BOOKBINDING: ITS PROCESSES AND IDEAL. 675 



when completely successful, when completely triumphant, he is 

 then most conspicuously a failure. The tremulous outline of 

 design and design appeals to the imagination, to the inner eye of 

 the soul as well as to the outer eye of sense the tremulous out- 

 line of design has perished in the too great exactitude of his 

 acomplished execution. Wholly to achieve victory, indeed, in 

 the binder's craft, to forget no end in the prosecution of the 

 means, to exaggerate no feature from long practice and perfect 

 skill, to permit no craft of hand to overcome the judgment of the 

 head, is, in bookbinding, as in all crafts, an exceedingly difficult 

 task, and we have in the very development of a craft the cause 

 of its ultimate decay. But what an education the prosecution of 

 a craft is for the soul of a man ! The silent matter, which is the 

 craftsman's material, is wholly in his hands, it hears and makes 

 no reproaches, but it never forgives and it has no mercy. Sunrise 

 after sunrise lights the craftsman to his task, sunset after sunset 

 leaves him to his regret. Shall the sun ever rise upon victory or 

 set upon contentment ? It is a great struggle. He only knows 

 how great the struggle is, who knows what the aim of craft rising 

 into the ideal is, and who tolerates, between him and it, no cloud of 

 self -illusion, no splendor of popular praise to blind or to darken 

 his gaze. And so through the work of his hand man may rise 

 indeed to his soul's height. But the victory itself is withdrawn 

 behind the veil. The world may not know it when it is achieved, 

 and the artist himself may sometimes see it achieved, as he 

 thinks, when to reach it he has yet to traverse the entire way 



of truth. 



" Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, 



The city sparkles still, a grain of salt." 



The great schools of design for the decoration of bound books 

 are the great schools of France of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries. 



The first great school the school of Grolier as it may be 

 called is characterized mainly by the simple motives of straight- 

 ness and curvature. Straight and curved bands or straps and 

 straight or curved lines are interwoven one with the other and 

 distributed on a more or less simple or intricate but always sym- 

 metrical plan over the sides and back and sometimes the edges of 

 a book. 



The second great school the school of the Eves is charac- 

 terized by the symmetrical distribution over the side of the cover 

 of symmetrically drawn compartments or panels, and the union 

 of them all into one organic whole by the intermediation of 

 twisted or interwoven bands. This is its main and for its earlier 

 years almost its only characteristic. But the school attained its 

 maturity by the combination with it of an independent contem- 



