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.