184 Mr. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson on Bookbinding. [Feb. 2, 



be taught. It is as distinctly a gift of imaginative 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 supreme 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 intranscendant 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 imagination and his 

 affections. This is not the moment to dwell at length upon this 

 attempt, or to show how, with increasing knowledge of his environ- 

 ment, 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 figured 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 mankind. They are attempts, and 

 for some of us they have ceased to be adequate. For myself, I see 

 only unbounded space and infinite time, and within those illimitables, 

 a finite world obedient to law, unfolding to unknown ends ; and 

 though I cannot 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 infinitely 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 powers 

 to an end not beyond man's reach ; it develops invention and the 

 imaginative faculties ; it distracts the mind from the vexed question, 

 never wholly to be put aside, of man's own ultimate destiny ; it 

 gives him rest ; it gives him hope, that even as from the work of his 

 own hands here there arise things of beauty and of use, so from his 

 whole life's work there may arise in the " hereafter," which in some 

 sense may be only another form of the " present," a something of 

 even greater use and greater beauty still. 



It is in this wise that I commend to you all the life of the 

 workman, of the workman working in little in the spirit of the whole. 



[T. J. C.-S.] 



