TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: In the printed version of this text, allapostrophes for contractions such as “can’t”, “wouldn’t” and “he’d”were omitted, to read as “cant”, “wouldnt”, and “hed”. This etextedition restores the omitted apostrophes.
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 fortheir language, and will not teach their children to speak it. Theyspell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth withoutmaking some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanishare accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even toEnglishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phoneticenthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popularplay. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness formany years past. When I became interested in the subject towards theend of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head alwayscovered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to publicmeetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, anotherphonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. HenrySweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he wasabout as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or SamuelButler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the bestof them all at his job) would have entitled him to high officialrecognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but forhis Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons ingeneral who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the dayswhen the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and JosephChamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leadingmonthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperialimportance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but asavagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literaturewhose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. Thearticle, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had torenounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I methim afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to myastonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable youngman, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personalappearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxfordand all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despitethat he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phoneticsthere. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who allswore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort ofcompliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung bydivine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if hehas left any, include some satires that may be published without toodestructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in theleast an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but hewould not suffer fools gladly.
Those who knew