"It was to my juvenile admiration for this particular bit of work," she goes on, "that I owed the privilege of meeting Lafcadio Hearn in the winter of 1882, and of laying the foundation of a close friendship which lasted without a break until the day of his death."
His linking of love with death in this and the other "Fantastics" was in full accord with the sombre atmosphere of the trebly stricken city to which he had come—a city with a glorious and a joyous past, but just then ruined by three horrors:—recent war, misrule under the carpet-baggers, and oft-recurring pestilence. He had come expecting much from a semi-tropical environment. He found sorrow and trouble and a wasted land; and his mood was soon in unison with the disastrous elements around him. His letter to his friend Watkin when he first came to this smitten Paradise shows how strong the impression was: "When I saw it first—sunrise over Louisiana—the tears sprang to my eyes. It was like young death—a dead bride crowned with orange flowers—a dead face that asked for a kiss. I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this dead South is. It has fascinated me. I have resolved to live in it; I could not leave it for that chill and damp Northern life again."
From the files of the Item and the Times-Democrat over a score of these "Fantastics" have been gathered, and with them certain other fanciful little sketches that seem worth preserving, though they do not deal so directly with the mystic "twin-idea of Love and Death."
In his sympathetic Introduction to Hearn's Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist, Mr. Ferris Greenslet deplores the loss of that collection of these "Fantastics" made by Hearn himself as one section of the book he evidently planned to publish under the title Ephemeræ, or Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist. Says Mr. Greenslet:
Apparently it was Hearn's intention to add to the "Floridian Reveries" a little collection of "Fantastics," with such savory titles as "Aïda," "The Devil's Carbuncle," "A Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair," "The Fool and Venus," etc[1].
This group, however, is, unfortunately, lost. From the notebook labeled upon its cover "Fantastics" many leaves have been cut, and there remains only the paper on "Arabian Women."
But for the solitary copy of the files of the Item, preserved in the office of that paper, most of these earliest bits of original fantasy wrought by the shabby, eccentric young journalist, whose passion for exquisite words was so incomprehensible to the other "newspaper boys," would have been wholly lost.
"The modest Item goes no farther than St. Louis," wrote Hearn to Krehbiel; and it was for this little two-page paper, too insignificant at that time to be preserved even in the city archives or in the public libraries, that he wrote most of the "tales of Love and Death" reproduced in this volume. Twenty-nine out of the thirty-odd are to be found only, so far as we know, in the brittle yellow pages of bound volumes of the City Item, from June, 1878, to December, 1881, to which we have been given access through the courtesy of the present owners of the New Orleans Item. The other six, some of which were rearrangements and paraphrases of earlier "Fantastics," appeared in the Times-Democrat, of which several nearly complete files exist in libraries.
Among these thirty-five brief but vitally imaginative sketches several are far superior to "L'Amour après la Mort."