Pygmalion

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.