Pygmalion and Three Other Plays Page 37

  JENNIFER [shaking her head, pitying his error] He was one of the men who know what women know: that self-sacrifice is vain and cowardly.

  RIDGEON Yes, when the sacrifice is rejected and thrown away. Not when it becomes the food of godhead.

  JENNIFER I dont understand that. And I cant argue with you: you are clever enough to puzzle me, but not to shake me. You are so utterly, so wildly wrong; so incapable of appreciating Louis —

  RIDGEON Oh! [taking up the SECRETARY’s list] I have marked five pictures as sold to me.

  JENNIFER They will not be sold to you. Louis’ creditors insisted on selling them; but this is my birthday; and they were all bought in for me this morning by my husband.

  RIDGEON By whom?!!!

  JENNIFER By my husband.

  RIDGEON [gabbling and stuttering] What husband? Whose husband? Which husband? Whom? how? what? Do you mean to say that you have married again?

  JENNIFER Do you forget that Louis disliked widows, and that people who have married happily once always marry again?

  RIDGEON Then I have committed a purely disinterested murder!

  The SECRETARY returns with a pile of catalogues.

  THE SECRETARY Just got the first batch of catalogues in time. The doors are open.

  JENNIFER [to RIDGEON, politely] So glad you like the pictures, Sir Colenso. Good morning.

  RIDGEON Good morning. [He goes towards the door; hesitates; turns to say something more; gives it up as a bad job; and goes].

  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{45} was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis[172] 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,[173] 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 [174] 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 illnatured 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[175] 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,[176] 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.[177] 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,[178] to whom perhaps Higgins m
ay 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[179] 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, {46}where there are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.

  The church clock strikes the first quarter.

  THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars, close to the one on her left] I’m getting chilled to the bone. What can Freddy be doing all this time? Hes been gone twenty minutes.

  THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right] Not so long. But he ought to have got us a cab by this.

  A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right] He wont get no cab not until half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping their theatre fares.

  THE MOTHER But we must have a cab. We cant stand here until half-past eleven. It’s too bad.

  THE BYSTANDER Well, it aint my fault, missus.

  THE DAUGHTER If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got one at the theatre door.

  THE MOTHER What could he have done, poor boy?

  THE DAUGHTER Other people got cabs. Why couldnt he?

  FREDDY rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side, and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet around the ankles.

  THE DAUGHTER Well, havnt you got a cab?

  FREDDY Theres not one to be had for love or money.

  THE MOTHER Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You cant have tried.

  THE DAUGHTER It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one ourselves?

  FREDDY I tell you theyre all engaged. The rain was so sudden: nobody was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. Ive been to Charing Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all engaged.

  THE MOTHER Did you try Trafalgar Square?

  FREDDY There wasnt one at Trafalgar Square.

  THE DAUGHTER Did you try?

  FREDDY I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to walk to Hammersmith?

  THE DAUGHTER You havnt tried at all.

  THE MOTHER You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and dont come back until you have found a cab.

  FREDDY I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

  THE DAUGHTER And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this draught, with next to nothing on. You selfish pig —

  FREDDY Oh, very well: I’ll go, I’ll go. [He opens his umbrella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands. A blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident].

  THE FLOWER GIRL Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah.

  FREDDY Sorry [he rushes off].

  THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] Theres menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad.[180] [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady’s right. She is not at all an attractive person.[181] She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist].

  THE MOTHER How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

  THE FLOWER GIRL Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e?Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f‘them?{47} [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

  THE DAUGHTER Do nothing of the sort, mother. The idea!

  THE MOTHER Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies?

  THE DAUGHTER No. I’ve nothing smaller than sixpence.

  THE FLOWER GIRL [hopefully] I can give you change for a tanner,[182] kind lady.

  THE MOTHER [to CLARA] Give it to me. [CLARA parts reluctantly ]. Now [to the girl] this is for your flowers.

  THE FLOWER GIRL Thank you kindly, lady.

  THE DAUGHTER Make her give you the change. These things are only a penny a bunch.

  THE MOTHER Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl] You can keep the change.

  THE FLOWER GIRL Oh, thank you, lady.

  THE MOTHER Now tell me how you know that young gentleman’s name.

  THE FLOWER GIRL I didnt.

  THE MOTHER I heard you call him by it. Dont try to deceive me.

  THE FLOWER GIRL [protesting] Whos trying to deceive you? I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant. [She sits down beside her basket].

  THE DAUGHTER Sixpence thrown away! Really, mamma, you might have spared Freddy that. [She retreats in disgust behind the pillar].

  An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into shelter, and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight as FREDDY, very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress, with a light overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the daughter’s retirement.

  THE GENTLEMAN Phew!

  THE MOTHER [to the gentleman] Oh, sir, is there any sign of its stopping?

  THE GENTLEMAN I’m afraid not. It started worse than ever about two minutes ago. [He goes to the plinth beside the flower girl; puts up his foot on it; and stoops to turn down his trouser ends]. [183]

  THE MOTHER Oh, dear! [She retires sadly and joins her daughter ].

  THE FLOWER GIRL [taking advantage of the military gentleman’s proximity to establish friendly relations with him] If it’s worse it’s a sign it’s nearly over. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl.

  THE GENTLEMAN I’m sorry, I havnt any change.

  THE FLOWER GIRL I can give you change, Captain.

  THE GENTLEMAN For a sovereign? Ive nothing less.

  THE FL
OWER GIRL Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain. I can change half-a-crown. Take this for tuppence.

  THE GENTLEMAN Now dont be troublesome: theres a good girl. (Trying his pockets] I really havnt any change — Stop: heres three hapence, if thats any use to you [he retreats to the other pillar].

  THE FLOWER GIRL [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better than nothing] Thank you, sir.

  THE BYSTANDER [to the girl] You be careful: give him a flower for it. Theres a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word youre saying. [All turn to the man who is taking notes].

  THE FLOWER GIRL [springing up terrified] I aint done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. Ive a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb. [Hysterically] I’m a respectable girl: so help me, I never spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower off me. [General hubbub, mostly sympathetic to the flower girl, but deprecating her excessive sensibility. Cries of Dont start hol lerin. Whos hurting you? Nobody’s going to touch you. Whats the good of fussing? Steady on. Easy, easy, etc., come from the elderly staid spectators, who pat her comfortingly. Less patient ones bid her shut her head, or ask her roughly what is wrong with her. A remoter group, not knowing what the matter is, crowd in and increase the noise with question and answer: Whats the row? What she do? Where is he? A tec[184] taking her down. What! him? Yes: him over there: Took money off the gentleman, etc. The flower girl, distraught and mobbed, breaks through them to the gentleman, crying wildly] Oh, sir, dont let him charge me.[185] You dunno what it means to me. Theyll take away my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to gentlemen. They —

  THE NOTE TAKER [coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after him] There, there, there, there! whos hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?

  THE BYSTANDER It’s all right: hes a gentleman: look at his boots. [Explaining to the note taker] She thought you was a copper’s nark,[186] sir.

  THE NOTE TAKER [with quick interest] Whats a copper’s nark?