The Three Perils Of Man - James Hogg Canongate Classics

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out to be withered hags, and they use such deception for their own ends. They are also, however, given as rewards. Charlie, because of his goodness and strength, is given Lady Jane Howard, Douglas gains Princess Margaret, and Delaney is the prize for the storytelling contest. Hogg’s fiction continually, and unusually for his time, emphasises the complexity and reality of women; and while the three heroic virgins of the poet’s tale may be little more than the idealised feminine creatures of chivalric romance, in contrast Margaret, Lady Jane, and the Chisholm daughters, have full, sensual, and highly unconventional roles to play. The cross-dressing of these girls complicates both the action and the conventional notions of femininity presented by Isaac and the poet. Douglas’s elfin page, Colin/Margaret, is one of Hogg’s most teasing inventions, with his/her exploitation of male/female codes. The transformations of men are thus balanced with transformations of women, an important part of the rich and complex patterning of Hogg’s epic.

      In the end Hogg does succeed in holding together his three perils in this loose-woven romance, despite his many authorial and ‘editorial’ problems. His ‘editor’ had likened his problem in controlling his multitude of characters and situations to that of the waggoner who has to take his load up a steep hill in stages, going back to collect what had to be left behind. It is precisely the want of his waggoner’s patience that has been most objected to in Hogg’s immense undertaking. He tells us in The Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott that he and the great novelist discussed the romance, Scott accusing him of rushing impatiently on in random fashion, and thus spoiling a potentially good tale. Whether we agree with Scott or not, Hogg’s statement in the same place about his method of composition is highly significant. He told Scott that when he started the first line of a tale or a novel, he never knew what the second was to be, and that this continued throughout. But he made an important qualification:

      When my tale is traditionary, the work is easy, as I then see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so short, but in all my prose works of the imagination, knowing little of the world, I sail on without star or compass.

      In spite of the last statement there is a real sense of direction in The Three Perils of Man, and an impressive enough destination, but it is indeed at the several points where he has tradition to help him that Hogg sees his way best. These are found especially in the scenes set in the Borders and the scenes relating to Sir Michael Scott. It is in working out a path between one such familiar point and another that his uncertainties show. Yet paradoxically it is in the originality of such working-out which makes revaluation of Hogg in the twentieth century such an exciting and on-going process. Seen in the lights of post-structuralist criticism, revisions of Romanticism, Bakhtinian readings – and even feminist theories – Hogg’s fiction generally, and not least The Three Perils of Man, reveals striking and challenging features which command respect and multi-faceted reassessment. And one particular implication of Hogg’s statement few readers will be disposed to accept – seeming to give all the credit for his success to tradition, he belittles his own imagination and is grossly unfair to himself and his romance. For when one has pointed out Hogg’s awareness of the Ballad and folk-tale tradition, when one has drawn parallels with The Pilgrim’s Progress or the chapbooks, one vital factor remains to astonish the critic. It is the sheer fecundity, immensity and colour of Hogg’s imagination, which, working on all kinds of traditional material, creates a living world which needs no other justification than its own unique blend of irony, racy humour, fantasy and romance.

      The final ironic reduction comes with the reader’s dawning realisation (confirmed when a map of the Borders is consulted), after following the epic journey of the comic embassy through danger, darkness and leagues of Border mountains, that their entire romantic journey has been something of a storm in a teacup, and that a daylight’s ride through passes in the hills would easily have sufficed to take Charlie and his companions the shortest route to Sir Michael Scott’s castle. Hogg of course is fully aware of his grotesque inflation of the distance and the dangers: since when have the great journeys of imagination taken the shortest route? And conjecture as to the extent of Hogg’s ironies leads the reader to a final and intriguing consideration concerning this troubled, love-hate journey to seek the advice of that medieval wizard of the north, Sir Michael Scott: given Walter Scott’s complex and sometimes dubiously productive relationship with the shepherd, is Hogg playing games yet again, in variation of the Chaldee Manuscript, with his own quest for advice regarding his future development from his illustrious contemporary, that other wizard of the Borders and the north?

      The achievement has no parallel. It is the last major effort of the dying, centuries-old tradition which produced the ballads, but it is something more. It is wonderful and refreshing entertainment, and is now recognised as an outstanding contribution, along with Hogg’s other novels, stories and poetry, to the traditions of Scottish literature which the twentieth century has been recovering ever since.

      Douglas Gifford

      NOTES

      In 1822, perceiving that I was likely to run short of money, I began and finished in the course of a few months, ‘The Three Perils of Man, viz. War, Women, and Witchcraft!’ Lord preserve us! what a medley I made of it! for I never in my life rewrote a page of prose; and being impatient to get hold of some of Messrs. Longman and Co.’ s money or their bills, which were the same, I dashed on, and mixed up what might have been made one of the best historical tales our country ever produced, such a mass of diablerie as retarded the main story, and rendered the whole perfectly ludicrous.

THE THREE PERILS OF MAN

      CHAPTER ONE

      There was a king, and a courteous king,

      And he had a daughter sae bonnie;

      And he lo’ed that maiden aboon a’ thing

      I’ the bonnie, bonnie halls o’ Binnorie.

      But wae be to thee, thou warlock wight,

      My malison come o’er thee,

      For thou hast undone the bravest knight,

      That ever brak bread i’ Binnorie!

       Old Song

      THE DAYS OF the Stuarts, kings of Scotland, were the days of chivalry and romance. The long and bloody contest that the nation maintained against the whole power of England, for the recovery of its independence – of those rights which had been most unwarrantably wrested from our fathers by the greatest and most treacherous sovereign of that age, with the successful and glorious issue of the war, laid the foundation for this spirit of heroism, which appears to have been at its zenith about the time that the Stuarts first acquired the sovereignty of the realm. The deeds of the Douglasses, the Randolphs, and other border barons of that day, are not to be equalled by any recorded in our annals; while the reprisals that they made upon the English, in retaliation for former injuries, enriched both them and their followers, and rendered their appearance splendid and imposing to a degree that would scarcely now gain credit. It was no uncommon thing for

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