George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

partner than strength.
The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry
strong people who do not frighten them too much; and
this often leads them to make the mistake we describe
metaphorically as “biting off more than they can chew.”
They want too much for too little; and when the bar-
gain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union
becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party be-
ing either discarded or borne as a cross, which is
worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or ob-
tuse as well, are often in these difficulties.
This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza
fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy
and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of
fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy
fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the an-
swer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her,
and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that
overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she mar-
ries either of them, marry Freddy.
And that is just what Eliza did.
Complications ensued; but they were economic, not
romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation.
His mother’s jointure, a last relic of the opulence of
Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in
Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure
any serious secondary education for her children,
much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at
thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy’s dignity,
and extremely distasteful to him besides. His pros-
pects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appear-
ances somebody would do something for him. The

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something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a
private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To
his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some
lady of means who could not resist her boy’s nice-
ness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower
girl who had become declassee under extraordinary
circumstances which were now notorious!
It is true that Eliza’s situation did not seem wholly
ineligible. Her father, though formerly a dustman, and
now fantastically disclassed, had become extremely
popular in the smartest society by a social talent which
triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvan-
tage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed,
he had shot up at once into the highest circles by his
wit, his dustmanship (which he carried like a banner),
and his Nietzschean transcendence of good and evil.
At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of
the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked in the
pantry and was made much of by the butler when he
was not feeding in the dining-room and being con-
sulted by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as
hard to do all this on four thousand a year as Mrs.
Eynsford Hill to live in Earlseourt on an income so
pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose its
exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw
to his burden by contributing to Eliza’s support.
Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford
Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but
for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colo-
nel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did
not know how to spend money, never having had
any to spend, and Eliza, socially trained by a pair of
old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they held
together and looked pretty, without the least regard
to their being many months out of fashion. Still, 500
pounds will not last two young people for ever; and
they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must
shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter
herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to
be her home; but she was quite aware that she ought
not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not be
good for his character if she did.

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Shaw
Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected.
When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be
bothered about her housing problem when that solu-
tion was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in
the house with her seemed of no more importance
than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom
furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the
moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were
lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any char-
acter, and declared that if he tried to do any useful
work some competent person would have the trouble
of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the
community, and great unhappiness to Freddy him-
self, who was obviously intended by Nature for such
light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared,
was a much more useful and honorable occupation
than working in the city. When Eliza referred again to
her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not
a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she was
not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with
his pet subject; and as it was evident that the Colo-
nel agreed with him, she felt she could not go against
them in this grave matter, and that she had no right,
without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge
he had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her
as much his private property as his watch: Eliza was
no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously de-
voted to them both, more entirely and frankly after
her marriage than before it.
It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem,
which had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He
one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had
quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop.
She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it
out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that
day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would never do. The Colo-
nel confessed that when he said that, he had not quite
recovered from the dazzling impression of the day
before. They broke the matter to Higgins that evening.
The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led
to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that
she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

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Pygmalion
Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject.
He said he had been thinking of a shop himself;
though it had presented itself to his pennilessness
as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at
one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the oppo-
site one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinar-
ily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent
Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first
meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses
from his wife. He added that he had always been
afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara
would make an awful row about a step that must
damage her matrimonial chances, and his mother
could not be expected to like it after clinging for so
many years to that step of the social ladder on which
retail trade is impossible.
This difficulty was removed by an event highly un-
expected by Freddy’s mother. Clara, in the course of
her incursions into those artistic circles which were
the highest within her reach, discovered that her con-
versational qualifications were expected to include a
grounding in the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She bor-
rowed them in various directions so energetically that
she swallowed them all within two months. The re-
sult was a conversion of a kind quite common today.
A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole
Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.
Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his
mother as a disagreeable and ridiculous person, and
to her own mother as in some inexplicable way a
social failure, had never seen herself in either light;
for, though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in
West Kensington like everybody else there, she was
accepted as a rational and normal—or shall we say
inevitable?—sort of human being. At worst they called
her The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself
had it ever occurred that she was pushing the air,
and pushing it in a wrong direction. Still, she was not
happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset,
the fact that her mother was what the Epsom
greengrocer called a carriage lady had no exchange
value, apparently. It had prevented her from getting

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Shaw
educated, because the only education she could have
afforded was education with the Earlscourt green
grocer’s daughter. It had led her to seek the society
of her mother’s class; and that class simply would
not have her, because she was much poorer than
the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a
maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to
scrape along at home with an illiberally treated gen-
eral servant. Under such circumstances nothing could
give her an air of being a genuine product of Largelady
Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a mar-
riage with anyone within her reach as an unbearable
humiliation. Commercial people and professional
people in a small way were odious to her. She ran
after painters and novelists; but she did not charm
them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise
artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in
short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pre-
tentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob;
and though she did not admit these disqualifications
(for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind
until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she
felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her
position.
Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being
suddenly wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own
age who dazzled her and produced in her a gushing
desire to take her for a model, and gain her friend-
ship, she discovered that this exquisite apparition had
graduated from the gutter in a few months’ time. It
shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted
her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her
at the angle of view from which the life she was lead-
ing and the society to which she clung appeared in
its true relation to real human needs and worthy so-
cial structure, he effected a conversion and a convic-
tion of sin comparable to the most sensational feats
of General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara’s snobbery
went bang. Life suddenly began to move with her.
Without knowing how or why, she began to make
friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to
whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or ridicu-

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Pygmalion
lous affliction, dropped her: others became cordial.
To her amazement she found that some “quite nice”
people were saturated with Wells, and that this ac-
cessibility to ideas was the secret of their niceness.
People she had thought deeply religious, and had
tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results,
suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a hos-
tility to conventional religion which she had never
conceived possible except among the most desper-
ate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and
Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and
finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dun-
geon in which she had languished for so many un-
happy years had been unlocked all the time, and that
the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and
stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were
precisely those by which alone she could have come
into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radi-
ance of these discoveries, and the tumult of their re-
action, she made a fool of herself as freely and con-
spicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza’s
expletive in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room; for the new-
born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ri-
diculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its
ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat
the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.
They laughed at her to her face this time; and she
had to defend herself and fight it out as best she could.
When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he
never did when he could possibly help it) to make
the desolating announcement that he and his Eliza
were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon
by opening a shop, he found the little household al-
ready convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara
that she also was going to work in an old furniture
shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a
fellow Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after
all, to her old social accomplishment of Push. She
had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she
would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had
achieved her end at a garden party. She had better
luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells

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Shaw
came up to her expectations. Age had not withered
him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half
an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness,
his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain,
his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine appre-
hensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from
his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresist-
ible. Clara talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks
afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady
of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above
all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to
him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of achiev-
ing that end through her.
And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the
expected opposition to the flower shop melted away.
The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not
very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if
you live in that neighborhood you may go there any
day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.
Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would
you not like to be assured that the shop was an im-
mense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her
early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas!
the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a long
time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not
know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to begin at
the very beginning: she knew the names and prices
of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was un-
bounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths
educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inef-
ficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little,
but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or
Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical
nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing else;
and Eliza, though she could count money up to eigh-
teen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain famil-
iarity with the language of Milton from her struggles
to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet, could not
write out a bill without utterly disgracing the estab-
lishment. Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that
Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into
three parts did not carry with it the slightest knowl-

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Pygmalion
edge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had
to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank
account meant. And the pair were by no means eas-
ily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her obsti-
nate refusal to believe that they could save money
by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of
the business. How, they argued, could you possibly
save money by going to extra expense when you
already could not make both ends meet? But the
Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over
again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to
the dust by having to beg from him so often, and
stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom
the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a
joke that never palled, grasped the fact that business,
like phonetics, has to be learned.
On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their
evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic
classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with
incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the el-
ementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even
classes at the London School of Economics, and a
humble personal appeal to the director of that institu-
tion to recommend a course bearing on the flower
business. He, being a humorist, explained to them
the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on
Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an
article on China and an article on Metaphysics and
combined the information. He suggested that they
should combine the London School with Kew Gar-
dens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian
gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was)
and not in the least funny (which was only her igno-
rance) took his advice with entire gravity. But the ef-
fort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a re-
quest to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to
Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote
a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach
her to write. He declared that she was congenitally
incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least
of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he
suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her

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Shaw
with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated
patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disqui-
sition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission
and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by
acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which
was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and
spending three times as much on stationery as any-
one else because certain qualities and shapes of
paper became indispensable to her. She could not
even address an envelope in the usual way because
it made the margins all wrong.
Their commercial school days were a period of dis-
grace and despair for the young couple. They seemed
to be learning nothing about flower shops. At last they
gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the
shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the
London School of Economics from their feet for ever.
Besides, the business was in some mysterious way
beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow
forgotten their objections to employing other people.
They came to the conclusion that their own way was
the best, and that they had really a remarkable talent
for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled
for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current
account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found
that the provision was unnecessary: the young people
were prospering. It is true that there was not quite
fair play between them and their competitors in trade.
Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing,
and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners;
for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and
Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and
greengrocer (they soon discovered that there was
money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other veg-
etables), had an air which stamped the business as
classy; and in private life he was still Frederick
Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that there was any swank
about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been
christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked
like anything.
That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is aston-
ishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the

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Pygmalion
housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop
and her own family. And it is notable that though she
never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colo-
nel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never
got out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was es-
tablished on the fatal night when she won his bet for
him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provoca-
tion, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by
assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy’s mind to
his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she
stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to
ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and
it is the only request of his that brings a mulish ex-
pression into her face. Nothing but some emergency
or calamity great enough to break down all likes and
dislikes, and throw them both back on their common
humanity—and may they be spared any such trial!—
will ever alter this. She knows that Higgins does not
need her, just as her father did not need her. The
very scrupulousness with which he told her that day
that he had become used to having her there, and
dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and
that he should miss her if she went away (it would
never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say
anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that
she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she
has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than
the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely
interested in him. She has even secret mischievous
moments in which she wishes she could get him
alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with
nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag
him off his pedestal and see him making love like
any common man. We all have private imaginations
of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the life
that she really leads as distinguished from the life of
dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes
the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr.
Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion:
his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agree-
able.

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HEARTBREAK HOUSE:
A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER
ON ENGLISH THEMES
by
BERNARD SHAW