Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/695

Rh of some primary element of decoration. In the great French schools which I 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 can not, in my opinion, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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