It is disconcerting to hear of the plaid in India. Our dyes, we know, they use in the silk mills of Bombay, with the deplorable result that their clothes, when they grow old, are dull and unintentionally falsified with infelicitous decay. The Hindus are a washing people; and the sun and water that do but dim, soften, and warm the native vegetable dyes to the last, do but burlesque the aniline. Magenta is bad enough when it is itself; but the worst of magenta is that it spoils but poorly. No bad modern forms and no bad modern colours spoil well. And spoiling is an important process. It is a test—one of the ironical tests that come too late with their proofs. London portico-houses will make some such ruins as do chemical dyes, which undergo no use but derides them, no accidents but caricature them. This is an old enough grievance. But the plaid!
The plaid is the Scotsman's contribution to the decorative art of the world. Scotland has no other indigenous decoration. In his most admirable lecture on "The Two Paths", Ruskin acknowledged, with a passing misgiving, that his Highlanders had little art. And the misgiving was but passing, because he considered how fatally wrong was the art of India—"it never represents a natural fact. It forms its compositions out
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Publication information:
Book title: Essays.
Contributors: Alice Meynell - Author.
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 1914.
Page number: 152.
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