Crucial Instances

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.