Henry James and the "Transcendent Adventure": The Search for the Self in the Introduction to The Tempest

Abstract

Henry James and the "Transcendent Adventure": The Search for the Self in the Introduction to The Tempest by Lauren T. Cowdery, Franklin and Marshall College When in 1907 Henry James was asked by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee to write an introduction to The Tempest for Lee's Complete Works of William Shakespeare, James replied in terms that give the measure of his interest: "I will challenge this artist—the master and magician of a thousand masks—and make him drop them if only for an interval."1 The essay that he wrote is remarkable on several counts, not the least of them being the sustained passion and energy of its expression. The essay is full of surprises: James's principal assumption, first of all, is a major reversal of his position in "The Figure in the Carpet" that a successful work of art stands free of its author. Here he insists that in order to appreciate Shakespeare's Tempest we must have access to every detail of the author's private life. There are more surprises in James's technique: determined to describe the composition of this play and undaunted by the absence of requisite biographical facts, James has the audacity to fabricate a biographical episode out of whole cloth. This strategy is only the first of a series of spells meant to conjure up the spirit of the "master and magician," who, James says in a tone half accusatory, half admiring , "slunk past in life" and appears to be able to "slink past in immortality, too."2 Despite his brave challenge, James's dealings with the Shakespeare of this essay are better characterized as a chase than as an encounter. But it is exactly as a hunt for big game that this essay ranks with "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Jolly Corner" for risk, excitement and the complexity of the relation between the stalker and the stalked. In the course of searching for an imaginative matrix to contain and give form to the elusive spirit, James recalls and combines the imagery of the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady and the symbolic drama of "The Jolly Corner," and represents himself pursuing the bard through the house of fiction, hoping to trap him as he makes for one of the windows. Previous discussions of this essay have emphasized James's admiration for Shakespeare and have drawn attention to the acuteness of James's observations about the nature of the compositional process. These are certainly important observations, but they are misleading insofar as they suggest that James was mainly concerned with discovering similarities between himself and the writer he honors. It seemsi to me that, with its excited tone, its quick succession of investigative strategies, its imagery, and its purpose, to seek out a hidden origin, this essay takes on its richest significance when we consider the ways in which the novelist/critic repeatedly characterizes the retreating figure of the dramatist/poet as his opposite. 1. Quoted in William Stafford, "James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius," PMLA, 73 (1958), p. 128. This discussion and Leon Edel's commentary in Henry James: The Master (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), pp. 148-49, are the only extended treatments the introduction has received. 2. Henry James, Introduction to The Tempest, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Sidney Lee (Boston:Jefferson Press, 1907), VIII, xxx, hereafter cited parenthetically in my text. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 145 WINTER, 1982 James's purpose in writing the introduction was first of all to register his unqualified praise. Reading The Tempest is "a surrender to the luxury of expertness . . . sublimely enjoyed," he writes. "I may frankly say that . . . there is no refinement of the artistic consciousness that I do not see ray way . to attribute to the author" (xvii) . He immediately reverts to the question that interests him in this period of his life, the "germ" or origin of a work of art, while content to remain allusive and general in praise of the play itself. He does not discuss technical aspects of plotting, the development of character, or moral implications. Instead, he contends that "the Questions" about "the condition of their [the...