the employer bloated into a millionaire is the slave of the public, and
the public is the slave of its pet god, cheapness. The bookbinder of the
future is to be an educated man who appreciates literature and has
freedom for his fancy and leisure for his thought.

All this is very good and sound. But in treating bookbinding as an
imaginative, expressive human art we must confess that we think that Mr.
Sanderson made something of an error. Bookbinding is essentially
decorative, and good decoration is far more often suggested by material
and mode of work than by any desire on the part of the designer to tell
us of his joy in the world. Hence it comes that good decoration is
always traditional. Where it is the expression of the individual it is
usually either false or capricious. These handicrafts are not primarily
expressive arts; they are impressive arts. If a man has any message for
the world he will not deliver it in a material that always suggests and
always conditions its own decoration. The beauty of bookbinding is
abstract decorative beauty. It is not, in the first instance, a mode of
expression for a man's soul. Indeed, the danger of all these lofty
claims for handicraft is simply that they show a desire to give crafts
the province and motive of arts such as poetry, painting and sculpture.
Such province and such motive they have not got. Their aim is different.
Between the arts that aim at annihilating their material and the arts
that aim at glorifying it there is a wide gulf.

However, it was quite right of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson to extol his own art,
and though he seemed often to confuse expressive and impressive modes of
beauty, he always spoke with great sincerity.

Next week Mr. Crane delivers the final lecture of this admirable 'Arts
and Crafts' series and, no doubt, he will have much to say on a subject