SparkNotes: Complete Text of Pygmalion: PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a

sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have

no respect for their language, and will not teach their children

to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach

himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman

to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or

despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners:

English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer

England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is

why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have

been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years

past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of

the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.

Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head

always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would

apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and

Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was

impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked

their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to

conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability

as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his

job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and

perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his

Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in

general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the

days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and

Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor

of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet

on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it

contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of

language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a

phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be

returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of

dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him

afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my

astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable

young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his

personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking

repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been

largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something

called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics

rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing

could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the

university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an

intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any,

include some satires that may be published without too

destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in

the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should

say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to

the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and

which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published

by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins

describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would

decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a

Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on

earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,

would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word

Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of

making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on

earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications

was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of

his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the

language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your

hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with

which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at

whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate

determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script

serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the

most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the

provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but

ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt

for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the

Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business

organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn

Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and

transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where

experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency.

Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as

well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that

nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in

his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized,

may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon

the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but

until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have

bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed

by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady

and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times;

and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is

Pitman's. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe

Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman.

Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed

at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave

no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a

portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would

have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches

of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament

Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed

himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his

comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do

justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his

subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite

right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings

(heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for

although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a

seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly

relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the

best places for less important subjects which they profess

without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them,

still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot

expect them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among

them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe

his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all

portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there

are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most

important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful

play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is

so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is

esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of

the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be

didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be

anything else.

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with

accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add

that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl

is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge's

daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain

in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands

of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and

acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done

scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse

than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more

tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to

imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to

say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art,

there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and

too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.

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