George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

1912
PREFACE TO PYGMALION
A Professor of Phonetics
A
S
 
WILL
 
BE
 
SEEN
 
LATER
 
ON
, Pygmalion needs, not a pref-
ace, 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 English-
man 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 in-
terested in the subject towards the end of the eigh-
teen-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 dis-
like. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their
sweetness 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 entitled
him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled
him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic con-
tempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonet-

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4
Pygmalion
ics. 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 lead-
ing 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 litera-
ture whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a pho-
netic 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 ap-
pearance until he had become a sort of walking re-
pudiation 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 pa-
pers, 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-na-
tured 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 rep-
resent 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 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 with

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5
Shaw
the context, existed in any language spoken on earth.
That less expert mortals should require fuller indica-
tions was beyond Sweet’s patience. Therefore,
though the whole point of his “Current Shorthand” is
that it can express every sound in the language per-
fectly, 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 easi-
est 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 organi-
zation: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to
learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exer-
cise 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 cer-
tainly 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 sys-
tem 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, hav-
ing 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 Cur-

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6
Pygmalion
rent 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 for-
eign 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 ge-
nius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain
serene 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 him.
Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little.
Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom per-
haps 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 ex-
tremely 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 impos-
sible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daugh-

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7
Shaw
ter 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 tol-
erable 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 sum-
mer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all direc-
tions. 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 evening dress. They are all peer-
ing out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his
back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccu-
pied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.