THE SKIN AND HAIR. 87 



If it be a solemn and a serious thing to grow a beard, 

 then by how much more a solemn and serious thing to dye a 

 beard, or a head of hair for a climax ? It comes at once, or 

 at most in a night, the portentous change of colour. White, 

 or carroty, or foxy, as the case may be, you come under the 

 operation of art ; then, hey presto ! out you go fully meta- 

 morphosed. However I may reprobate the act itself, the 

 deed, the thing, I must needs admire the prompting courage 

 of it. Talk of suicide hanging one's self, drowning one's 

 self, poisoning one's self, or cutting one's throat, the supreme 

 moment is all in all; the deed is done, and your friends 

 shudder, but yourself are out of it. But to dye one's hair, 

 and live ! To stand the gibes and staring, the chaff and innu- 

 endoes and allusions and questioning, that indeed is courage ! 



This is a digression; we come back again to capillary 

 chromatics. Life is short and art is long; the triumph of 

 hair-dyeing has been reserved for modern time to achieve, and 

 the latter part of this thesis to chronicle. The dyeing of 

 hair black or brown such as it is I call mere child's play ; 

 to impart the fashionable golden glow is a modern triumph. 

 This achievement resolves itself into one of two cases. Either 

 the hair to be dyed is naturally red, coaxable into golden, 

 or it is actually and unmistakably dark. In the latter case 

 preliminary bleaching will be needed, in the former not. Of 

 red hair there are various tints ; the designations cherry, 

 carroty, scorched, and foxy, will mostly comprise them. The 

 two former are colours that generally go together with a rich 

 animal growth; they are accompanied with an exuberance 

 of gloss, and, I think, an exuberance of temper. The two 

 latter seem as though they had grown on poor soil; they 

 want lustre, surface, finish, hot-pressing ; they are poor and 

 meagre, suggestive of flocks of dingy oakum untwisted from 

 ropes by convict hands. Out of each and all of such raw 

 materials, then, it were idle to expect the same final amount 

 of artistic golden beauty. 



