AT THE PLAY.
"Pygmalion."
The original Pygmalion took a block of dead ivory and made of it so fair a figure of a woman that he fell in love with his own creation, and Aphrodite, at his request, brought it to life. Mr. Shaw's Pygmalion takes a live flower-girl, turns her into a lifeless wax figure fit for a milliner's shop-window, and flatters himself, as an artist, on the result, but, as a man, proposes to take no interest in it, moral or physical. So you can easily see why almost any other proper name you can think of would have done better for the title.
We venture to suggest a new attitude to illustrate the ease of manner which one expects from a Master of Phonetics and Deportment.
Henry Higgins Sir Herbert Tree.
The play itself shows the same typical inconsequence, the same freedom from the pedantry of logic. Eliza Doolittle's ambition is to become fitted for the functions of a young lady in a florist's shop. Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, undertakes for a wager to teach her the manners and diction of a duchess—a smaller achievement, of course, in Mr. Shaw's eyes, but still a step in the right direction. And he is better than his word. After six months she has acquired a mincing speech, from which she is still liable to lapse into appalling indiscretions; but after another six months the product might pass muster in any modiste's showroom. And then she turns on him and protests that he has spoilt her life. As a flower-girl, she tells him, she used to earn her living honestly; now there is nothing she is good for.
Of course, you say, her contact with refined society—"we needs must love the highest when we see it"—has unfitted her for mixing with inferior people. On the contrary. She has, it is true, passed the final test of a series of social functions; but meanwhile all this time of her apprenticeship in manners she has been living her daily life, doing half-menial duties, in the house of Higgins, who happens to have no manners at all. One trembles, indeed, to picture the figure that he himself, the master, must have cut when he took his pupil to the halls of the great.
Then perhaps, you say, she has fallen into an unrequited passion for him, and this accounts for her peevishness? Well, if she has, we have only Mr. Shaw's word for it, and she gets no sympathy from us for her deplorable taste in men. There was another man who was always about the house, a man with a habit of courtesy, but this gallant soldier left her cold. Such is the perversity of women—and Mr. Shaw. Higgins's one act of civility to his protégée, on which we had to base our hopes of a happy issue, was to throw a bunch of flowers at her from a balcony in Chelsea—not perhaps a very tactful reminder of her origin. But he was only just in time. Another two seconds of delay and the final curtain would have cut off this tardy and inadequate effort of conciliation.
