202
PETE R BROO KS
child of light caught in the claws of the mysterious birds of prey.
Mter this perception, when Strether speaks it is to say, "You're afraid
for your life!" - an articulation which strikes home, makes Mme.
de
Vionnet give up "all attempt at a manner," and break down in tears.
This stark articulation, which clarifies and simplifies Mme. de Vion·
net's position and passion, puts her in touch with elemental human·
ity - "as a maidservant crying for her young man," thinks Strether–
and with the ravages of time, finally differs very little from the
ex·
changes of the Count and Countess Restaud in the passage I quoted
from
Gobseck.
The Jamesian mode is subtler, more refined, but
it
aims at the same thing: a total articulation of the grandiose moral
tenns of the drama, an assertion that what is being played out within
the realm of manners is charged with significance from the realm of
the moral occult, that gestures within the world constantly refer us
to another, hyperbolic, parabolic set of gestures where life and death
are at stake.
There is a passage from James's 1902 essay on Balzac (he wrote
five in all) which touches closely on the problem of melodramatic
representation. A notable point about the passage is that it constitutes
a reparation, for in his 1875 essay, in
French Poets and Novelists,
James had singled out the episode in
Illusions perdues
where Mme
de Bargeton, under the influence of her Parisian relation the
Mar–
quise d'Espard, drops her provincial young lover Lucien de Rubem–
pre, as an example of Balzac's inteptitude in portrayal of the aristo–
cracy. The two women desert Lucien, whose dress is ridiculous and
whose plebeian parentage has become public knowledge, in the mid–
dle of the opera, and sneak out the loge. Aristocratic ladies would
not so lose their cool, James argues in the earlier essay, would not
behave in so flustered and overly dramatic a fashion. His view
in
1902
is
more nuanced, and shows an attempt to come to terms with
the mode of representation we fmd in Balzac:
The whole episode, in "Les Illusions perdues," of Madame de
Bargeton's "chucking" Lucien de Rubempre, under pressure
of
Madame d'Espard's shockability as to his coat and trousers and
