PYGMALION

1 PYGMALIONByGeorge Bernard ShawA Penn State electronic Classics series PublicationPygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is a publication of the pennsylvania State university . ThisPortable Document file is furnished free and without any charge of any kind. Any person usingthis document file, for any purpose, and in any way does so at his or her own risk. Neither thePennsylvania State university nor Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, nor anyone associated with thePennsylvania State university assumes any responsibility for the material contained within thedocument or for the file as an electronic transmission, in any by George Bernard Shaw, the pennsylvania State university , electronic Classics series ,Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced aspart of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English,to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of Design.

2 Jim ManisCopyright 2004 The pennsylvania State UniversityThe pennsylvania State university is an equal opportunity Bernard Shaw1912 PREFACE TO PYGMALIONA Professor of PhoneticsAS WILL BE SEEN LATER ON, PYGMALION needs, not a pref-ace, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its dueplace. The English have no respect for their language,and will not teach their children to speak it. They spellit so abominably that no man can teach himself whatit sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman toopen his mouth without making some other English-man hate or despise him. German and Spanish areaccessible to foreigners: English is not accessibleeven to Englishmen. The reformer England needstoday is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is whyI have made such a one the hero of a popular have been heroes of that kind crying in thewilderness for many years past.

3 When I became in-terested in the subject towards the end of the eigh-teen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but AlexanderJ. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressivehead always covered by a velvet skull cap, for whichhe would apologize to public meetings in a very courtlymanner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phoneticveteran, were men whom it was impossible to dis-like. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked theirsweetness of character: he was about as concilia-tory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel But-ler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think,the best of them all at his job) would have entitledhim to high official recognition, and perhaps enabledhim to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic con-tempt for all academic dignitaries and persons ingeneral who thought more of Greek than of phonet-4 Pygmalionics.

4 Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rosein South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain wasbooming the Empire, I induced the editor of a lead-ing monthly review to commission an article fromSweet on the imperial importance of his it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagelyderisive attack on a professor of language and litera-ture whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a pho-netic expert only. The article, being libelous, had tobe returned as impossible; and I had to renounce mydream of dragging its author into the limelight. WhenI met him afterwards, for the first time for many years,I found to my astonishment that he, who had been aquite tolerably presentable young man, had actuallymanaged by sheer scorn to alter his personal ap-pearance until he had become a sort of walking re-pudiation of Oxford and all its traditions.

5 It must havebeen largely in his own despite that he was squeezedinto something called a Readership of phoneticsthere. The future of phonetics rests probably with hispupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bringthe man himself into any sort of compliance with theuniversity, to which he nevertheless clung by divineright in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his pa-pers, if he has left any, include some satires that maybe published without too destructive results fifty yearshence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-na-tured man: very much the opposite, I should say; buthe would not suffer fools who knew him will recognize in my third actthe allusion to the patent Shorthand in which he usedto write postcards, and which may be acquired froma four and six-penny manual published by theClarendon Press.

6 The postcards which Mrs. Higginsdescribes are such as I have received from Sweet. Iwould decipher a sound which a cockney would rep-resent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and thenwrite demanding with some heat what on earth itmeant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stu-pidity, would reply that it not only meant but obvi-ously was the word Result, as no other Word con-taining that sound, and capable of making sense with5 Shawthe context, existed in any language spoken on less expert mortals should require fuller indica-tions was beyond Sweet s patience. Therefore,though the whole point of his Current Shorthand isthat it can express every sound in the language per-fectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that yourhand has to make no stroke except the easy andcurrent ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p,and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easi-est to you, his unfortunate determination to make thisremarkable and quite legible script serve also as aShorthand reduced it in his own practice to the mostinscrutable of cryptograms.

7 His true objective wasthe provision of a full, accurate, legible script for ournoble but ill-dressed language; but he was led pastthat by his contempt for the popular Pitman systemof Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. Thetriumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organi-zation: there was a weekly paper to persuade you tolearn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exer-cise books and transcripts of speeches for you tocopy, and schools where experienced teacherscoached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweetcould not organize his market in that fashion. He mightas well have been the Sybil who tore up the leavesof prophecy that nobody would attend to. The fourand six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographedhandwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, mayperhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate andpushed upon the public as The Times pushed theEncyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will cer-tainly not prevail against Pitman.

8 I have bought threecopies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed bythe publishers that its cloistered existence is still asteady and healthy one. I actually learned the sys-tem two several times; and yet the shorthand in whichI am writing these lines is Pitman s. And the reasonis, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, hav-ing been perforce taught in the schools of , Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly asThersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it mayhave eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Cur-6 Pygmalionrent Shorthand. PYGMALION Higgins is not a portraitof Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittlewould have been impossible; still, as will be seen,there are touches of Sweet in the play.

9 With Higgins sphysique and temperament Sweet might have setthe Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himselfprofessionally on Europe to an extent that made hiscomparative personal obscurity, and the failure ofOxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to for-eign specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford,because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding acertain social amenity from its nurslings (heavenknows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); foralthough I well know how hard it is for a man of ge-nius with a seriously underrated subject to maintainserene and kindly relations with the men who under-rate it, and who keep all the best places for less im-portant subjects which they profess without original-ity and sometimes without much capacity for them,still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain,he cannot expect them to heap honors on the later generations of phoneticians I know them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom per-haps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies,though here again I must disclaim all portraiture.

10 Butif the play makes the public aware that there are suchpeople as phoneticians, and that they are among themost important people in England at present, it willserve its wish to boast that PYGMALION has been an ex-tremely successful play all over Europe and NorthAmerica as well as at home. It is so intensely anddeliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed sodry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of thewiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art shouldnever be didactic. It goes to prove my contention thatart should never be anything , and for the encouragement of peopletroubled with accents that cut them off from all highemployment, I may add that the change wrought byProfessor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impos-sible nor uncommon.