ial" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social
and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own
day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never
entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental
horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and
pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his
deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of
occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so
because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so,
and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared
to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it
out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was
quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own,
and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the
spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another,
he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform
himself of details before discussing them.

As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely
conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the
modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in
the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of
Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature
in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan
was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan
rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive
sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of
all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that
"he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents
inventions shall be killed!"

Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his
political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever
camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again
whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival
Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a
season.

It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in
his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism o