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decide, for instance, that in the English seventeenth century the 'better
tradition ' is illustrated by Donne and Herbert and Marvell, not by
Campion or Dowland, Lovelace or Waller. " A few years ago I pub–
lished a note in
Notes and Queries
to show that the phrase is given in
quotation marks because it is a quotation from
The Awkward Age,
a
novel in which Pound was inordinately interested. The ripple of irony
which the phrase causes in
Mauberley
tarts from a passage in Chapter
two of James 's novel where Vanderbank is talking to Mr. Longdon .
Vanderbank has remarked of Mrs. Brookenham that for the past year or
two she has been giving her daughter's age as sixteen. Longdon
rebukes him mildly for the insinuation that Mrs. Brookenham has been
doing this in her own behalf. Vanderbank answers:
It
was nasty my doing that? I see, I see. Yes, yes: I rather gave her
away, and you're struck by it-as is most delightful you
should
be–
because you're, in every way, of a beller tradition and, knowing Mrs.
Brookenham's my friend, can't conceive of one's playing on a friend
a trick so vulgar and odious.
Davie takes Pound as mocking the kind of discrimination which makes
a pretentiously strict preference for one tradition rather than another.
It
is in keeping with Davie's current critique that he should enforce this
point;
0
that he can then ascribe to Pound a concern for Tradition "as
rhythm working through history" in the same way as several motifs
work through the
Cantos:
all the traditions are precious, he ays, they
do not compete. I think the argument would be greatly enriched,
though not necessarily settled once for all, by recourse not merely to a
blunt preference for one tradition rather than another but to the
Jamesian nuances of feeling which pass between Vanderbank and
Longdon and
to
the moral and aesthetic responsibilities implied in
such encounters.
DENIS DONOGHUE
