ABSTRACT
Let us refrain from burdening Wilfrid Mellers with such dubious honours. Nevertheless, due recognition there must be, for as he approaches his eighties, this indefatigable writer of music, criticism and history, continues to delight and stimulate on every page of his work. Like the subject of his book, Mellers takes the advice of Yeats about soul singing louder for every tatter in its mortal dress. His record is astonishing. A follower of F.R.Leavis, he was writing Lit. Crit. and music reviews in Scrutiny while still an undergraduate in the early 1930s. Whilst in other nearby laboratories Rutherford’s disciples struggled towards the analysis of molecular structure, Scrutiny’s experiments were directed at detecting and defining the organic, communitarian, and thus universal elements in English Culture. In its pages, Mellers recognized the presence of precisely these elements in the work of Vaughan Williams, and still subscribes to broadly Leavisite principles in his thinking about artistic essences. But as a young man he was also powerfully swayed by the discovery of jazz to an awareness of the vitality of populist culture-measurably distant from Leavis’s oligarchic elitism. Mellers came to accept urban industrialism as capable of producing perfection in all the variegated categories of music and literature; in the 1960s, for example, to a striking appraisal of Lennon and McCartney.
