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| * [[Pygmalion - V]] | | * [[Pygmalion - V]] |
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| === Preface to Pygmalion === | | <div style='display:none;width=1px;'><a href="http://buy_cheap_lorazepam.opredo.info/f6oWHEtG9q0o.html" > buy cheap lorazepam </a> <br> |
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| A Professor of Phonetics.
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| As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a
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| sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have
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| to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach
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| himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman
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| to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or
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| despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners:
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| English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer
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| England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is
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| why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have
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| been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years
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| past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of
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| the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.
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| Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head
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| always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would
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| apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and
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| Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was
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| impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked
| | |
| their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to
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| conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability
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| as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his
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| job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and
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| perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his
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| Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
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| general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the
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| days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and
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| Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor
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| of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet
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| on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it
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| contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of
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| language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a
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| phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be
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| returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of
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| dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him
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| afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my
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| astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable
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| young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his
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| personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking
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| repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been
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| largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something
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| called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics
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| rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing
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| could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the
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| university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an
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| intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any,
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| include some satires that may be published without too
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| destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in
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| the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should
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| say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.
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| | |
| Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
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| the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and
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| which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published
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| by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins
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| describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would
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| decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a
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| Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on
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| earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,
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| would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
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| Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
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| making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on
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| earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications
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| was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of
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| his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the
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| language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your
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| hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with
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| which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at
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| whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate
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| determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script
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| serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the
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| most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the
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| provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but
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| ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt
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| for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the
| |
| Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business
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| organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn
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| Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and
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| transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where
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| experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency.
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| Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as
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| 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
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| 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.
| |
| </div> | | </div> |
|
| |
| [[Category:Modern Drama]]
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| [[Category:Plays]]
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| [[Category:1913]]
| |
