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.
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