AN EDITOR AND BIOGRAPHER OF THE LAST REIGN, THE REV.
WHITWELL ELWIN.*
THESE welcome volumes contain a Life of the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, Lockhart's successor as editor of the Quarterly Review, and a selection from his essays, all amply furnished with dates and annotations. Elwin junior is industrious, he has excellent narrative powers, knows how to temper the serious with the gay, and—may the shade of Elwin senior grant pardon to the word—be possesses the quality of " aloofness." Whitwell Elwin took Orders, not from clerical leanings, but in view of an eventual institution in the family living of Booton, Norfolk, to which he succeeded in 1849. In a previous country curacy his life was envenomed by the brekekekez- koax-koax of the local toads who invaded his house, and, he said, were as bad as the plague in Egypt. Uncle Toby might exclaim, "Go, go, little fly," but the world had not room enough for the batrachians of Hemington, whose number, even after a thousand had been killed in one day, seemed hardly diminished. Making his debut in the Quarterly with an article on "The Dog," which was followed by others on Shakespeare and "Spectacles," he gradually fell into his ?agora eanamus, by which he acquired high favour with Lock- hart, who, writing to the publisher Murray, said that the new hand was "our only valuable literary acquisition for many years past," and added that he would be the "fittest editor of the Q. B. so soon as the old one drops down." Elwin's earlier output included an assault on the poetasters of the day, which, though sarcastic enough, was free from the savagery of Croker's treatment of " Endymion," which drew forth Byron's famous protest to Murray beginning :—
"Who killed John Keats ? said the Quarterly."
The Review was then not so much governed by a single tyrant as by a species of syndicate. In 1853 Lockhart's health and editorial faculty began to give way, "over-worked, over- worried, over-Crokered, over-Murray'd," as he said. He re- signed his chair for a while to a substitute, who, of course, was Elwin. Although the new coadjutor was not " over-Murray'd," with Croker, who enjoyed a special consultative and pecuniary position in regard to the Review, he had sundry collisions, in which, however, "J. W. C.," admitting the necessity of editorial despotism, gave way. But when Elwin flatly declined an article on the antecedents of the Crimean War wherein Croker sided with Russia, there followed a definite split which led to no personal soreness. On the invalid's return from his furlough, Elwin said one might "consider the Q. R. as transformed from a one-horse brougham into a carriage and pair." But Lockhart's time was come : his closing days were by no means brightened by the appearance of a number of the Quarterly in which, he complained, the old traditions of Albemarle Street had been abandoned : "a page would have made Gifford faint." After Elwin had definitely become editor, he lamented to Murray the want of "a few clever young fellows,"—the dearth of recruits he illustrated by the fact that Dickens had read through nine hundred contributions to Household Wards, of which the available eleven had to be rewritten. He himself bad, he grumbled, to do every one else's work as well as his own ; he re- • Some Seventeenth Century Men of Letters: Biographical Essays by the Rev. Whitmell Elwin, sometime Edttor of the" Quarterly Review." With a Memoir. Edited by his Son, Warwick Elwin. 2 vols. London : .7. Murray. [Zs. net.1 arranged, condensed, interpolated, retouched in such sweep- ing fashion, that, as be wrote to Lady Westmorland, three articles out of four were recomposed : "there is rarely one entire line as it comes." Some of "the mediocrity men" thus treated expressed annoyance at the mutilation of their work. One angrily returned his cheque ; another sarcastically said, "A little irregular individuality is better than a uniform and tame correctness." Amongst the scribblers put into the melting-pot was Arthur Stanley, the eventual Dean of West- minster, of whose literary powers Elwin spoke in contemptuous terms, calling him a most careless, twaddling writer, who would repeat the same word six times in six sentences ! In his shambles style of procedure Elwin was on the whole upholding the old Murray traditions, and meeting his colleague of the Edinburgh at dinner, he was surprised to find that Sir G. Cornewall Lewis's methods of editorial discipline were far less drastic than his own. Mr. Warwick Elwin prudently refrains from a comparison of his father, as adept in the labor linuze, with "the great Mr. Cook" of the Saturday ; but he enlarges on his amazing neglect of business details. Elwin seemed to be guided by Lord Hert- ford's remark that "a man is a fool if be answers a letter" : his diocesan, the Bishop of Norwich, thought there could be no post-office at Booton, as he never got answers to his letters to the rector. As to the bulk of the MS. proposed contributions to the Review, they were pigeon-holed in heaps, frequently unopened, and often lost for good, even after the expostulations addressed by the writers to the Albemarle Street headquarters had led to the necessary search being made.
If the editor did not quite treat his publisher like a mere Bishop, his irregular epistolary habits and the infrequency of his short visits to London caused trouble to Murray, who pro- posed to Elwin to take up his residence in town in return for an addition to his emoluments, which were already on a very liberal scale. This bribe did not attract the rector of Booton, who bated the fumum strepitumque of the Metropolis, and was satisfied with the simplicity of his Sabine farm. Six years of tinkering other men's work sufficed for Elwin, and in 1860 he retired, to spend his remaining forty years in parochial and literary avocations, visiting, and rebuilding his church. Booton was very unlike "sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain." The ugly locality was twelve miles from a railway station, had at first no post-office, and the parsonage, built by Elwin himself far from the village, stood on a species of quagmire, through which it was hard to bring coals to the house. Indoors the Horatian non ebur neque aureum was carried to excess : the rooms were unpainted and unpapered, there were no window-blinds, while the den used as the study was blocked up by a single deal table. At breakfast the rector got nothing but bread and butter, at dinner only meat and pudding ; he did not keep a horse, objected to sport, and had no amusement of any sort except playing with his domestic animal pets. In a letter of 1876 he explains that he is bolding his writing paper in his hand because he could not disturb the parrot on his leg and the "junior cat" on his lap. If the son does not quite condescend to the prevalent demand for anecdotes of the trivial sort, he gives a string of interesting notices of his father's contact with many of the political and intellectual lions of the epoch, frotn Lord Brougham and Gladstone to Thackeray, Carlyle, and Arthur Stanley. It appears that Brougham used to send his draft speeches to Elwin for correction, as well as for com- pletion by quotations calculated to adorn the oratorical texts, a job which the rector settled by inventing, when necessary, the poetical beauties required. Brougham at eighty-one would read and write half the night through, and then at breakfast be "so hilarious and excited that he could hardly eat or drink." In Lord Lyndhurst act at. eighty-six "the brilliancy of youth and the experience of age were met together" ; neither in talk nor manner did either of the great men exhibit "the faintest touch of senility." The views of the last-named ex- Lord Chancellor on the education of the classes whose vocation in life was manual labour should be studied by Mr. Balfour. To train the children of the people in literary subjects was, he argued, absurd. Teach them the truths of science, and they will learn to reason and observe ; talk about air and water, light and heat, would interest them when they would scoff at the A B C. Some of us can remember the saying," If Brougham only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything." Yet when "a man by the name of Ruskin" read at a scientific meeting a paper on art, the paragon of omniscience wrote to ask "who the fellow was." Again, on tile publication of the first volumes of Carlyle's Frederick the Great the Duke of Bedford showed absolute unacquaintance with the writer's name, a feat equalled by Sir Robert Peel, who, we are told, three years after the appearance of The Princess stated that he was unaware there was a poet called Tennyson. That confession could hardly shock Elwin, who never quite digested the Laureate, detested Browning, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and had read no French novel except Consuelo. Fond of science, he never- theless thought Darwin a quack, and put Tyn.dall and Huxley in a back row far behind. He called Millais and his associates idolators of ugliness, but, according to the painter Leslie, he was the only person who really understood the pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds ! The rector had a cultivated musical taste; but, strange to say, a letter written after a concert lays down that Beethoven was the special exponent of beauty, Mozart of sublimity. A notable feat for an amateur was Elwin's rebuilding of Booton Church. Entirely unaided by so much as the merest suggestion from any professional quarter, he achieved his complicated task with a degree of aesthetic success which, to judge from the photograph, few professional architects would have attained. In the local development of the Volunteer movement of 1859 the parson took the lead. He was personally prepared to meet the French with carnal weapons, for which purpose he drilled in uniform in the ranks of the village contingent. His requiescat in pace took the beatific form of a sudden departure. His parishioners still keep warm in their hearts the memory of the man they loved so well.
A superficial glance at such classical work as the biographical essays here reprinted, with addenda from their author's own hand, would be indefensible and useless. Elwin was not a pioneer of intellectual progress; but his elucidations of personality, fact, and style will satisfy every reader whose critical balance has not been upset by the hysterical methods of some of our caricaturists of Sainte-Beuve and Faguet.
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