t. 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.

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