to an end on the spoken “In America they haven’t used it for
years!” and then starts in again on “Why can’t the English
teach their children how to speak,” as though nothing had
happened. We are back to an AABA tune, it seems, but this
time Higgins cuts the rhyme pattern apart on the second A
section with another spoken line, the one about the French:
Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek.
In France every Frenchman knows his language from “A” to
“Zed”—
(spoken) The French never care what they do, actually, as along as
they pronounce it properly.
His idiosyncratic way with a song bursts out in “I’m an Or-
dinary Man,” which is an elongated verse-chorus song, the
verse running to twelve measures and consisting of drastic self-
idealizations on Higgins’s part (I’m a very gentle man, I’m a
quiet loving man, and so on), followed by an AABA chorus that
balloons each time into seventy-six measures of misogyny. Hig-
gins finally destroys this chorus by switching on his instruction
phonographs of women’s voices and making them into a ca-
cophony of female disorder.
Misogyny is what he has to get over, obviously, before he
can become fit for a romantic ending, and it is a stroke of sen-
timental genius on the part of Lerner and Loewe to show this
change of character through a song structure that Higgins does
not finally want to destroy, although he certainly tries for a
while. “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” is a gentle, or-
derly ABAC song. ABAC is another standard format. The B
section sets the two A sections apart, letting the repeat occur
over a patch of difference, then C appears to break new ground.
The sections are even in length, with a coda at the end refer-
ring back to A (“accustomed to her face”). Call it ABACA′with
the coda, a trim design. For Henry Higgins to settle for such
standardization is a change of character.
He does not settle without a fight. In the midst of the song he
erupts into a fantasy about the sufferings Eliza will undergo if
she pursues her notion of marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill. The