Lockhart's 'The History of Matthew Wald' - 1824

 

 First edition - 1824

I am not quite sure how to 'pigeon hole' Lockhart's last novel of the four he wrote. It has been classed as a Gothic Tale; Lockhart himself (in a review of his own work!) wrote that everything is decidedly and entirely subordinate to the minute and anxious, although easy and unaffected, anatomy of one man's mind. Arguably, Matthew's plight can be seen as an emblem of Scotland's unstable cultural identity in the Romantic period. (I must admit, that thought never crossed my mind!) Walter Scott, writing to Lady Abercorn from Edinburgh on 4th June 1824, opined

Lockhart...wrote one or two tales of fiction uncommonly powerful in incident and language...he very lately wrote a little volume called "Matthew Wald", which is a very painful tale, very forcibly told; the worst is that there is no resting-place - nothing but misery from the title-page to the finis. 

Francis Russell Hart in The Scottish Novel, describes Matthew Wald as the manic disinherited picaro, whose intense perceptions are animated by a deeply divided self that he himself has fractured...we depend on the impulsive, anguished character...for our vision of his picaresque world. It is a grim and grotesque world in which character is almost always mysterious, surprising, the repository of secret pain and corruption.

The last three chapters, in particular, bear out Scott's prognosis of nothing but misery. I don't necessarily need a novel to finish 'happily ever after', but this ended in the 'valley of the shadow of deaths'.

Several paragraphs border on the incoherent, which does not make easy reading. On page 341, Wald's wife, Joanne, on seeing her husband with his cousin in a seeming embrace, has one convulsion after another and dies as does her new born babe.  On page 359, Wald kills his bête noire, the Hon. George Lascelyne, in a duel - "Lie there, rot there, beast"...I dipped my shoe in his blood. On page 360, his beloved cousin, Katharine, on hearing of her husband's decease, expires - Fainted? - swooned? - Dead! oh! dead. I remember no more. Chapter XXXII  starts well enough - somehow Wald is still alive, free but much older. Old I am, yet I feel strength in every fibre...I can walk, read and write, as nimbly as if I were a man of five and twenty years... There then follows an incoherent series of paragraphs, suggesting he has previously gone mad in a wilderness of horrors. 

This is not the end of the book, however. There is a 'Letter to P.R. Esq.' which is sent  by J[ohn].W.R. from London, dated August, 1816, enclosing the foregoing memoirs. It charts Wald's later life - one of seeming contentment, never visiting Scotland,  (he gave up possession of his wife's estate the moment he had recovered possession of his faculties), giving occasional dinners and joining in other festivities. Verily a "grey-haired man of glee". It also explains his decease through apoplexy. Wald is a Brontesque figure, whose passionate behaviour leads to madness, from which he recovers; his secret is not discovered  until his Memoir is found, after his death. Does the story 'work'? Not really. There are too many digressions (Wald himself admits at one stage that I have indulged in this digression...), the construction is uneven. The coincidence of Matthew ending up in London, residing in a house next to the fugitive Katharine, is really too much to accept. Moreover, it is clear that Wald's young heir wonders how much the Memoir is true.

There are, however, one or two good pen portraits - such as the old Lord of Session in his country estate, who Wald goes to see - he is in his usual rural costume of a scratch-wig, a green jacket, Shetland hose, and short black gaiters, who regularly ejaculates  "Hooly, hooly"....  The fanatical Cameronian cobbler, John M'Ewan, who murders a farmer friend, in a moment of lust for the latter's money; Mrs Bauby 'Mammy' Baird, the ancient retainer of the Barr family ; the malign preacher, Mr. Mather, who marries Matthew's aunt and drives him away from home; the rather too fat and rubicund Miss Biddy Patterson, Matthew's housekeeper when he boarded at St. Andrews; her to-be husband John Mackay, who gets the Kirk of St Dees from the College. Joanne, the eldest daughter of Sir Claud Barr, seemingly illegitimate but, as later 'proved' (by Matthew) to be the offspring of a genuine marriage, has the saddest life in many ways. The young lady had a face of singular though melancholy beauty - but her figure was extremely small and slender, and her walk seemed, I thought to hint some very slight imperfection in one of her limbs. Wald marries this meekest of women, but, too soon, their relationship is tested when she comes under the spell of the itinerant Methodists of England [who] first made their appearance in our part of the country. Although Wald can praise Whitefield as a superior orator, he soon finds the manifestation of the same growing mania objectionable; he calls it an endemic, with eternal visitations of wandering fanatics...the far greater part ignorant, uninformed, wild, raving mechanics. Methodism does not get a good press with any of these Blackwood novelists!

A tale, therefore, rather like the proverbial curate's egg - good in parts, but decidedly below average in others. I have yet to read Lockhart's first novel, Valerius. Only when I have done that, can I try to assess whether he was a good writer of fiction or not. The jury, at present, is out.