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.
