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.
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. 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 subjec