BOOKBINDING: ITS PROCESSES AND IDEAL. 677 



ment of some primary element of decoration. In the great 

 Frencli schools which I have attempted to describe, the motifs 

 were primarily curved or straight bands or lines, and compart- 

 ments composed of the same, the whole pattern of the first school 

 becoming, in principle, the motifs of the second and third. 



Before leaving this subject of design I may be permitted to 

 prophesy that in the infinite inventions of Nature herself will, in 

 the future as in the past, be found the suggestions of design, and 

 that in seeking them there the craftsman artist will enter again 

 into that vital communion with her which is the condition at 

 once of his own happiness and of his own imaginative growth. 

 But the prophecy must be accompanied by this caution design 

 can not, in my opinion, be taught. It is as distinctly a gift of im- 

 aginative genius as the power of poetical vision and expression. 

 To the conditions of the problem, then, must be added the genius 

 suitable for its solution. 



I have now, in conclusion, to say what, in my opinion, the 

 craft of the binder is, and in what relation it stands to the su- 

 preme art and craft of life itself. 



All this universe of light and shade and sound, which at all 

 moments surrounds us, and constitutes the supreme object of 

 man's thoughts, his intranscendent inner and outer self, may be 

 looked upon as itself a work of art in progress, and man's life 

 through the ages as an attempt, ever renewed, to apprehend it in 

 its entirety, and to reduce it to something appreciable by his im- 

 agination and his affections. This is not the moment to dwell at 

 length upon this attempt, or to show how, with increasing knowl- 

 edge of his environment, his previous conceptions of it have 

 perished to give birth to higher and wider appreciations ; but I 

 may allege that, in my opinion, all the religions which have fig- 

 ured upon the stage of history, as well as all philosophical and 

 scientific systems, are attempts at this reduction of the universe, 

 and of man as a part of it, to an entirety harmonious within itself, 

 and fit to be the dwelling place of the imaginative soul of man- 

 kind. They are attempts, and for some of us they have ceased to 

 be adequate. For myself, I see only unbounded space and infi- 

 nite time, and within those illimitables, a finite world obedient 

 to law, unfolding to unknown ends ; and though I can not grasp 

 that world in its entirety, yet I can divine the amplitude of its 

 rhythm, be sensitive to its adaptations and to the balance of its 

 parts, and, in the spirit of the infinitely great, work at the in- 

 finitely little, and feel the two akin in their adjustments, balance, 



and rhythm. 



It is in this intuition of the harmony of the universe that the 

 ideal of the work of the hand resides. It is itself an adjustment, 

 at once beautiful and serviceable. It is a dedication of man's 



