1894.] on Bookbinding ; its Processes and Ideal. 183 



distributed and connected, filled with dainty devices or with the 

 severer tools of the Grolier pattern, and supported and enriched in 

 the interspaces by foliated branches and sprays. 



8. The third great school — the school of Le Gascon — and 

 perhaps the last, was characterised by the combination with the 

 geometrical framework of the preceding school of a new motive, 

 borrowed, I think, from the contemporary lace, or perhaps filigree 

 work, and used, ultimately, to fill in both the compartments or panels 

 and the space between them. The motive is an exceedingly simple 

 one, a small spiral of dots, but the close repetition of it has a 

 singularly rich if somewhat bewildering effect. The school, however, 

 in what specially characterised it, has dropped the tradition of form 

 and is content with the glitter of gold. The repetition of the spiral 

 is not always organic in its construction. The spirals are placed 

 side by side, they do not grow the one out of the other. And I 

 submit that all patterns, to be good, must be organic in the relation 

 of their details and organic in the method of their development. 



The great schools of design which I have thus attempted to 

 characterise are historical, and they are closed. The future, as T 

 have elsewhere had occasion to remark, is not, in my opinion, with 

 them or their developments or repetition, however much the present 

 may occupy itself with their corrected iteration. 



Design is invention and development, and when development has 

 reached a certain point the invention is exhausted and some new 

 departure must be taken. No new departure, however, of any 

 importance has taken place since the close of the great schools of 

 France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the decoration 

 of bound books is still an open problem awaiting solution at the 

 hands of genius. 



But though the problem awaits solution the conditions of the 

 problem may, I think, be stated shortly in general terms. In the 

 first place, then, there must be in any design a scheme or framework 

 of distribution. The area to be covered must be covered according 

 to some symmetrical plan. In the second place, the scheme or 

 framework of distribution must itself be covered by the orderly 

 repetition, and if need be, modification and develoiDinent of some 

 primary element of decoration. In the great French schools which 

 1 have attempted to describe, the motifs were primarily curved or 

 straight bands or lines, and compartments 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 cannot, in my opinion, 



