From a hint given him by a traveler's tale, by a trivial street incident, by a couplet of verse, or a carven cameo in an antique shop, by an old legend, or a few grains of sand, his genius was able to create a series of vivid and mystical visions, more real to him and to his readers than the political contests or the personal gossip which fill the surrounding columns of print.
To discover these vibrant bits of poesy in their commonplace setting is like finding rare and glorious orchids in the midst of the crowfoots and black-eyed Susans that crowd the banquettes and gutters' edges of our New Orleans streets.
"He hated the routine work, and was really quite lazy about it," testifies Colonel John W. Fairfax, former owner of the Item, and Hearn's first New Orleans employer and friend. At the age of seventy-two this genial old gentleman recalls many incidents of his association with the eccentric young literary editor who for three years and a half aided him and Mark F. Bigney in the task of filling the columns of the unpretentious little paper which he had purchased from the printers and tramp journalists who were its original owners—for the Item was started on a cooperative, profit-sharing basis.
"Hearn was really quite lazy about his regular work," Colonel Fairfax insists. "We had to prod him up all the time—stick pins in him, so to speak. But when he would write one of his own little fanciful things, out of his own head—dreams—he was always dreaming—why, then he would work like mad. And people always noticed those little things of his, somehow, for they were truly lovely, wonderful. 'Fantastics' he called them."
It was Colonel Fairfax who deserves the credit of "discovering" Hearn in New Orleans, when he applied, shabby and half-starved, at the Item office for a job, just after he had written to his friend Watkin, June 14, 1878: "Have been here seven months and never made one cent in the city. No possible prospect of doing anything in this town now or within twenty-five years."
But his next letter (undated) says—and it is evident that the impression he had made had secured him more than he had asked for:
"The day after I wrote you, I got a position (without asking for it) as assistant editor on the Item, at a salary considerably smaller than that I received on the Commercial, but large enough to enable me to save half of it."
And the old gentleman appears still to regard the Hearn he recalls with the sort of half-admiring, half-contemptuous, wholly marveling affection which a fine healthy turkey-cock would feel for the "ugly duckling" just beginning to reveal himself of the breed of swans.
Apparently he and Bigney allowed Hearn considerable latitude in his choice and treatment of subject. The three years of his work in their employ show bolder and more varied editorial comment, as well as five or six times as many "Fantastics" as are to be found in the six years of his work under the Bakers, and prove that the quality of his work was already fine enough to justify Page Baker's choice of him for a place on the staff of "the new literary venture."
How these strange little blossoms of Hearn's genius attracted the admiration of lovers of beauty and won him fame and friends among professional men and scholars is told most vividly in the words of Dr. Rodolph Matas, now a surgeon of international reputation, who was Hearn's friend and early foresaw his fame.