Page 3 (1/1)

Those who knew hinize in my third act the allusion to the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press The postcards which Mrs Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a French with some heat what on earth it meant Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of e spoken on earth That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond Sweet's patience Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones hich you write le comes easiest to you, his unfortunate deterible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the rams His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall systeanization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency Sweet could not organize his ht as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to The four and six-penny , that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pit my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one I actually learned the system two several ti these lines is Pitman's And the reason is, thatbeen perforce taught in the schools of Pitman Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it ue to Current Shorthand Pygins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play With Higgins's physique and teht have set the Thames on fire As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his en specialists in his subject I do not bla a certain social as (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requireh I well kno hard it is for a enius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less iinality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them rath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him