Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/694

676 style, which consisted in the use of a number of branches, spreading from each corner of the cover toward the center, the unity of the whole being enhanced by a semis, simple or alternate, of some simple tools over the whole of the side. The combination was effected under the direction, if not by the hands, of the great binders Nicholas and Clovis Eve, and consisted in the enrichment of the interspaces of the first style by means of the sprays and branches of the second. When mature the school was characterized by compartments symmetrically distributed and connected, filled with dainty devices or with the severer tools of the Grolier pattern, and supported and enriched in the inter-spaces by foliated branches and sprays.

The third great school—the school of Le Gascon—and perhaps the last, was characterized 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 characterized 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 characterize are historical, and they are closed. The future, as I 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