DYEING has almost ceased to exist as a traditional art. In this 20th century the importance of colour in our lives seems to be realized less and less. It has been forgotten that strong and beautiful colour, such as used to abound in all every day things, is an essential to the full joy of life. A sort of fear or nervousness of bright colour is one of the features of our age, it is especially evident in the things we wear.

There is unfortunately good reason for it. We fear bright colour because our modern colours are bad, and they are bad because the tradition of dyeing has been broken. The chemist has invaded the domain of the dyer, driven him out and taken over his business, with the result that ugly colour has become the rule for the first time in the history of mankind. It is not that chemists never produce beautiful colour. Dyeing as a chemical science has not been studied for the last 50 years without producing good results. But there is this great difference between the chemical commercial dyes and the traditional dyes—that with the commercial dyes it is very easy to produce ugly colours, the beautiful colour is rare; but with traditional dyes it is difficult to make an ugly colour, and good colour is the rule.

It was in 1856 that mauve was produced from coal tar by an English chemist, and this began a new era in dyeing. The discovery was developed in Germany, and the result was the creation of a science of chemical colouring.

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.

The aim of commerce is material gain; the aim of the crafts is to make life, and no trouble must be spared to reach that end. It must always be before the craft worker. Dyeing is an art; the moment science dominates it, it is an art no longer, and the craftsman must go back to the time before science touched it, and begin all over again.

The tradition is nearly lost in England.

It lingers in a few places in Scotland and Ireland. In Norway, Russia, Central Asia, India and other places where science has not entered too much into the life of the people, it is still practiced. Is dyeing as a tradition to be doomed, as traditional weaving was doomed? Yes, unless it be consciously studied again and remade into an art.

This book is intended for the use of craftsmen and others who are trying to dye their materials by hand and on a small scale. Information and recipes, useful to such workers, are to be found in books and pamphlets dating onwards from the 17th century, and in this book I have drawn largely upon these sources of dyeing knowledge, as well as upon the traditions still followed by present workers, and upon the experience of my own work.

All dyeing recipes, however, should guide rather than rule the worker; they are better applied with imagination and experience than with the slavishness of minute imitation. Every dyer should keep a record of his experiments, for this will become invaluable as it grows, and as one thing is learnt from another. The ideal way of working is not by a too rigid accuracy nor by loose guess-work, but by the way which practice has proved best: nevertheless, some of the greatest dyers have done their work by rule-of-thumb methods just as others have certainly worked with systematic exactness.

The dyer, like any other artist, is free to find his own methods, subject to the requirements of good and permanent craftsmanship, provided that he achieves the effects at which he aims. But it is supremely important that he should aim at the right effects; or, rather, at the use of the right materials, for if these are right the effects may safely be left to take care of themselves. In order to develop the taste and temperament of a good colourist, it is necessary to use good colour and to live with good colour. In this book I attempt to show where good colour can be obtained. But one may begin to live with good colour which has been found by others.

This part of the dyer's education is not prohibitively costly, even in these days of inferior colour. Indian and Persian embroideries are still to be obtained, though care must be taken in their selection, as most modern pieces are dyed with chemical dyes and are very ugly. Persian Khelim rugs are cheap and often of the most beautiful colours. Russian embroideries and woven stuffs, both old and new, are obtainable, and are good in colour, as are most of the embroideries and weavings of Eastern Europe and the East. What are popularly known as "coffee towels" are often embroidered in the finest coloured silks. Bokhara rugs and embroideries are still to be purchased, and many of the weavings of the far East, although, alas, very few of the modern ones are of good colour. I would say to dyers, do not be satisfied with seeing beautiful coloured stuffs in museums. It is possible still to get them, and to live with a piece of good colour is of much more use than occasional hours spent in museums.