PYGMALION

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, 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 Englishman 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 interested in the subject towards the
end of the eighteen-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 dislike. Henry
Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was
about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel
Butler. 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 contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. 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 leading
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 literature
whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic 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
appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation 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 papers, 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-natured 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
represent 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 stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was
the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth.
That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond
Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current
Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language
perfectly, 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 easiest 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.