The advantages of the new colours were ease and simplicity of use, general reliability with regard to strength and composition, and certainty in reproducing the same colour again without trouble. With regard to fastness, to light and to washing there is practically little difference between the two. It is more the method by which they are dyed and not the dye itself (although of course in some cases this is not so) that determines their fastness. The natural dyes are more trouble and take longer time to prepare. Chemical colours can be dyed now as fast as the natural colours, although at first this could not be done. Some of the chemical colours as well as the natural, are not fast to light and washing, and ought never to be used; but there are natural colours, such as madder, some of the lichens, catechu etc., which are as fast as any chemical dye, if not more so. BUT there is this general difference between the results of the two methods,—that when a chemical colour fades it becomes a different colour and generally a bad one: when a natural colour fades, it becomes a lighter tone of the same colour.
Since the middle of the 19th century our colour sense has been getting rude shocks. At first came the hideous aniline colours, crude and ugly, and people said, "How wonderful, are they really made out of coal!" They were told to like them and they did, and admired the chemists who made them. Then came more discoveries, and colour began to go to the opposite extreme, and the fashion was muddy indeterminate colours—'art' colours as they were called, just as remote from pure good colouring in one direction as the early aniline colours were in the other. We are now emerging from the mud colours, as I would call them, to the period of the brilliant colouring of the Futurist. Here we have scientific colouring used with real skill. The Futurist has perhaps indicated a possible way in which chemical colours may be used by the artist and is teaching people the value of simple combinations of brilliant colour.
And yet do they satisfy the artist? Are they as beautiful as the colours in a Persian Khelim? Is there a blue in the world as fine as the blue in a Bokhara rug, or a red to touch the red of a Persian brocade or Indian silk?—the new fresh colours as they come out of the dyer's vat, not as they are after years of wear and tear, though that is beautiful enough. And yet they are not more beautiful than the colours once made by dyers in England. They are as brilliant as the chemical colours, but they are not hard and unsympathetic and correct. They are alive and varied, holding the light as no chemical colour can hold it; and they are beautiful from their birth to their old age, when they mellow, one with the other, into a blend of richness that has never yet been got by the chemical dyer and never will be.
Perhaps it is the scientific method that kills the imagination. Dealing with exactly known quantities, and striving for precise uniformity, the chemist has no use for the accidents and irregularities which the artist's imagination seizes and which the traditional worker well knew how to use.
William Morris says that "all degradation of art veils itself in the semblance of an intellectual advance," and nothing is truer than this with regard to the art of dyeing. As a tradition it is practically dead in Britain, and is threatened with gradual extinction all over the world. It will not recover itself as an art till individual artists set themselves to make beautiful colours again, and ignore the colour made for them by commerce and the chemists.
Handicraft workers should make their own colours. Leather workers should dye their own leather, the embroiderers their own silks and wools, the basket makers their own materials, the weavers and spinners their own flax, cotton and wool; and until they do this the best work will not be done. This is the necessity for the present. If any craft worker wants sound colour he must make it for himself, he cannot get it done for him by artists. The hope for the future is that dyeing may be reinstated as a craft, co-operating with the other crafts and practiced by craftsmen.
The way to beauty is not by the broad and easy road; it is along difficult and adventurous paths. Every piece of craft work should be an adventure. It cannot be an adventure if commerce steps in and says "I will dye all your yarn for you; you will always then be able to match your colour again; there need be no variation; every skein shall be as all the others; you can order so many pounds of such a number and you can get it by return of post; and you can have six or seven hundred shades to choose from." It is all so easy, so temptingly easy,—but how DULL! the deadly yards of stuff all so even and so exactly dyed; so perfect that the commerce-ridden person says, "this is almost as good as the stuff you can buy in a shop, it is as perfect as machine made stuff."
What would have been the use of all this to the great colourists of the world, the ancient Egyptians, the mediæval Italians or the great Oriental dyers? They could not get six hundred shades to order; six was more like their range, they did not need more, and in those they could not command precise uniformity. They knew that the slight variations caused by natural human methods add to the beauty and interest of a thing, and that a few good colours are worth any number of indifferent ones.
It is quite certain that a great many of the handicrafts that have depended upon commercial dyes would produce infinitely better work if they dyed their raw material themselves.
It may be objected that life is not long enough; but the handicrafts are out to create more life, not out to produce quantity nor to save time.