Pygmalion/Appendix

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed,
would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so
enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and
reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of
"happy endings" to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza
Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration
it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such
transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely
ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by
playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she
began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions
have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the
heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.
This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted
on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because
the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature
in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked
her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered
decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches,
and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she
always, if she has character enough to be capable of it,
considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for
becoming that bachelor's wife, especially if he is so little
interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might
capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision
will depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose;
and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at
the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she
will marry him because she must marry anybody who will provide
for her. But at Eliza's age a good-looking girl does not feel
that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is
therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza's instinct
tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him
up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of
the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very
sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her
with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she
has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any,
even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so
great to youth, did not exist between them.
As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let
us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins
excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they
had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his
inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the
extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative
boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal
grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated
sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house
beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few
women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of
his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his
specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to
the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up
in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to
whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and
affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come
at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that
Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his
mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural.
Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is
too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she
wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the
average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that
the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is
so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius
achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or
aided by parental fascination.
Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself
Higgins's formidable powers of resistance to the charm that
prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively
aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come
between him and his mother (the first necessity of the married
woman). To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious
reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according
to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his
nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no
mother-rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest
in herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs.
Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the
Universal Alphabet. Landor's remark that to those who have the
greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair, would not
have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along with her
resentment of Higgins's domineering superiority, and her mistrust
of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading her
wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and
you will see that Eliza's instinct had good grounds for warning
her not to marry her Pygmalion.
And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate
old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid.
Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed
it from the indications she has herself given them.
Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her
considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the
fact that young Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his
love for her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young,
practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman
(or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he
is nicely dressed, is treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves
her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to
dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza
has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love
to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. "When you go
to women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you." Sensible
despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have
taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and
been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have
flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are
slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire
those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong
person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two
different things. The weak may not be admired and
hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned;
and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying
people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies;
but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of
situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with
which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger
partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere
in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only
do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for
them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a
louder roar "the first lion thinks the last a bore." The man or
woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other
quality in a partner than strength.
The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong
people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads
them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as "biting
off more than they can chew." They want too much for too little;
and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the
union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being
either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who
are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in
these difficulties.
This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure
to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she
look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins's slippers or to a
lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the
answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and
Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all
her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them,
marry Freddy.
And that is just what Eliza did.
Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic.
Freddy had no money and no occupation. His mother's jointure, a
last relic of the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to
struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to
procure any serious secondary education for her children, much
less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a
week was beneath Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to
him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up
appearances somebody would do something for him. The something
appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or
a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a
marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy's
niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who
had become declassee under extraordinary circumstances which were
now notorious!
It is true that Eliza's situation did not seem wholly ineligible.
Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically
disclassed, had become extremely popular in the smartest society
by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every
disadvantage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed, he
had shot up at once into the highest circles by his wit, his
dustmanship (which he carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean
transcendence of good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat
on the right hand of the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked
in the pantry and was made much of by the butler when he was not
feeding in the dining-room and being consulted by cabinet
ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do all this on four
thousand a year as Mrs. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an
income so pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose
its exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw to
his burden by contributing to Eliza's support.
Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have
spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500
pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because
Freddy did not know how to spend money, never having had any to
spend, and Eliza, socially trained by a pair of old bachelors,
wore her clothes as long as they held together and looked pretty,
without the least regard to their being many months out of
fashion. Still, 500 pounds will not last two young people for
ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must
shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on
Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was
quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that
it would not be good for his character if she did.
Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she
consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing
problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza's desire to have
Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if
she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to
Freddy's character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his
own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any
character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work
some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a
procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great
unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by
Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins
declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than
working in the city. When Eliza referred again to her project of
teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent
opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of being
qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident
that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go
against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right,
without Higgins's consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given
her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property
as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was
superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly
after her marriage than before it.
It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost
him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather
shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a
flower shop. She replied that she had thought of it, but had put
it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at
Mrs. Higgins's, that it would never do. The Colonel confessed
that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the
dazzling impression of the day before. They broke the matter to
Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very
nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect
that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.
Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had
been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself
to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell
tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite
one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go
early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers
on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him
many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been
afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara would make
an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial
chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after
clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on
which retail trade is impossible.
This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by
Freddy's mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into
those artistic circles which were the highest within her reach,
discovered that her conversational qualifications were expected
to include a grounding in the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She
borrowed them in various directions so energetically that she
swallowed them all within two months. The result was a conversion
of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would
fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.
Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a
disagreeable and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in
some inexplicable way a social failure, had never seen herself in
either light; for, though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked
in West Kensington like everybody else there, she was accepted as
a rational and normal—or shall we say inevitable?—sort of human
being. At worst they called her The Pusher; but to them no more
than to herself had it ever occurred that she was pushing the
air, and pushing it in a wrong direction. Still, she was not
happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the fact that
her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage lady
had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from
getting educated, because the only education she could have
afforded was education with the Earlscourt green grocer's
daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother's
class; and that class simply would not have her, because she was
much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to
afford a maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to
scrape along at home with an illiberally treated general servant.
Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a
genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her
regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an unbearable
humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a small
way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but
she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and
practise artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in
short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious,
unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and though she did not
admit these disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant
truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on
them) she felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her
position.
Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened
to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and
produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a model, and
gain her friendship, she discovered that this exquisite
apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few months' time.
It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted her
on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of
view from which the life she was leading and the society to which
she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and
worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a
conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of
General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara's snobbery went bang. Life
suddenly began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she
began to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to
whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or ridiculous
affliction, dropped her: others became cordial. To her amazement
she found that some "quite nice" people were saturated with
Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the secret of
their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and had
tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results,
suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to
conventional religion which she had never conceived possible
except among the most desperate characters. They made her read
Galsworthy; and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park
and finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in
which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been
unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully
struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with
society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come
into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these
discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of
herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted
Eliza's expletive in Mrs. Higgins's drawing-room; for the
new-born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously
as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks
the worse of it for trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no
friends by her follies. They laughed at her to her face this
time; and she had to defend herself and fight it out as best she
could.
When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when
he could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement
that he and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady
scutcheon by opening a shop, he found the little household
already convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara that she
also was going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street,
which had been started by a fellow Wellsian. This appointment
Clara owed, after all, to her old social accomplishment of Push.
She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see
Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden
party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved.
Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him,
nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His
pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his
teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain
fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his
topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara
talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she
happened to talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady
also desired above all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty
things to him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of achieving
that end through her.
And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the expected
opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the
arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and
Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go
there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.
Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to
be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to
Eliza's charms and her early business experience in Covent
Garden? Alas! the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a
long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how
to keep it. True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning:
she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her
elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths
educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient
schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but enough to
make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his
ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing
else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen
shillings or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the
language of Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for
winning Higgins's bet, could not write out a bill without utterly
disgracing the establishment. Freddy's power of stating in Latin
that Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into three
parts did not carry with it the slightest knowledge of accounts
or business: Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a
cheque book and a bank account meant. And the pair were by no
means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate
refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a
bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued,
could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you
already could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after
making the ends meet over and over again, at last gently
insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg from
him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to
whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that
never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has
to be learned.
On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in
shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping
and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female,
from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even
classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal
appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course
bearing on the flower business. He, being a humorist, explained
to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese
Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an
article on Metaphysics and combined the information. He suggested
that they should combine the London School with Kew Gardens.
Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian gentleman seemed
perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the least funny
(which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire
gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was
a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's
verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful
Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that
she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy
of the least of Milton's words; but she persisted; and again he
suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a
combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and
occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and
nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting.
Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which
was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending
three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain
qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She
could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it
made the margins all wrong.
Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and
despair for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing
about flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and
shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics,
and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever.
Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to
take care of itself. They had somehow forgotten their objections
to employing other people. They came to the conclusion that their
own way was the best, and that they had really a remarkable
talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for some
years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers
to make up their deficits, found that the provision was
unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that
there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors
in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and
saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car
was the Colonel's; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr.
F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there
was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other vegetables),
had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in private
life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that
there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had
been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like
anything.
That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how
much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole
Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable
that though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the
Colonel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never got
out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was established on the
fatal night when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off
on the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to
tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy's mind to
his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to
him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to
time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only request of his
that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing but some
emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and
dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity—and
may they be spared any such trial!—will ever alter this. She
knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not
need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day
that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her
for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if
she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the
Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty
that she is "no more to him than them slippers", yet she has a
sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation
of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has
even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get
him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody
else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal
and see him making love like any common man. We all have private
imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the
life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of
dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel;
and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never
does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to
be altogether agreeable.
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