The Pavement Artist.
"Pavement artists," too, select the near neighbourhood of the squares as their favoured haunt. These "open-air pastellists," as they have been called, are a curious, unshaven, dilapidated race, with an indescribable "come-down-in-the world" look about them; and their lot seems hardly an enviable one. Their "plant," it is true, is not large; a few coloured chalks and a soft duster form all their necessary stock-in-trade. Gifted often with a fair amount of technical ability, they lead the passerby to wonder, whether, given happier circumstances and a less vivid acquaintance with the bar of the public house, they might not now be exhibiting their efforts on the sacred walls of the Royal Academy. Not that the Royal Academy pictures themselves would, for that matter, if they could be painted on the pavement, draw so many coppers as the lurid representations of railway accidents, or the scenes of domestic bliss, or the "Mother's Grave" (the public love sentiment and pathos), or even the innocent mackerel or salmon, "as like as like," that form the répertoire of the pavement artist. His wares, to catch pennies, have to be highly coloured, if nothing else. His trials are many; dust and rain efface his pictures, drunken navvies fall foul of him, cramp attacks his legs, and east wind benumbs his fingers, till, poor wretch, no wonder that he repairs, with his hardly won money, to the nearest public-house,—the poor man's refuge. He is, on the other hand, not obliged to rise early or to work after dark, and it is said that occasionally his takings average as much as 4/6 per day, although an amateur who recently tried his hand at the business only gained 3-1/2d, a violent headache, and nearly a sunstroke. There is, it is true, a new and degenerate kind of Pavement Artist, who, instead of painstakingly bedaubing the same "pitch" day after day, brings out with him a series of highly-coloured oil-pictures on cardboard; the public, however, have already discovered him to be a hollow fraud. There is also said to be in existence one young lady pavement artist, in sailor hat and neat get-up (though where her present "pitch" may be I know not), who labels herself proudly "the only one in England."
That Londoners are great lovers of the picturesque may be seen from the admiring crowd that surround the pavement artist; they prefer Nature, however, brought "home" to them in crude and garish colours. Yet, as likely as not, when the shabby pastellist has put away chalks and duster for the day, and betaken himself to his nightly refuge in Soho or Hatton Garden, the sky behind him will robe itself in intense hues of orange, purple, and crimson that baffle imitation, and before which even pavement-art fades into insignificance. For the sunset-skies of London are a marvel. All through the varying year they are beautiful, but in September and October they are at their best. The sun either sinks, a bold red disc, behind the black houses and still blacker plane trees, or it clothes its retreat with bright purple and madder clouds, against which, with their golden background, the tree branches show dark like prison-bars. Was it perhaps, on these sunset-skies that Christina Rossetti gazed when she wrote her most inspired poems? And was it from the small window of her gloomy little house in Torrington Square, "the small upper back bedroom whose only outlook," her biographer says, "was to the tall dingy walls of adjacent houses;" was it from here that,—looking with rapt gaze over to the neighbouring stables and mews,—she saw, in fancy, the angel choirs of which she wrote?
"... Multitudes—multitudes—stood up in bliss,
Made equal to the angels, glorious, fair;
With harps, palms, wedding-garments, kiss of peace,
And crowned and haloed hair."
Indeed it is not unlikely that she did see them, for the true poet's mind sees what it brings, to the exclusion of all meaner things. There is a pretty story told, in this connection, of William Blake, the poor, half-crazed poet-painter of Fountain Court. "What," he said, "it will be questioned" (of me) "when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? Oh! no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty!' I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it." And thus it was with Miss Rossetti. She, the patient, noble, suffering woman,—suffering, latterly, from a long and painful illness,—lay, day after day silent and uncomplaining, in that dismal little London house where she had spent nineteen years of her life,—her soul ever beating its prison-bars. Near by in the neighbouring Woburn Square, is Christ Church, where Miss Rossetti during her life was a constant attendant, and whose incumbent, the Rev. J. J. Glendinning Nash, was her close friend. Here her impressive funeral service (where her own poems were sung) took place on January 2nd 1895. The whole of this part of London is bound up with the lives of the talented Rossetti family. Christina, her mother, and aunts, lived at No 30 Torrington Square—and before that at 5 Endsleigh Gardens; W. M. Rossetti, the younger brother and literary critic, lived near by, close to Regent's Park; and Dante Rossetti, the chief of this family of poets, was, as we know, a thorough Londoner, and never even visited Italy at all. One of the most curious things about London is the way in which, despite its gloom, it inspires and stimulates the poet's thought, "moulding the secret gold." Else why is it that so many beautiful things are produced there? Even Mr. Austin Dobson's Muse, he complains, "pouts" when abroad, though "she is not shy on London stones!" The many-hued beauties of the country do not affect us as do the grey London stones and streets, eloquent with association and history.
If the Rossetti family are deeply connected with Bloomsbury streets and squares,—William Morris, the poet of The Earthly Paradise, the Socialist, designer, prophet of the House Beautiful, is hardly less so. It was in unromantic Bloomsbury that his ideas of beauty were mainly nourished; Oxford Street, Upton, and Kelmscott came later. Bloomsbury, whose drawing and painting schools are immortalised in Thackeray's novels (vide "Gandish's," in The Newcomes,), has always been more or less a focus of art teaching. Bohemian in old days, it is mildly Bohemian still, as any one who frequents the art-schools of the neighbourhood will testify. When Morris first left Oxford, in 1856, he and Burne-Jones took rooms together in Upper Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, as being a convenient locality for the study of art. Here they fell in with other kindred spirits, such as Holman Hunt and Rossetti. "Topsy" (Morris) "and I lived together," Burne Jones wrote in 1856, "in the quaintest room in all London, hung with brasses of old knights and drawings of Albert Dürer." In the following year (1857) they removed to 17 Red Lion Square, a house already consecrated to the early pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
"It was a first-floor set of three rooms; the large room in front looked north, and its window had been heightened up to the ceiling to adapt it for use as a studio: behind it was a bedroom, and behind that another small bedroom or powdering closet. Till the spring of 1859 this was their London residence and working place, and it is round Red Lion Square that much of the mythology of Morris's earlier life clusters. From the incidents which occurred or were invented there, a sort of Book of the Hundred Merry Tales gradually was formed, of which Morris was the central figure."—(Life of W. Morris, by J. W. Mackail.)
"A great many of these stories are connected with the maid of the house, who became famous under the name of 'Red Lion Mary.' She was very plain, but a person of great character and unfailing good humour.... One of the tales told of her shows her imperturbable good nature. Rossetti one day, on her entering the room, strode up to her, and in deep resonant tones, with fearful meaning in his voice, declaimed the lines:
"'Shall the hide of a fierce lion
Be stretched on a couch of wood
For a daughter's foot to lie on,
Stained with a father's blood?'