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