George Bernard Shaw; his life and works,a critical biography (authorized)

Front matter

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^eT .

Preface

I have neither space nor words to express, in full measure, my gratitude and indebtedness to the many friends, critics, scholars and men of letters who have aided me in the preparation of this work. First of all I wish to thank Mr. Shaw himself for his assistance. The voluminous correspondence filled with criticism, exposition and reminiscence; the immense trouble taken in placing ample materials at my disposal; the personal assistance in detailed discussion of the work — will have made this work possible. For the views expressed in this biography Mr. Shaw is in no sense responsible. On many points we are in hearty disagreement. At this place, I take pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to Mrs. Shaw, for kind assistance and helpful suggestions.

Valuable assistance, especially in connection with the earlier stages of Shaw's career as a dramatist, was derived from Mr. William Archer's collection of Shaviana, which he freely and most generously placed at my disposal. The chapter on Shaw as a critic of music I could not have written without the articles lent me by Mr. Archer. I am likewise greatly indebted to Mr. Holbrook Jackson, who gave me free access to his collection of Shaviana, and lent me valuable material hitherto unknown to me, or inaccessible. During the entire course of the preparation of the present work, I have received the counsel and aid of that scholarly student of the drama, Mr. James Piatt White, of Buffalo, New York, who freely placed the services of himself and his fine library of dramatic literature at my disposal.

To certain able students of Shaw's work, some of them not known to me personally, and also to a few personal friends, I am also especially indebted. To Mr. John Corbin, Professor William Lyon Phelps and Professor E. E. Hale, Jr., in connection with the chapters treating of the plays ; to Mr. James Huneker, in connection with the chapter treating of Shaw as a

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PREFACE

critic of music ; to the late Mr. Samuel L. Clemens and to Dr.

C. Alphonso Smith in connection with other critical and biographical chapters — for reading these portions of the work, for helpful criticism in some instances, for the loan of material in others, to all my thanks are gratefully accorded. Needless to say, they are in no wise responsible for any faults or errors of mine. In various ways, in lesser degree, I am indebted to Miss Sally Fair child, Mr. Henry George, Jr., Mr. J. T. Grein and Mr. Austin Lewis.

Of foreign critics, I wish especially to thank M. Augustin Hamon, the French translator of Shaw's works, for his interesting suggestions, his numerous acts of kindness, and for the rich mass of documents embodying the continental criticism of Shaw with which he has kept me supplied ; and Herr Siegfried Trebitsch, of Vienna, the German translator of Shaw's works, for detailed information in regard to Shaw's position and recognition in German Europe. I cannot permit myself to omit from the list of those to whom I am especially indebted the names of M. Jean Blum, formerly Professor at the Lycee, Oran, Algeria ; Herr Heinrich Stiimcke, editor of Biihne unci Welt; Professor Paul Haensel, of the University of Moscow; Dr. Julius Brouta, of Madrid, the Spanish translator of Shaw's works ; Herr Hugo Vallentin, the Swedish translator of Shaw's works ; Mr. J. M. Borup, the Danish translator of Shaw's works ; Baron Reinhold von Willebrand, editor of the Finsk Tidskrift, Helsingfors, Finland; M. Auguste Filon, now resident in England, I believe; and Dr. Georg Brandes, of Copenhagen. In the text of the present work, or in footnotes, I trust I have not failed to express my indebtedness to everyone, not heretofore mentioned, who, in one way or another, has aided me in the present work. I should, however, like to acknowledge here my indebtedness to the officials of the Library of Congress, Washington,

D. C, of the British Museum, and of the Cambridge University Library, for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness.

I have taken the utmost pains to include among the illustrations the most notable representations ever made of Shaw — sculpture, portrait, photograph and cartoon. Moreover, the thought of presenting Shaw to the eye in the most character-

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PREFACE

istic and representative way, as he appeared at various stages in his career, has been constantly borne in mind. My thanks are now expressed to M. Auguste Rodin for permission to reproduce a photograph of his bronze bust of Shaw, the marble replica of which, presented by Mr. Shaw, now stands in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; to Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, Paris, for a photograph of his remarkable plaster bust of Shaw, said to have been made in forty minutes ; to the Hon. Neville S. Lytton, for permission to reproduce his unique portrait of Mr. Shaw, after the Innocent X. of Velasquez; to Mr. Bernard Partridge for the loan of his admirable water-colour of Shaw; to Miss Jessie Holliday for the loan of her striking water-colour of Shaw, her photo-drawing of Mr. Webb, and her sketch of Mr. Archer ; to Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. E. T. Reed for permission to reproduce cartoons of Shaw; to Mr. H. G. Wells for permission to reproduce his drawing of six Socialists; to Mr. Joseph Simpson, the artist, and Mr. J. Murray Allison, the owner, for the loan of a black-and-white wash drawing — all the best of their kind. I was so fortunate as to enlist the interest and co-operation of those two great American artist-photographers, Alvin Langdon Coburn (London) and Eduard J. Steichen (Paris). Notable portraits and pictures were taken by them especially for this work — one Lumiere autochrome and four monochromes by Mr. Coburn, and two monochromes by Mr. Steichen. For permission to photograph the first and last pages of the original manuscript of Love Among the Artists — and also for supplying me with much other valuable material — I am indebted to Mr. D. J. Rider. I wish to express my thanks to Dr. M. L. Ettinghausen, of Munich, who secured for me many playbills of the productions of Shaw's plays in German Europe. I wish to express my thanks also to Mr. Roger Ingpen, for his assistance in the matter of illustrations. My thanks are likewise extended to the proprietors of Punch and Vanity Fair for permission to reproduce certain cartoons which originally appeared in those publications. In especial, I wish to thank Mrs. Shaw for her intelligent aid in the selection of likenesses of Mr. Shaw from his own large collection.

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PREFACE

In accordance with the original plan for the biography of Mr. Shaw, the present volume was to contain an appendix* treating chronologically and critically of the production of Shaw's plays throughout the world, from the inception of his career as a dramatist. It has proved advisable to publish this appendix later in a separate, souvenir volume, embodying the history of the dramatic movement inaugurated by Bernard Shaw. Consequently, the chapters in the present volume dealing with Shaw's plays are concerned primarily with critical discussion of the genesis and art of the plays, touching upon their production only in the most casual and adventitious way.

Mr. Shaw is fond of saying : " I am a typical Irishman ; my family came from Hampshire." His lineal ancestor, Captain William Shaw, was of Scotch descent; lived in Hampshire, England; and in 1689 went to Ireland, where the family has since lived. The strains in Mr. Shaw's ancestry are so complicated and interwoven, that it has seemed important to publish a genealogical chart of the Shaw family. The researches were conducted by the expert genealogist, Rev. W. Ball Wright, M.A., Osbaldwick Vicarage, York, at the instance and under the direction of Mr. Shaw himself. The chart, compiled from the data of Mr. Wright, was prepared by the experts of the Grafton Genealogical Press, New York.

To my wife, for her untiring assistance and inestimably valuable criticism, I cannot cancel my debt of gratitude by any expressions, however eloquent. I could not have written this book without her aid. It is to her intellectual directness and to her genius for suggestive criticism, that the present volume owes very much of whatever merit it may possess.

Archibald Henderson.

Cambridge, England.

November 30th, 1910.

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Preface To The American Edition

The association of America and Bernard Shaw connotes, at the first glance, incongruity if not mutual antipathy. There is at once a suggestion of conflict between the most individualistic personality of the day and the most individualistic nation of the world. One of America's deplorable, if amiable, weaknesses is the predilection for inviting estimates of herself from supercilious people who know nothing about her. And one of Shaw's amusing idiosyncracies is his fancy for discoursing freely upon subjects of which he is pathetically ignorant. Bull-baiting is his daily pastime ; but now and then he eagerly yields to the tempting invitation to take a new fling at America. So from time to time we have the diverting spectacle of a remarkably clever and shrewd Irishman making quaintly stupid and delightfully inapposite strictures upon a country he has never visited and upon a people among whom he has never lived or even sojourned.

Imagine a Martian making his first studies of the United States through the sole intermediary of the writings and dis^ courses of Mr. Bernard Shaw. What a lurid and shocking picture would be presented to his view! The United States, thus portrayed, is a " nation of villagers," suburban in instinct and parochial in moral judgments, " overridden with old-fashioned creeds and a capitalistic religion." The Americans are an " appalling, horrible, narrow lot," and America is a " land of unthinking, bigoted persecution." The American woman is attractive, beautiful, and well-dressed — but has no soul. The American man is a machine of voluble activity without progressive impetus, whose single aim is the acquisition of wealth. America is a semi-barbaric country, incessantly shocking the world with its crass exposures of political corruption and industrial brigandage, murders, manslaughters, and lynchings, peonage, sweat-shops, child-labor, and white slavery. It is fifty years behind England, and a hundred years behind Europe, in

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art, literature, science, religion, and government — in a word, in civilization.

This lurid chromo, painted in crude and primary colors, is clearly the Shavian reflection of English press-opinion of America and the Americans — if it is not one of Mr. Shaw's most successful comic fictions. In whatever proportion jest and earnest may be commingled in such a comic fiction, certainly it is disappointing to find a man who has often proven himself an exceedingly clear-sighted observer and astute thinker with respect to subjects upon which he is fully informed, betray so pathetic an ignorance of the realities of American life. Mr. Shaw has been content to acquire his notions concerning America at second hand, and often at third and fourth — a method of acquiring information which is to be recommended for ease rather than for accuracy.

The English newspaper is, actually, a standing menace to perfectly equable relations between England and America. There is a yellowness of sensationalism, and there is a yellowness of deliberate misrepresentation. There is a deeper, more subtle inaccuracy than that which inheres in the distortion of facts; it is the inaccuracy which inheres in the suppression of facts; The picture of America daily presented to English eyes through the medium of the English press is a caricature — a broad, crude caricature. It is so flagrant as to lead to the lurid chromo of America achieved by Mr. Shaw. The English visitor to the United States, who gets no further than the hotels of the great cities and the rear platform of an observation car, catches only the most superficial of impressions — chiefly of the hurried metropolitan search for wealth and of the natural, still almost primitive, wildness of the landscape. England means censoriousness; and English curiosity and inquisitiveness are more than often misguided — searching into and accentuating those phases of American life and character which are most open to adverse criticism, and overlooking or ignoring those indicative features and attributes which are most suggestive in their utility and value.

In reality, England and America have much to learn from each other that will be mutually helpful and beneficial. That spirit of generosity which characterizes America in her relations

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to all the world is the significant deficiency in the English national character. America is the supreme exemplar of internationalism. America is open-mindedness, enterprise, acquisitiveness. England, as instanced most signally in her splendid public institutions, is unsparingly generous — liberally sharing her treasures with all the rest of the world. But she is deplorably retrograde, as a nation, through declining to utilize the best that is to be found in other nationalities and other civilizations. It is, perhaps, sometimes more generous to receive than to give. England austerely plays the role of model to other nations; but she cannot abide to " sit at the feet of wisdom," to appropriate for her own advancement the good and the useful in others, whosoever those others may be. England's besetting sin of national vanity is the canker in the flower of her civilization, the ominous source of her progressive relinquishment of international supremacy.

On the other hand, America has much to learn from England, and from that phase of English spirit signally exemplified in the person of Bernard Shaw. For if he is anything, Shaw is a free thinker — in the original and entirely uncorrupted meaning of that term. His is that boundless naivete so fertile for truth's own discovery. Not only is he free thinker : he is equally free writer and free speaker. He says exactly what he thinks — and a good deal more. He coats the pill of the satirist with the sugar of the artist; his wit stands sponsor for his irreverence. In Nietzschean phrase, Shaw is a " good European." He is fully abreast of the most advanced thought of Europe, and consistently maintains relations with the latest developments in the fine arts, philosophy, and sociology. For many years, he has served as a channel for the influx into English-speaking countries of the streams of European consciousness. As an original thinker, Shaw has independently arrived at many conclusions which have been more rigorously elaborated by numerous modern thinkers, from Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen to Maeterlinck, Bergson and James. As the literary popularizer of contemporary philosophic ideas, Bernard Shaw is one of the heralds of that steadily evolving spirit of cosmopolitan culture which bids fair to give the intellectual note of the twentieth century.

In this hour of America's great national resurgence in tht

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effort to purge the body politic of glaring social evils, it is helpful to study Bernard Shaw and to discover that his most distinctive and noteworthy service as a public character has been his splendid struggle for the inculcation of the highest ideals of unselfish public service. England far surpasses America in the relative amount of public service rendered by individuals and public organizations in behalf of the general welfare, without remuneration or the hope of remuneration. " I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community," Bernard Shaw has finely declared, " and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can." Only when individual leaders of opinion in America, of which there is now no dearth, are supported everywhere by an awakened public conscience and a universally functioning spirit of individual responsibility, shall we secure throughout our country, from hamlet to metropolis, the much desiderated remedy for social abuse and the progressive perfecting of popular government.

Aechibald Henderson.

Salisbury, N. C, September 4, 1911.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Author's Introduction v

Preface xi

Preface to the American Edition xv

I. — Dublin Days 3

II. — London . 31

III. — The Novelist 59

IV.— The Fabian Society 89

V. — The Cart and Trumpet 121

VI. — Shavian Socialism 151

VII.— The Art Critic 195

VIII— The Music Critic 231

IX.— The Dramatic Critic 261

X. — The Playwright — I 293

XI. — The Playwright — II 335

XII.— The Playwright— III 363

^XIIL— The Technician 409

VXIV.— The Dramatist 431

XV. — Artist and Philosopher . . . . .453

XVI.— The Man 491

Appendix. — A Genealogy of the Shaw Family.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

COVER DESIGN

IX*

A Satyric Mask. From an original in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

COLOURED PLATES George Bernard Shaw. Xumiere autochrome, by Alvin

Langdon Cobum Frontispiece

Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal. Water-colour of G. B. Shaw,

by J. Bernard Partridge .... facing p. 246

PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES George Bernard Shaw. " The Diabolonian." Monochrome

by Eduard J. Steichen facing p. 80

George Bernard Shaw. "The Philosopher." Monochrome

by Alvin Langdon Cobum . . . . facing p. 468

OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS Shaw and the biographer. Photo by Mrs. Bernard Shaw

facing p. viii

Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, George Carr Shaw, etc. " 18

Shaw at the age of twenty-three " 46 w

Sidney Webb " 92"

Henry George " 96

Karl Marx " 96

Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2 .... p. 103

The Socialist (George Bernard Shaw in 1891) . facing p. 116 v

A Study of Six Socialists " 164 v

Cover design of Fabian Essays, 1890. By Walter Crane p. 179

Fitzroy Square, London facing p. 196

William Morris " 211 '

George Bernard Shaw. A Cartoon. By Max

Pope Innocent X " 262

The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom. By Neville

S. Lytton " 262

John Bull's other Playwright. A Cartoon. By E.

T. Reed " 270

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ILLUSTRATIONS

William Archer. By Jessie Holliday . . . facing p. Bernard Shaw. Black-and-white wash sketch by

Joseph Simpson ......"

In Consultation (G. B. S. and the author). By J§.

J. Steichen "

H. Granville Barker. By A. L. Coburn . . " Shaw's House at Ayot St. Lawrence ..."

George Bernard Shaw. Photo by Histed . . " Shaw's present home in London (10, Adelphi Terrace) " A plaster bust of Shaw. By Troubetzkoy . . " G. B. S. (A Cartoon). By Joseph Simpson . . p.

A bust of Shaw. By Rodin A Prophet, the Press, and Some People. water-colour by Jessie Holliday

. facing p.

From a

294 /

372'

FACSIMILES

MANUSCRIPTS

A page of a letter from Bernard Shaw to the

biographer facing p. vi

The first and last pages of original MS. of Love

Among the Artists . . . . . pp. 65-66

PLAYBILLS, ETC.

Sunday Afternoon Lectures. March, 1886

The Philanderer. Berlin

Mrs. Warren's Profession. Munich .

Arms and the Man. London. First performance

You Never Can Tell. Stockholm

The Man of Destiny. Frankfort

Candida. Paris

Candida, Brussels

Man and Superman. New York

Candida. New York

The Doctor's Dilemma. Cologne

Arms and the Man. Frankfort

Press Cuttings. London

PAGE

A Genealogical Chart xxn

"If religion is that which binds men to one another, and irreligiori that which sunders, then must I testify that I found the religion of my country in its musical genius and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms." — Ir\ the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898.

HIS LIFE AND WORKS

Chapter I

IT is a circumstance of no little significance that Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, two dramatists whose plays have achieved so notable a success on the European stage, should both have been born in Dublin within two years of one another. It has been the good fortune of no other living British or Irish dramatist of our day to receive the enthusiastic acclaim of the most cultured public of continental Europe. What more fitting and natural than this sustention, by the countrymen of Swift and Sheridan, of the Celtic reputation for brilliancy, cleverness and wit?

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26th, 1856 — well-nigh a century later than his countryman and fellow-townsman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Only one year before, in 1855, was born Shaw's sole rival to the place of the foremost living dramatist of the United Kingdom, Arthur Wing Pinero. It is an interesting coincidence that the year which saw the demise of that " first man of his century," Heinrich Heine, also witnessed the birth of the brilliant and original spirit who is, in some sense, his natural and logical successor: Bernard Shaw. There is some suggestion of the workings of that wonderful law of compensation, which Emerson preached with such high seriousness, in this synchronous relation of birth and death, connecting Heine and Shaw. The circumstance might be said to proclaim the unbroken continuity of the comic spirit.

Bernard Shaw possesses the unique faculty of befuddling the brains of more sane writers than any other living man. The critic of conventional view-point is dismayed by the discovery that Shaw is bound by no conventions whatever, with the possible exception of the mechanical conventions of the stage. Shaw is essentially an intellectual, not an emotional, talent; the critic of large imaginative sympathy discovers in him one who on occasion disclaims the possession of imagination. Unlike the idealist critic, Shaw is never a hero-worshipper: he derides heroism and makes game of humanity. To the analytic critic, with his schools, his classifications, his labellings, Shaw is the elusive and unanalyzable quantity — a fantastic original, a talent wholly sui generis. With all his realism, he cannot be called the exponent of a school. It would be nearer the truth to say that he is himself a school.

It is futile to attempt to measure Shaw with the foot-rule of prejudice or convention. Only by placing oneself exactly at his peculiar point of view and recording the impressions received without prejudice, preference or caricature, can one ever hope to fathom the mystery of this disquieting intelligence. Most mocking when most serious, most fantastic when most earnest; his every word belies his intent. The antipode to the farcicality of pompous dulness, his gravity is that of the masquerader in motley, the mordant humour of the licensed fool. Contradiction between manner and meaning, between method and essence, constitutes the real secret of his career. The truly noteworthy consideration is not that Shaw -is incorrigibly fantastic and frivolous ; the alarming fact is that he is remarkably consistent and profoundly in earnest. The willingness of the public to accept the artist at his face value blinds its eyes to the profound, almost grim, seriousness of the man. The great solid and central fact of his life is that he has used the artistic mask of humour to conceal the unswerving purpose of the humanitarian / and social reformer. The story of the career of George Bernard * Shaw, in whom is found the almost unprecedented combination of the most brilliantly whimsical humour with the most serious and vital purpose, has already, even in our time, taken on somewhat of the character of a legend. It might become a fairy story, in very fact, if we did not finally determine to relate it, to associate it in printed form with the life of our time.

How to write the biography of so complex a nature? The greatest living English dramatic critic once confessed that he never approached a more difficult task than that of interpretation of Shaw's plays. One of Shaw's most intimate friends once suggested that the title of his biography would probably be " The Court Jester who was Hanged."

A few years ago, in discussing with me the plan of his biography, Mr. Shaw suggested for it the euphonious if journalistic title — G. B. S. Biography and Autobiography. Though the book as a whole is not developed along the lines originally suggested sufficiently to render that title truly applicable, for this first chapter surely none could be more suitable. These " Dublin Days " have been reproduced by Shaw with much amplitude, and more or less precision ; so that, accepting Shaw's definition of Autobiography and mine of Biography, the result will be a narrative of much falsehood and perhaps a little truth.

" All autobiographies are lies," is Shaw's fundamental thesis. " I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies : I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him." The true, the real autobiography will never be written ; no man, no woman — Rousseau, Marie Bashkirtseff? — ever dared to write it. Were one to attempt to write the book entitled, M y Heart Laid Bare, as Poe says somewhere in his Margmalia, " the paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen." Shaw once " tried the experiment, within certain limits, of being candidly autobiographical." He produced no permanent impression, because nobody ever believed him; but the extent to which he stood compromised with his relations may well be imagined. His few confidential reminiscences won him the reputation of being the " most reckless liar in London " ; they reeked too strongly of the diabolism mentioned by Poe. And yet we must accept Shaw's comically irreverent autobiographical details, in view of his assertion that they are attempts at genuine autobiography.

In the autobiographical accounts of his youth and early life, as well as in many conversations on the subject with Mr. Shaw, I have discovered ample explanation of his scepticism concerning the binding ties of blood, of the strangely unsympathetic, even hostile, relations between parents and children displayed throughout his entire work. These autobiographical accounts reveal on his part less filial affection than a sort of comic disrespect for the mistakes, faults and frailties of his parents and relatives.

Mr. Shaw's grandfather was a Dublin notary and stockbroker, who left a large family unprovided for at his death. George Carr Shaw, his son and Bernard Shaw's father, was an Irish Protestant gentleman; his rank — a very damnable one in his son's eyes — was that of a poor relation of that particular grade of the haute bourgeoisie which makes strenuous social pretensions. He had no money, it seems, no education, no profession, no manual skill, no qualification of any sort for any definite social function. Moreover, he had been brought up " to believe that there was an inborn virtue of gentility in all Shaws, since they revolved impecuniously in a sort of vague second cousinship round a baronetcy." His people, who were prolific and numerous, always spoke of themselves as " the Shaws " with an intense sense of their own importance — as one would speak of the Hohenzollerns or the Romanoffs. An amiable, but timid man, the father's worst faults were inefficiency and hypocrisy. His son could only say of him that he might have been a weaker brother of Charles Lamb. Proclaiming, and half believing, himself a teetotaller, he was in practice often a furtive drinker. The one trait of his which was reproduced in his son, his antithesis in almost every other respect, was a sense of humour, an appreciation of the comic force of anti-climax. " When I was a child, he gave me my first dip in the sea in Killiney Bay," writes his son. " He prefaced it by a very serious exhortation on the importance of learning to swim, culminating in these words : ' When I was a boy of only f ourteeen, my knowledge of swimming enabled me to save your Uncle Robert's life.' Then, seeing that I was deeply impressed, he stooped, and added confidentially in my ear: ' And, to tell the truth, I never was so sorry for anything in my life afterwards.' He then plunged into the ocean, enjoyed a thoroughly refreshing swim, and chuckled all the way home."

All the Shaws, because of that remote baronetcy, Mr. Shaw once gravely assured me, considered it the first duty of a respectable Government to provide them with sinecures. After holding a couple of clerkships, Shaw's father, by some means, finally asserted his family claim on the State with sufficient success to attain a post in the Four Courts — the Dublin Courts of Justice. This post in the Civil Service must have been a gross sinecure, for by 1850 it was abolished, and he was pensioned off. He then sold his small pension and went into business as a wholesale dealer in corn, a business of which he had not the slightest knowledge. " I cannot begin, like Ruskin, by saying that my father was an entirely honest merchant," said his son in one of his autobiographical confidences. " I don't know whether he was or not ; I do know that he was an entirely unsuccessful one." In addition to a warehouse and office in the city, he had a flour mill at a place called Dolphin's Barn, a few miles out. This mill, attached to the business as a matter of ceremony, perhaps paid its own rent, since the machinery was generally in motion. But its chief use, according to Bernard Shaw, " was to amuse me and my boon companions, the sons of my father's partner."

When he was about forty years of age, Shaw's father married Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, the daughter of a country gentleman. Students in eugenics might find in their disparity in age — a difference of twenty years— some explanation of the singular qualities and unique genius of their son. The estate in Carlow, now owned by Mr. Shaw, descended to him from his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnal Gurly, through his mother's brother. Miss Gurly was brought up with extreme severity by her maternal aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a sweet-faced lady, with a deformed back and a ruthless will, who gave her niece the most rigorous training, with the intention of subsequently leaving her a fortune. The result of this course of education upon Miss Gurly was ignorance alike of the value of money and of the world; her marriage, hastily contracted when her home was made uncomfortable for her by her father's second marriage, gave her a sufficient knowledge of both. Her aunt, angered by this unexpected and vexatious conduct on the part of this absurdly inexperienced young woman, her erstwhile paragon and protegee, summarily disinherited her. In many ways, Miss Gurly's marriage proved a disappointment. Her husband, one of the most impecunious of men, was far too poor to enable her to live on the scale to which she had been accustomed. Indeed, he was anything but a satisfactory husband for a clever woman. It was in her music that Mrs. Shaw found solace and comfort — a refuge from domestic disappointment.