so the first part is called “The Editor’s Narrative” and tells, in
the third-person, the story of
young Robert Wringhim, son of a fanatical Calvinist mother, brought up
by her and by an equally fanatical Calvinist clergyman after she has deserted
her lawful husband.
Young
Robert begins as a sneak and a cheat, but gradually progresses to really
serious crimes, culminating in murder. But, in investigating the circumstances
of the murder, two diligent women discover that Robert is always accompanied by
a malignant stranger called “Gil-Martin”, who seems to have the power to change
shape and to become other people; and who holds to the predestinarian view that
the sins of the “elect” do not affect their eternal state. The two women, like
others in the story, readily identify “Gil-Martin” as the Devil. Robert is
about to be arraigned for murder when he mysteriously vanishes.
The
second part, called “The Confessions of a Sinner”, recapitulates this whole
story, except now told in the first person by Robert Wringhim himself. As a
boy, he says, he was assured of his own superiority and righteousness, but
others seemed to excel him. He contrived to falsely accuse, and have dismissed,
an old servant who had once reprimanded him. A fellow schoolboy, who excelled
him in studies, became his next target. By false witness, he managed to have
the boy expelled from school. His life really changed, however, when he met the
mysterious and persuasive stranger. Reluctant to give his name, the stranger
identified himself eventually as “Gil-Martin”. He persuaded Robert of the exact
truth of the doctrine that the “saved” are free to act as they will, and that
their deeds will always be righteous. The stranger contrives with Robert in all
the violent sins we have already heard, including a few more murders. But the
story takes an odd turn when Robert finds himself accused of things of which he
had no knowledge. Has “Gil-Martin” acted in his shape, or has Robert himself
acted in a sort of trance, and without any volition of his own? If we are truly
predestined, then does it mean we are automata with no free will? Robert
becomes more frantic, more demented, more mentally unhinged. The story ends in
suicide.
I
have simplified brutally the action of this novel, because there are many more
self-contained incidents in the narrative.
Given
that Confessions of a Justified Sinner
was written nearly two centuries ago, much of the prose is refreshingly robust
and straightforward, despite the novel’s tangled structure. The chief puzzle is
why it is written with the two separate narrators, especially as so much in one
version of the story is directly repeated in the other. I suppose they do give
the inwardness and the outwardness of the situation, and it is only when we
move to the justified sinner’s own memoirs that his perspective of being
compelled by the Evil One becomes fully clear.
The
novel presents a Devil who argues by hard Calvinist theology. It is difficult,
therefore, to see it as anything other than a satire upon the strict Calvinism
that lingered in Scots Presbyterianism. Hard Calvinism and the concept of
predestination lead to antinomianism, the view that no rules or laws need be
obeyed once one is “justified” and assured of salvation. Human actions and choices don’t matter
and, in practice, concepts of good and evil cease to exist. Therefore murder is
no bar to salvation (or justification) for the “elect”.
By
setting the story in the early 18th. century, so soon after the age
of the Covenanters, Hogg is clearly looking back with some detachment to a
Scotland of violent religious conviction that was fading (the story takes place
between 1687 and 1712). Though Presbyterianism still ruled the land in 1824,
its intellectual power was evaporating and elements of its more fanatical
sectaries could be mocked.
But
in the novel there is the added dimension that we are not always persuaded of
the literal existence of “Gil-Martin”. He could merely be the mental projection
of a self-justifying and self-righteous young man. Young Robert is, after all,
already a sneak, liar and cheat before he meets “Gil-Martin”. He has already
borne false witness and ruined other people’s lives simply because of his own
sense of election and superiority. He has what would now be called a belief in
his own “entitlement”. “Gil-Martin” simply “justifies” him in the more colloquial
sense of the word. Read in this way, the novel is about the further corruption
of an already flawed young man’s moral sense by fanatical Calvinism. It could
well be called Confessions of a Self-Justified
Sinner.
Rather
confounding this reading, though, are some incidents that insist on the literal
existence of “Gil-Martin”, as testified, for example, by the two women in “The
Editor’s Narrative” when they
overhear Robert and “Gil-Martin” talking. It is interesting, incidentally, that
the two women are a prostitute and a married man’s mistress. James Hogg does
not make sexual sins part of Robert’s corruption, perhaps implying that sins of
the flesh are not necessarily the most demoralising. I think he is also
thumbing his nose at a strict Puritanism which could not recognise that
sometimes whores and kept women can be more moral than their apparent betters.
There
are some good patches of raucous humour, such as the self-contained tale of a
preacher being exposed as the Devil; and a spot of “mistakes of the night”
farce when Robert Wringhim briefly lodges with a weaver. But one thing that
strikes me about this novel is the sheer Scottishness of it all. Those extremes
of feeling! That extreme theology, pulling people between an impossibly high
sense of “election” and a demoralising sense of utter depravity! I can’t help
seeing it as part of a Scottish tradition of “doubleness”, where a man who is
apparently a good and upright God-fearing member of society one moment is a
depraved murderer the next. Call
it the spirit of whisky. Does it
have something to do with the meeting of wild, clannish whisky-drinking
Highlander and prudent, thrifty, kirk-going Lowlander? For me, parts of the
story of Robert Wringhim and “Gil-Martin” are like a foretaste of the work of
James Hogg’s fellow-countryman Robert Louis Stevenson, who structured all his
major stories around this “doubleness” – prim Lowlander David Balfour and
buccaneering Highlander Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped; good stay-at-home brother and bad roving brother in The Master of Ballantrae; and the most
extreme cases of all in Deacon Brodie
and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
What
kept me busy, however, was copying into my notebook pungent satirical passages
on religion.
I
like the way a level-headed laird responds to a fanatical Calvinist clergyman:-
“You are one, Sir, whose righteousness
consists in splitting the doctrines of Calvin into thousands of
undistinguishable films, and in setting up a system of justifying-grace against
all breaches of all laws, moral or divine. In short, Sir, you are mildew – a
canker worm in the bosom of the Reformed Church, generating a disease of which
she will never be purged, but by the shedding of blood….”
There’s
the editor’s sly comment on the way the clergyman preaches:- “Then, after due thanks returned, they parted
rejoicing in spirit; which thanks, by the by, consisted wholly in telling the
Almighty what he was; and informing him, with very particular precision, what
they were who addressed him; for Wringhim’s whole system of popular
declamation consisted, it seems, in this, - to denounce all men and women to
destruction, and then hold out hopes to his adherents that they were the chosen
few, included in the promise, and who could never fall away. It would appear
that this Pharisaical doctrine is a very delicious one, and the most grateful
of all others to the worst characters.”
The
sinner damns himself when he declares:- “I
had more sense than to regard either my good works, or my evil deeds, as in the
smallest degree influencing the eternal decrees of God concerning me, either
with regard to my acceptance or reprobation. I depended entirely on the bounty
of free grace, holding all the righteousness of man as filthy rags, and
believing in the momentous and magnificent truth, that the more heavily laden
with transgressions, the more welcome was the believer at the throne of grace.”
And
there is the sinner’s explanation of the appeal of gloomy religions:- “Nothing
in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to
eternal damnation.”
It
is a challenging novel still.
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