Robert is seen to be arm in arm with the murdered man — ‘it is a phantasy of our disturbed imaginations,’ reason the women — and they are followed by the (it seems) ghosts, as George himself had been by the shape of his brother. In great personal danger, the women manage to report back to the Lord Justice Clerk, who despatches officers to Dalcastle — but Robert Wringhim Colwan is not to be found.

We move now to the actual confessions. It is a measure of Hogg’s maturity as an artist that he makes no attempt to let Robert present himself sympathetically. He engineers the sacking of a trusted servant (‘I rejoiced in his riddance’) and the downfall of fellow pupils — when another boy bests him in Latin, ‘I succeeded several times in getting him severely beaten for faults of which he was innocent.’ He enjoys lying and glories in ‘a labyrinth of deceit’ — all of which he does ‘as a duty’. The character’s over-mastering arrogance never mellows. (Tenderness is a sin and, like compassion, a temptation to be resisted.) Wounded and on the run he has no humility — taken on by the printer ‘I could not but despise the man in my heart’; and his last words are a farewell to ‘woman, whom I have despised and shunned; and man, whom I have hated’. His unwholesome rages, as mentioned above, mirror his mother’s. His own fear of sex seems to have originated in his conception — copulating to produce him, his parents sinned — and before long ‘I brought myself to despise, if not to abhor, the beauty of women … to this day I am thankful for having escaped the most dangerous of all snares.’ This is not to say that Robert has no lustful urges. Far from it. What transfixes the reader of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is its presentation of the eroticism of evil.

To dance with the devil in the pale moonlight is a rich theme in literature. When somebody is as clever as Faustus or as socially rebellious as Don Juan, the devil rides out to meet his blood brother. Diabolists, moreover, don’t blunder into wrong-doing, as if to commit a secular crime; rather, their transgressions are purposeful and insolent. Faustus experiments with the limits of his brain power; Don Juan, inviting the Stone Guest to dinner, the ghost of a man he’s killed, the father of a girl he’s seduced, is seeing how much he can get away with. Hence, Robert Wringhim Colwan. Though the character of his real father, the fire and brimstone preacher, predicts the devil’s mannerisms, the devil actually makes his first direct appearance in the text during a moment of religious ecstasy. The Rev. Wringhim anoints Robert as one of ‘the just made perfect’, and as ‘a justified person’ he gambols across the landscape — ‘I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men.’ At which juncture he meets his sinister double. It is love at first sight: ‘I can never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my whole frame at that impressive moment.’

What ensues may be as endlessly argued as Hamlet’s antic disposition. Is Robert a schizophrenic to be pitied or a psychopath to be actively hated? Is the apparition of the devil an emanation of what is already latent in Robert’s nature (as Mr Hyde is the self-confident and vivid version of meek and masochistic Dr Jekyll) or is he supernaturally possessed by demons? To what extent is he responsible for his actions? Is Robert the devil’s double, or is he, as a prig and bigot, simply victimized? Is Robert, in fact, removed from the scene altogether — his body invaded and snatched away, to be replaced by an unholy simulacrum? After his first meeting with the stranger in the wild woods, for example, he returns home and upsets his parents — they find him altered, ‘translated’. How so? And if we try and match the chronology of the confession with the action of the editorial sections, we see that just when George was haunted and humiliated, Robert was bedridden with fever and hallucinations for a month.

Hogg has space, here and there, for all these bewitching possibilities. Sometimes Robert’s companion is, ‘as the shadow is cast from the substance’, alongside him; at other moments he is internalized (‘our beings are amalgamated’) and the voice of insanity (which ‘tyrannized over every spontaneous movement of my heart’); then again he retires into the background, forlorn and degenerating, ‘raging with despair at his fallen and decayed majesty’. The fact of his fluidity, however, now in Robert’s mind, now his room, now in the shape of George, or Thomas Drummond, or anybody, witnessed by strangers or invisible to them, is constant — and never naturalistic. And it is in the dark intensity and languor of the devil’s magical transformations that the eroticism is to be found; in his disappearances, the way people’s bodies are merging and deliquescing, one into the other. Satan sets up a rhythm with which Robert complies and to which, increasingly exhausted, he yields — ‘the power was not in me to separate myself from him’.

Robert’s relationship with the devil, therefore, is presented as a sexual bond. (His being trussed upside down and beaten by a weaver and being tethered and whipped by the two Arabellas are other, minor, delicacies out of de Sade.) This becomes explicit when, back as the new laird of Dalcastle, Robert is obliterated for a spell (he seems to suffer a six-month narcoleptic trance) and some ‘second self … some other being who appears in my likeness’, roams the countryside, depraved, drunk, despoiling. As the devil never admits that he’s been the one getting up to ‘the basest and most ungenerous of purposes’, raping a village wench, forging legal documents to acquire neighbouring estates, and so on, it is as if Robert’s released and violent inner self has been carrying out the crimes and misdemeanours, fulfilling its appetites whilst he sleeps — a nightmare self. (The devil stands back, sombre and disgusted, merely reminding Robert of his promise that ‘no human hand shall ever henceforth be able to injure your life, or shed one drop of your precious blood’. If he doesn’t realize this is the devil talking it is only because he doesn’t want to.) The culmination of the orgy is the murder of his mother, who had become ‘exceedingly obnoxious to me’, after which he flees into the night, creating commotion wherever he goes — horses are maddened, cats with talons out fling themselves at him, etc.

The justified sinner’s surrender to Satan’s fascination, with the opportunities for character renewal, leaving your body, and, as he hopes, moral indemnity, connects Hogg’s novel with that other flirtation of the Romantic age — after the imitations and translations of books and papers — the actor. Actors (like lunatics) were licensed for extravagance and excess. There was an element of mystery to their art — and they were full of the gusto which Hazlitt, for example, also detected in, as it might be, Indian jugglers or a prize fight.