Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Rutherford, William Gunion
RUTHERFORD, WILLIAM GUNION (1853–1907), classical scholar, was born at Glasgow on 17 July 1853, the second son of Robert Rutherford, minister of the United Presbyterian church at Mountain Cross, in Peeblesshire, and his wife Agnes, daughter of William Gunion, a Glasgow merchant. A younger brother, John Gunion Rutherford, C.M.G. (b. 1857), has had a distinguished career in Canada as a veterinary surgeon in the service of the Dominion.
After receiving Latin lessons from a dominie William was sent to Glasgow High School, and thence to St. Andrews University, where Lewis Campbell [q. v. Suppl. II] was Greek professor. In April 1873 he went to Oxford as an exhibitioner of Balliol, and in 1874 was in the first class in classical moderations, but he chose natural science for his final school (in which he took a second class), reading at the same time much Greek on his own account. He graduated in Dec. 1876, and at once became a classical master at St. Paul's school.
In 1878 he published a 'First Greek Grammar,' which soon came into wide use. It owed something to Cobet's study of Attic forms, but much also to original research. In deference to convention some spurious forms were retained, but these disappeared from later editions. Working on the same lines, Rutherford produced in 1881 'The New Phrynichus,' the greatest contribution of English scholarship to the study of Attic usage in vocabulary and inflexions. This was followed in 1883 by an edition of 'Babrius' with critical dissertations and notes.
Rutherford's reputation as a scholar was now established, and in the same year he was elected fellow and tutor of University College, Oxford. Before he went into residence the headmastership of Westminster fell vacant, and at the instigation of Benjamin Jowett [q. v. Suppl. I] Rutherford became a candidate. He was elected and entered on office in September 1883.
Coming to the school as a reformer, Rutherford met with opposition from the sentiment of some Old Westminsters. Especial objection was taken to his abolition of 'water,' that is to say, rowing on the Thames. Though in this matter his judgment was at one with the Westminster staff, he took no shelter behind that fact. Nor did he waver in any of his more vital improvements, and the opposition gradually died away. In school he was a strong disciplinarian, a character which did not prevent him from becoming in the end extremely popular with the boys. He was a great teacher, always treating words as the vehicle of thought, using them with reverent precision, and in translation showing 'a horror of looseness, poverty of vocabulary, and English idiom all stuccoed over with a base convention' (J. S. Phillimore). Though he was not much given to the practice of verse composition, his prologues to the Westminster plays were marked by Terentian ease and grace. In 1884 St. Andrews gave him the honorary degree of LL.D. He had taken orders on going to Westminster, and in 1901 published under the title of 'The Key of Knowledge' some of his sermons preached at the school services in Westminster Abbey.
In 1889, in an edition of the fourth book of Thucydides, Rutherford exemplified a theory that the current texts of Greek authors are disfigured by ascripts imported from the margins. Some of his corrections have been accepted, but not all are necessary. Afterwards his view of the time at which the interpolations took place was modified in face of the evidence of the Egyptian papyri. His first recension of the newly discovered 'Mimiambi' of Herondas (1892) was a somewhat hasty piece of work which did not add to his reputation. In connexion with his work on Attic he had studied the scholia to Aristophanes, and he now visited Italy to examine the Ravenna manuscript. In 1896 he published a revised text of the scholia with a translation and notes, promising a third volume to deal with the conclusions which he had drawn. His health having begun to fail, early in 1899 he went with his wife on a voyage to New Zealand. The benefit was not lasting, and in July 1901 he gave up his headmastership and retired to Little Hallands, near Bishopstone, which had been for some years his country house. The third volume on the Aristophanic scholia came out in 1905 under the title of 'A Chapter in the History of Annotation.' It supplied no formal proof of the theory of ascripts, but threw light on it by tracing the history of Greek studies from the earliest commentators to the fall of Constantinople, and was a vigorous protest against the spirit which ranks the annotation with the text.
Rutherford was profoundly dissatisfied with the revised version of the New Testament. His sense of Hellenistic Greek told him that the author of the Pauline epistles thought in one language and wrote in another. In 1900 he brought out a new translation of the Epistle to the Romans. He began a new translation of the Epistles to the Thessalonians and to the Corinthians. He completed the work as far as 2 Cor. viii. 24, when on 19 July 1907 he died somewhat suddenly at Little Hallands. He was buried in Bishopstone churchyard. His last work was published posthumously with a biographical sketch by his friend Spenser Wilkinson.
Rutherford, though an admirer of Cobet and Blass, had too independent a genius to be any man's disciple. His fame as a scholar rests chiefly on his studies of Attic, of Aristophanes, and of New Testament Greek. His translations of St. Paul have to contend against some theological prejudice, but he was more learned and acute than any of his critics.
Rutherford married, on 3 Jan. 1884, (Constance Grordon, daughter of John Thomson Renton, of Bradston Brooke, Surrey. His wife with three daughters survives him.
A crayon portrait by J. Seymour Lucas, R.A., is in Ashburnham House, Westminster School. A portrait in oils by the same artist, for which Old Westminsters subscribed in 1901, is with Mrs. Rutherford for her life and will ultimately come to the school. The cartoon by 'Spy' in 'Vanity Fair,' 3 March 1898, is a remarkable likeness.
[Personal knowledge; Spenser Wilkinson's biog. sketch, noticed supra.]