To the visiting stranger Hillbridge’s first question was, “Have you seen
Keniston’s things?” Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.
Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to “know”
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on “atmosphere,” on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston’s milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. “It simply didn’t want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito,” she declared.
It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist’s best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for “collecting,” had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert’s visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor’s off-hand inquiry, “By-the-way, have you seen
my Keniston?” The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopædia. The
name was not in the Encyclopædia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President’s golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert’s sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare example of the painter’s first or silvery manner. Thus there
gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles
as men who collected Kenistons.
Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the
first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master’s methods and
purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had
cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give
but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals.
The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself
included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston’s work would
never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual
assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master’s “message” it
was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.
Professor Wildmarsh’s article was read one spring afternoon by a young
lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already
flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her.
In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford.
Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated
it as “the venerable Alma Mater,” the “antique seat of learning,” and
Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of
knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than
knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and
exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those
intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the
thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to
Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend
who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University
professors--Claudia’s spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities.
The vision of herself walking under the “historic elms” toward the Memorial
Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in,
from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President’s
reminiscences of the Concord group--this vividness of self-projection into
the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so
exquisite a moment.
It was in this mood that she opened the article on Keniston. She knew about
him, of course; she was wonderfully “well up,” even for East Onondaigua.
She had read of him in the magazines; she had met, on a visit to New York,
a man who collected Kenistons, and a photogravure of a Keniston in an
“artistic” frame hung above her writing-table at home. But Professor
Wildmarsh’s article made her feel how little she really knew of the master;
and she trembled to think of the state of relative ignorance in which, but
for the timely purchase of the magazine, she might have entered Hillbridge.
She had, for instance, been densely unaware that Keniston had already had
three “manners,” and was showing symptoms of a fourth. She was equally
ignorant of the fact that he had founded a school and “created a formula”;
and she learned with a thrill that no one could hope to understand him who
had not seen him in his studio at Hillbridge, surrounded by his own works.
“The man and the art interpret each other,” their exponent declared; and
Claudia Day, bending a brilliant eye on the future, wondered if she were
ever to be admitted to the privilege of that double initiation.
Keniston, to his other claims to distinction, added that of being hard to
know. His friends always hastened to announce the fact to strangers--adding
after a pause of suspense that they “would see what they could do.”
Visitors in whose favor he was induced to make an exception were further
warned that he never spoke unless he was interested--so that they mustn’t
mind if he remained silent. It was under these reassuring conditions that,
some ten days after her arrival at Hillbridge, Miss Day was introduced
to the master’s studio. She found him a tall listless-looking man, who
appeared middle-aged to her youth, and who stood before his own pictures
with a vaguely interrogative gaze, leaving the task of their interpretation
to the lady who had courageously contrived the visit. The studio, to
Claudia’s surprise, was bare and shabby. It formed a rambling addition to
the small cheerless house in which the artist lived with his mother and
a widowed sister. For Claudia it added the last touch to his distinction
to learn that he was poor, and that what he earned was devoted to the
maintenance of the two limp women who formed a neutral-tinted background to
his impressive outline. His pictures of course fetched high prices; but he
worked slowly--“painfully,” as his devotees preferred to phrase it--with
frequent intervals of ill health and inactivity, and the circle of Keniston
connoisseurs was still as small as it was distinguished. The girl’s fancy
instantly hailed in him that favorite figure of imaginative youth, the
artist who would rather starve than paint a pot-boiler. It is known to
comparatively few that the production of successful pot-boilers is an art
in itself, and that such heroic abstentions as Keniston’s are not always
purely voluntary. On the occasion of her first visit the artist said so
little that Claudia was able to indulge to the full the harrowing sense of
her inadequacy. No wonder she had not been one of the few that he cared
to talk to; every word she uttered must so obviously have diminished the
inducement! She had been cheap, trivial, conventional; at once gushing
and inexpressive, eager and constrained. She could feel him counting the
minutes till the visit was over, and as the door finally closed on the
scene of her discomfiture she almost shared the hope with which she
confidently credited him--that they might never meet again.