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 old clothes 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 Scotchman'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 of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line . . . It will
not draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower,
but only a spiral or a zig-zag." Because of this aversion from Nature
the Hindu and his art tended to evil, we read. But of the Scot we are
told, "You will find upon reflection that all the highest points of the
Scottish character are connected with impressions derived straight from
the natural scenery of their country."
What, then, about the plaid? Where is the natural fact there? If the
Indian, by practising a non-natural art of spirals and zig-zags, cuts
himself off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural
delight," to what did the good and healthy Highlander condemn himself by
practising the art of the plaid? A spiral may be found in the vine, and
a zig-zag in the lightning, but where in nature is the plaid to be found?
There is surely no curve or curl that can be drawn by a designing hand
but is a play upon some infinitely various natural fact. The smoke of
the cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its
waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and
such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and
impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls
ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand--and that is not a Hindu hand, nor
any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the
section of a sea-wave--its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a
single movement, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room
fluctuates in twenty delicate directions. No, it is impossible to accept
the saying that the poor spiral or scroll of a human design is anything
but a participation in the innumerable curves and curls of nature.
Now the plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin says
of Oriental design--the plaid is not only cut off from nature, and cut
off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in inorganic
quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradiction of all
natural or vital forms. And it is equally defiant of vital tone and of
vital colour. Everywhere in nature tone is gradual, and between the
fainting of a tone and the failing of a curve there is a charming
analogy. But the tartan insists that its tone shall be invariable, and
sharply defined by contrasts of dark and light. As to colour, it has
colours, not colour.
But that plaid should now go so far afield as to decorate the noble
garment of the Indies is ill news. True, Ruskin saw nothing but cruelty
and corruption in Indian life or art; but let us hear an Indian maxim in
regard to those who, in cruel places, are ready sufferers: "There," says
the _Mahabharata_, "where women are treated with respect, the very gods
are said to be filled with joy. Women deserve to be honoured. Serve ye
them. Bend your will before them. By honouring women ye are sure to
attain to the fruition of all things." And the rash teachers of our
youth would have persuaded us that this generous lesson was first learnt
in Teutonic forests!
Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably be
suffered to reply, to this Hindu profession of reverence. Accordingly
the woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil to the souls of
her mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and great-grandmother-in-law, in
gratitude for their giving her a good husband. And to go back for a
moment to Ruskin's contrast of the two races, it was assuredly under the
stress of some too rash reasoning that he judged the lovely art of the
East as a ministrant to superstition, cruelty, and pleasure, whether
wrought upon the temple, the sword, or the girdle. The innocent art of
innocent Hindu women for centuries decked their most modest heads, their
dedicated and sequestered beauty, their child-loving breasts, and
consecrated chambers.