SPOILER ALERT! Provided you don't mind us giving away too much ahead of the opening of our new production of Pygmalion, we thought it would be interesting to share the epilogue Shaw wrote to sit at the end of the script. Here it is, in all its glory...
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-mades 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 shew
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.
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 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 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 greengrocer'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 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 caligraphy, 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 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.
Pygmalion, Sydney
Theatre, 31 January - 3 March, 2012.
Rehearsal image of Andrea Demetriades by Grant Sparkes-Carroll