Coleridge famously complimented Edward Kean’s Hamlet on being like a reading of Shakespeare carried out between lightning flashes. Actors had a transformative genius. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s would-be husband, saw Kean play Othello in 1825 and remembered a small man who was yet enlarged by the emotions the role made him feel — Kean grew into Othello, the eloquence of the lines and the strength of the drama (‘this is all the witchcraft I have used’) converting him mentally, therefore physically. This is the witchery of theatre, to be found also in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for the devil is a master mummer: ‘My countenance changes with my studies and sensations … If I contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character … I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.’ This could be a description of the processes whereby actors absorb their roles; and it is also in tune with the sympathy and versatility the Romantic writers found in Hamlet, an unstable acid of a man, who ‘sees evil hovering near him like a spectre’ (Hazlitt), who ‘gives substance to shadows, and throws a mist over all commonplace actualities’ (Coleridge), whose speeches ‘are the effusions of his solitary musings’ (Lamb) — and who is, of course, being death-obsessed and misanthropic, the ancestor of Robert Wringhim Colwan.

The chief objection against the Shakespeare play in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was that it had to involve the vulgarity and compromises of the stage. Hamlet, it was felt, being ‘wrapped up in his reflections’, is incongrous in the theatre of the mind. And it is this region which Hogg’s character never leaves. Indeed, he’s shut up there, tormented, like Colin Hyslop in Hogg’s ‘The Witches of Traquair’ (Black-wood’s Edinburgh Mazazine, Vol. XXIII, April 1828), by ‘monstrous shapes, torn by cats, pricked by invisible bodkins’, unleashed by the Prince of the Power of the Air.

Nevertheless, if Hogg’s book borrowed Hamlet and put him at last in a novel, it is of interest to note that the film director Alexander Mackendrick had a long-held ambition to put The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner on to the screen. And yes it would have worked marvellously as an Ealing movie. The sardonic tone of Whisky Galore or The Man in the White Suit, the ‘lethal innocence’ (as Philip Kemp calls it) of the rebels and reactionaries who populate the stories — such an atmosphere and approach could have captured Hogg’s irony and drive. Then there are the set-pieces, which are ideal for the cinema — e.g. the mob violence incited by the devil (‘… thousands were moved to an involuntary flight they knew not why …’), or the villagers and the party of officers closing in on Robert with a warrant for his arrest (‘everything is in train for your ruin’), or the special effects of the doubles and the disappearing. The book contains straightforward comedy, too — as when the Rev. Wringhim, outraged to be charged with Robert’s paternity, says that, if the boy resembles him, it is simply because of his mother’s private thoughts and affections: ‘I have known a lady … who was delivered of a blackamoor child, merely from the circumstance of having got a start by the sudden entrance of her negro servant, and not being able to forget him for several hours.’

The way Hogg’s brief novel is rich in suggestiveness, asides, ellipses, matter which has to be read between the lines, would have suited Ealing — where restraint and economy were virtues and, given the era, put to alluring adult use. The extent of the evil, the erotic, the necromancy, and the appeal of these, isn’t spelled out by Hogg, and Mackendrick, especially, would have similarly half-touched in such gists and piths. (Does anybody want to draw a conclusion about what being Scottish entails at this point?) Over all: Robert and the devil — what opportunities for the actor, who can get around to giving a performance of gleeful craziness. A gift of a part for him who (in Hogg’s words) ‘by setting his features to the mould of other people’s, … entered at once into their conceptions and feelings’. In the cinema we’d be able to see what he sees.

If not yet a film, however, Hogg’s novel, we may mention in closing, does not entirely stand alone. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner stands behind Anthony Burgess’s Enderby trilogy. In these novels, dating from 1963, 1968 and 1974, the poet F. X. Enderby seeks a perfection of his art, rather than in his life — until, that is, the devil enters his world in the guise of various temptresses and treacherous muses, who destroy his calm, and hence his work. As in the Hogg original, there are a fear of sex, a hatred of women, and a number of false prophets. At the conclusion of Inside Mr Enderby, the hero is delirious. In a suicidal temper he breaks down and the doctors reorientate his identity. He is put in an asylum as Piggy Hogg, whence he is released at the beginning of Enderby Outside to rehabilitate by working in a pub. He pipes up when the author Hogg is mentioned: ‘The Ettrick Shepherd he was known as. Pope in worsted stockings … A very Jacobitical poet, that one.