Pygmalion - sandroid.org

1 PygmalionGeorge Bernard ShawThis public-domain text was produced byEve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, Project Gutenberg edition (designated pygml10 ) was subsequently converted toLATEX usingGutenMarksoftware, and thenre-edited by Ron Burkey (for formatting only)usinglyxsoftware. Report problems Revision B1 differs from Bin that - was everywhere replaced by .Revision: B1 Date: 02/02/2008 TRANSCRIBER S NOTE: In the printed ver-sion of this text, all apostrophes for contrac-tions such as can t , wouldn t and he d were omitted, to read as cant , wouldnt ,and hed . This etext edition restores theomitted TO I7 ACT II23 ACT III61 ACT IV83 ACT V95iiiPREFACE Professor of will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, nota preface, but a sequel, which I have suppliedin its due place.

2 The English have no respectfor their language, and will not teach theirchildren to speak it. They spell it so abom-inably that no man can teach himself what itsounds like. It is impossible for an English-man to open his mouth without making someother Englishman hate or despise him. Ger-man and Spanish are accessible to foreigners:English is not accessible even to reformer England needs today is an ener-getic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I havemade such a one the hero of a popular have been heroes of that kind crying inthe wilderness for many years past. When Ibecame interested in the subject towards theend of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bellwas dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still aliving patriarch, with an impressive head al-ways covered by a velvet skull cap, for which12 Pygmalionhe would apologize to public meetings in avery courtly manner.

3 He and Tito Pagliardini,another phonetic veteran, were men whom itwas impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, thena young man, lacked their sweetness of char-acter: he was about as conciliatory to con-ventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel great ability as a phonetician (he was, Ithink, the best of them all at his job) wouldhave entitled him to high official recognition,and perhaps enabled him to popularize hissubject, but for his Satanic contempt for allacademic dignitaries and persons in generalwho thought more of Greek than of , in the days when the Imperial Instituterose in South Kensington, and Joseph Cham-berlain was booming the Empire, I inducedthe editor of a leading monthly review to com-mission an article from Sweet on the imperialimportance of his subject.

4 When it arrived,it contained nothing but a savagely derisiveattack on a professor of language and litera-ture whose chair Sweet regarded as proper toa phonetic expert only. The article, being li-belous, had to be returned as impossible; andI had to renounce my dream of dragging itsauthor into the limelight. When I met himafterwards, for the first time for many years,I found to my astonishment that he, who hadbeen a quite tolerably presentable young man,had actually managed by sheer scorn to alterhis personal appearance until he had becomea sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and allits traditions. It must have been largely in hisown despite that he was squeezed into some-PREFACE TO PYGMALION3thing called a Readership of phonetics future of phonetics rests probably withhis pupils, who all swore by him; but noth-ing could bring the man himself into any sortof compliance with the university, to which henevertheless clung by divine right in an in-tensely Oxonian way.

5 I daresay his papers, ifhe has left any, include some satires that maybe published without too destructive resultsfifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in theleast an ill-natured man: very much the oppo-site, I should say; but he would not suffer who knew him will recognize in mythird act the allusion to the patent Short-hand in which he used to write postcards,and which may be acquired from a four andsix-penny manual published by the Claren-don Press. The postcards which Mrs. Hig-gins describes are such as I have receivedfrom Sweet. I would decipher a sound whicha cockney would represent by zerr, and aFrenchman by seu, and then write demand-ing with some heat what on earth it , with boundless contempt for my stu-pidity, would reply that it not only meant butobviously was the word Result, as no otherWord containing that sound, and capable ofmaking sense with the context, existed in anylanguage spoken on earth.

6 That less expertmortals should require fuller indications wasbeyond Sweet s patience. Therefore, thoughthe whole point of his Current Shorthand is that it can express every sound in the lan-guage perfectly, vowels as well as consonants,4 Pygmalionand that your hand has to make no stroke ex-cept the easy and current ones with which youwritem,n, andu,l,p, andq, scribbling themat whatever angle comes easiest to you, hisunfortunate determination to make this re-markable and quite legible script serve alsoas a Shorthand reduced it in his own prac-tice to the most inscrutable of true objective was the provision of a full,accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that byhis contempt for the popular Pitman system ofShorthand, which he called the Pitfall triumph of Pitman was a triumph of busi-ness organization: there was a weekly paperto persuade you to learn Pitman: there werecheap textbooks and exercise books and tran-scripts of speeches for you to copy, and schoolswhere experienced teachers coached you up tothe necessary proficiency.

7 Sweet could not or-ganize his market in that fashion. He mightas well have been the Sybil who tore up theleaves of prophecy that nobody would attendto. The four and six-penny manual, mostly inhis lithographed handwriting, that was nevervulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day betaken up by a syndicate and pushed upon thepublic asThe Timespushed theEncyclop diaBritannica; but until then it will certainly notprevail against Pitman. I have bought threecopies of it during my lifetime; and I am in-formed by the publishers that its cloisteredexistence is still a steady and healthy one. Iactually learned the system two several times;and yet the shorthand in which I am writ-PREFACE TO PYGMALION5ing these lines is Pitman s. And the reasonis, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet,having been perforce taught in the schools ofPitman.

8 Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman asvainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery,however it may have eased his soul, gave nopopular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pyg-malion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, towhom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle wouldhave been impossible; still, as will be seen,there are touches of Sweet in the play. WithHiggins s physique and temperament Sweetmight have set the Thames on fire. As it was,he impressed himself professionally on Eu-rope to an extent that made his comparativepersonal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford todo justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreignspecialists in his subject. I do not blame Ox-ford, because I think Oxford is quite right indemanding a certain social amenity from itsnurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitantin its requirements!)

9 ; for although I well knowhow hard it is for a man of genius with a seri-ously underrated subject to maintain sereneand kindly relations with the men who un-derrate it, and who keep all the best placesfor less important subjects which they pro-fess without originality and sometimes with-out much capacity for them, still, if he over-whelms them with wrath and disdain, he can-not expect them to heap honors on the later generations of phoneticiansI know little. Among them towers the PoetLaureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owehis Miltonic sympathies, though here again6 PygmalionI must disclaim all portraiture. But if theplay makes the public aware that there aresuch people as phoneticians, and that they areamong the most important people in Englandat present, it will serve its wish to boast that Pygmalion has beenan extremely successful play all over Europeand North America as well as at home.

10 It isso intensely and deliberately didactic, and itssubject is esteemed so dry, that I delight inthrowing it at the heads of the wiseacres whorepeat the parrot cry that art should never bedidactic. It goes to prove my contention thatart should never be anything , and for the encouragement of peo-ple troubled with accents that cut them offfrom all high employment, I may add that thechange wrought by Professor Higgins in theflower girl is neither impossible nor uncom-mon. The modern concierge s daughter whofulfils her ambition by playing the Queen ofSpain inRuy Blasat the Theatre Francaisis only one of many thousands of men andwomen who have sloughed off their native di-alects and acquired a new tongue. But thething has to be done scientifically, or the laststate of the aspirant may be worse than thefirst.