The Court and the Castle is a series of critical observations about various literary works held loosely together by a concern with how great writers from Shakespeare to Kafka have treated the problem of salvation. Miss West begins with the interesting theory that the king in Shakespeare's plays is fated to misuse the power he possesses, yet the usurper who stands ready to unseat him is invariably evil. Noting that this paradox of power does not seem relevant to actual political life, Miss West confesses that she would not be at all surprised if Shakespeare thought of his kings as symbols of the will, of their courts as symbols of personality, and of the usurpers as symbols of the will's futile attempts to reform itself. She seems unaware that the pattern she has observed is a form of the institution of the dying god described in The Golden Bough. Instead she considers that Shakespeare's plays about royalty are protests against the Renaissance heresy that man is capable of achieving his own salvation. This interpretation may make Shakespeare a sound theologian, but it also makes him a very poor allegorist, because it involves the use of one symbol for the will itself and another for the will in a struggle to reform. The usurper is thus required to be an activity of the king and the symbolism obviously breaks down.
Miss West does not succeed, in her later chapters, in showing that such novelists as Jane Austen, Fielding, Thackeray and Trollope had much to say either about the relations of kings and courtiers or about the spiritual situation they are supposed to represent. As she herself seems to realize when she complains that the novel cannot reveal "deepest truth," English fiction was usually occupied, not with ultimate spiritual matters, but with problems of character and social life. A similar difficulty besets her attempt to impose a theological message upon Proust. She is bound to find Proust's handling of moral values unsatisfactory, because for Proust morality was merely subject-matter, not theme. It is on the whole a pity that Miss West should have devoted the charm and ingenuity displayed in The Court and the Castle to an ill-conceived attempt to harmonize some of the world's most unorthodox literature with the Summa Theological. (p. 15)
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