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.
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, 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.
