I hope hard and work hard to do something
worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems
which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time
to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache
purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds
to outline what is to be his 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.
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