Mellers Bac(c)habundus

216 W.H. HERENDEEN One otheraspectofthe book's format must be singled outas insidiousand not to be encouraged, and although it originates with the author, it should not be allowed by an editor. Frequently quotations by several authors are brought together and given as though they were one passage from a single text. Ioffer one example exactly as it is introduced and dted in the text (p 124): It was widely recognized that economic injustice was not the work of a few demons, but a product of the existence of a landed gentry: we cannot enjoy the benefit of our labors ourselves, but for the maintenance of idle persons, slow bellies who raigne and ride over the common people in every Parrish, as Gods and Kings. Weep and howl, ye Rich men ... God will visityou for all your oppressions; you live on other men's labours, .. extorting extreme rents and taxes. Who are the oppressors, but the Nobility and the Gentry; and who are the oppressed, is not the Yeoman, the Farmer, the Tradesman, and the Labourer? ... The rich and mighty [have drawn] most of the land of this distressed and enslaved nation into [their] dawes ... yea, and inclosed OUf commons in mostcountries. Enclosure ofland ... hedges in some to be heirs of life and hedges out others; poore people are constrained to work in the very fire, for the maintenance of them that do live Deliciously, if not very vidously, as too many of the Gentry have done.'7 The reader will be somewhat perplexed by the stylistic range of the quotation as well as by its meaning. On looking up footnote '7, we learn that the passage is a composite from several primary and secondary sources. The same technique is used for prose and verse, and it is difficult to understand why an author would so disguise his materials. Surely the creation of communal footnotes is carrying 'the renaissance of Marxism' too far. Writing a review of this sort is very dispiriting. I wish The Politics of Landscape were better written so that it might at least be controversial, as the dust-jacket cautiously promises it to be.The questions it raises go to the heart of the diScipline of English studies, but unfortunately they do not have to do with matters of literary criticism. Mellers Bac(c)habundus GODFREY RIDOUT Wilfred Mellers. Bach and the Dance of God London: Faber and Faber 1980. viii, 324. $56.25 This book is a companion to the same author's Beethoven and the Voice ofGod which has yet to appear - and I, for one, can wait without the slightest impatience for its arrival. Bach and the Dance ofGod has, Mellers says, 'been thirty years in the writing UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 51, NUMBER 2, WINTER 198112 0042-D147/8210tDO-0217.o()22O$oo·o% C UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS BACH 217 and [is] a distillation of analysis classes given throughout my career as university teacher.' These thirty years have convinced him that in the flesh of Bach's music shall he see God: in the suites for solo violoncello Bach could create 'monodic music which did not cease to be dance in becoming also an act of praise'; in Das wohltemperierte Clavier he attempts to 'demonstrate the workings of "Christian Grace" through Bach's linear-harmonic polyphony'; and in Bach's horizontal and vertical polarities (counterpoint and harmony) he sees the Cross itself! Mellers starts his book with an essay that begins with the incantative role played by song and dance in primitive societies and works through history until Bach is reached. He then deals with selected suites for solo cello as 'an Apotheosis of the Dance' - the cello 'becomes aprojection ofa total human being. Its timbre is closest of all instruments to that of a wide-ranging male voice; physically, it calls for movements of anns, trunk and shoulders, so that to playa cello is at once to sing and dance within time.' The next section is 'Harmony, Counterpoint and the Cross in the Well-tempered Clavier - a heading which is self-explanatory. Now he reaches the centrepiece of the book, The Second Adam' and 'The Resurrection and the...