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.
