t 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