"The Eternal Against the Expedient": Structure and Theme in Shaw's The Apple Cart

·"THE ETERNAL AGAINST THE EXPEDIENT": STRUCTURE AND THEME IN SHAW'S THE APPLE CART IN The Apple Cart (1929) Shaw was principally concerned with an analysis of ideal personal distinction, and he attempted to show how his protagonist, King Magnus, is as truly great as his Latinate name would imply. In the Shavian view, the individual's preeminence results from the wealth and variety of his resources and from his independent moral strength which he can evince both in crisis and in the conditions of ordinary life. These are the chief facets, too, of Caesar's greatness in Caesar and Cleopatra; Magnus is, in reality, a subdued and crafty Caesar. Like Caesar, he is a modified man of action, great by what he is as much as by what he does. He also possesses originality of the sort which Shaw ascribed to Caesar: "Originality gives a man an . air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization."! Shaw's searching inquiry into his theme provides not only the philosophic context of the play but its structural unity as well. At all costs, Shaw was determined to present Magnus's genius, not summarily in the abstract, but suggestively in the specific situations which it confronts in its effort to prevail or to survive. The structural germ of the play is contained in the preliminary conversation between the two private secretaries of the king, Sempronius and Pamphilius. This scene, in its precision of phrasing and in its neatly interlocking conceptual patterns, furnishes, as Edmund Wilson has observed, the opening strands of an elaborate "music" of ideas characterizing the play itself.2 In the secretaries' discourse, an airy lightness of tone, a deftness of thought, and a graceful formality of utterance establish a somewhat Mozartian atmosphere for the play; and there is also something of the canny wisdom of the Mozartian Figaro in these two competent underlings. In this scene Shaw not only arouses curiosity about his protagonist through a calculated use of the delayed entrance, but also in part establishes the king's superiority through the subject of the secretaries' discourse, the personality 1. "Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra," Caesar and Cleopatra (New York, Brentano's, 1906), p. 122. First published, 1901. 2. "Bemard Shaw at Eighty:' The Triple Thinkers (New York. 1948). pp. 182-184. 99 100 MODERN DRAMA September of Sempronius' now deceased father.s He was, according to his son, a special kind of artist who believed too simply in his own creationspageants and other large scale celebrations-which were always the result of artifice imposed upon nature. In ethics and philosophy, as well as in art, he was "a Ritualist," since he used his mind only within areas defined by custom and distrusted the insights which might have been provided by unfettered natural powers. If, in his worship of ritual, he denied the importance of the discriminating reason, he was also deficient in the converse faculty, imagination. Though his imagination had within limits a certain fertility, it lacked scope, flexibility, and vigor. He possessed in abundance , however, that pernicious form of the imagination often characterizing the romantic temperament, the tendency to embroider the objects of actual perception with the most fantastic attributes. Apt to be deluded by meretricious appearances, he was unable, then, to see things as they really existed. If he was reprehensibly active in distorting his perceptions, he was also reprehensibly literal in denying the reality of what he could not see. In rejecting all but the physically observed, he revealed that he was insensitive to spiritual influences 'and, in general, to the more elusive facets of experience. He presented, then, the paradox of the professed antiromantic who is all too blindly romantic-or uncritically subjective-in dealing with fact. His culture , furthermore, failed to engage him fundamentally and became a self-indulgent, passive amusement provided for him by others. When he was a ship-wrecked lone survivor on an island off the Scottish coast and had neither companion card players nor a church to order his life, he found himself without the resources necessary to...