Pygmalion | Page 5

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.

ACT I
Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab
whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for
shelter into the market and under the portico of St. Paul's Church,
where there are already several people, among them a lady and her
daughter in