Touches of Sweet -- Was Sweet sweet? 04

I have written before a little about the name and its meaning (Names and their meanings 01), and here I wonder what sort of person Henry Sweet was like. From what I read in "Pygmalion" and other articles about this formidable phonetician, his character seems to have been quite the opposite to his name.

Henry Sweet was an avid scholar of phonetics, and Shaw recalls him as the best of them all, but his extraordinarily fiery zeal towards his subject had ironically stood in his way to popularize his subject and his study outcomes and to entitle him to high official recognition.

Shaw writes in the preface of "Pygmalion" about Sweet's non-sweet character when Sweet was made as a reader of phonetics at Oxford:

...he had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly; and to him all scholars who were not rabid phoneticians were fools.

Too strong in character, too fiery as an academic, too narrow in sociability, but Shaw must have respected and loved Sweet very much.

to be continued.