was a very good singer of peasant songs, and he made many beautiful poems for the people to sing, and he believed that it was the gods who had given him power to make the songs, and the Muses had inspired him with the capacity to make good verse.  In spite of his master’s will, Comatas therefore thought it was not very bad to take the young kids and sacrifice to the gods and the Muses.  When his master found out what had been done with the animals, naturally he became very angry, and he put Comatas into a great box of cedar-wood in order to starve him to death—­saying, as he closed and locked the lid, “Now, Comatas, let us see whether the gods will feed you!” In that box Comatas was left for a year without food or drink, and when the master, at the end of the year, opened the box, he expected to find nothing but the bones of the goatherd.  But Comatas was alive and well, singing sweet songs, because during the year the Muses had sent bees to feed him with honey.  The bees had been able to enter the box through a very little hole.  I suppose you know that bees were held sacred to the Muses, and that there is in Greek legend a symbolic relation between bees and poetry.

If you want to know what kind of songs Comatas sang and what kind of life he represented, you will find all this exquisitely told by Theocritus; and there is a beautiful little translation in prose of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, made by Andrew Lang, which should delight you to read.  Another day I shall give you examples of such translations.  Then you will see what true idyllic poetry originally signified.  These Greeks, although trained scholars and philosophers, understood not only that human nature in itself is a beautiful thing, but also that the best way to study human nature is to study the life of the peasants and the common people.  It is not to the rich and leisurely, not to rank and society, that a poet must go for inspiration.  He will not find it there.  What is called society is a world in which nobody is happy, and in which pure human nature is afraid to show itself.  Life among the higher classes in all countries is formal, artificial, theatrical; poetry is not there.  Of course no kind of human community is perfectly happy, but it is among the simple folk, the country folk, who do not know much about evil and deceit, that the greater proportion of happiness can be found.  Among the youths of the country especially, combining the charm of childhood with the strength of adult maturity, the best possible subjects for fine pure studies of human nature can be found.  May I not here express the hope that some young Japanese poet, some graduate of this very university, will eventually attempt to do in Japan what Theocritus and Bion did in ancient Sicily?  A great deal of the very same kind of poetry exists in our own rural districts, and parallels can be found in the daily life of the Japanese peasants for everything beautifully described in Theocritus.  At all events I am quite sure of one thing, that no great new literature can possibly arise in this country until some scholarly minds discover that the real force and truth and beauty and poetry of life is to be found only in studies of the common people—­not in the life of the rich and the noble, not in the shadowy life of books.