The `Introduction' (pp. xxviii f., xxxiii ff. [Part III], xlvii [Part IV])
gives, besides the plan of `The Symphony', a detailed statement
of its two themes, -- the evils of the trade-spirit
in the commercial and social world and the need in each of the love-spirit.
These questions preyed on the poet's mind and were to be treated at length
in `The Jacquerie' also, which he expected to make his great work,
but which he was unable to complete. This he tells us in a noble passage
to Judge Bleckley, in his letter of November 15, 1874. After deploring
the lack of time for literary labor (see quotation in `Introduction',
p. xlvi [Part IV]), he continues: "I manage to get a little time tho'
to work on what is to be my first `magnum opus', a long poem,
founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century
in France, called `The Jacquerie'. It was the first time
that the big hungers of `the People' appear in our modern civilization;
and it is full of significance. The peasants learned
from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be
a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose,
and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world
for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible,
it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims;
and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be
ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System
ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN
who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has,
in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth,
but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair dealing,
of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which
one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise,
as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice
or of meanness; -- it is this which must in these latter days
organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles
from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society.
-- This is about the plan which is to run through my book:
though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."
Mr. F. F. Browne is doubtless right in saying that `The Symphony' recalls
parts of Tennyson's `Maud', but the closest congeners of `The Symphony'
in English are, I think, Langland's `Piers The Plowman' in poetry
and Ruskin's `Unto This Last' in prose. Widely as these two works
differ from `The Symphony' in form, they are one with it
in purpose and in spirit. All three voice the outcry of the poor
against the hardness of their lot and their longing for a larger life;
all three show that the only hope of relief lies in a broader and deeper
love for humanity. Analogues to individual verses of `The Symphony'
are cited below.
1-2. See `Introduction', p. xxviii [Part III].
31-61. See `Introduction', p. xxix [Part III].
42-43. See St. Matthew 4:4.
55-60. It is precisely this evil that Ruskin has in mind, I take it,
when he condemns the commercial text, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell
in the dearest," and when he declares that "Competition is the law of death"
(`Unto This Last', pp. 40, 59).