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.

Well, our English poet felt with the Greek idylists, and in the poem
called "An Invocation" he beautifully expresses this sympathy. All of us,
he says, should like to see and hear something of the ancient past if it
were possible. We should like, some of us, to call back the vanished gods
and goddesses of the beautiful Greek world, or to talk to the great souls
of that world who had the experience of life as men--to Socrates, for
example, to Plato, to Phidias the sculptor, to Pericles the statesman.
But, as a poet, my wish would not be for the return of the old gods nor of
the old heroes so much as for the return to us of some common men who
lived in the Greek world. It is Comatas, he says, that he would most like
to see, and to see in some English p