Chapter 18

Bibliography.—The English literature on finance is rather unsatisfactory; for public finance the available text-books are: Adams,Science of Finance(New York, 1898); Bastable,Public Finance(London, 1892; 3rd ed., 1903); Daniels,Public Finance(New York, 1899), and Plehn,Public Finance(3rd ed., New York, 1909). In French, Leroy-Beaulieu,Traité de la science des finances(1877; 3rd ed., 1908), is the standard work. The German literature is abundant. Roscher, 5th ed. (edited by Gerlach), 1901; Wagner (4 vols.), incomplete; Cohn (1889) and Eheberg (9th ed., 1908) have published works entitledFinanzwissenschaft, dealing with all the aspects of state finance. For Greek financial history Boekh,Staalshaushaltung der Athenen(ed. Fränkel, 1887), is still a standard work. For Rome, Marquardt,Römische Staatsverwaltung, vol. ii., and Humbert,Les Finances et la comptabilité publique chez les Romains, are valuable. Clamageran,Histoire de l’impôt en France(1876), gives the earlier development of French finance. R.H. Patterson,Science of Finance(London, 1868), C.S. Meade,Trust Finance(1903), and E. Carroll,Principles and Practice of Finance, deal with finance in the wider sense of business transactions.

(C. F. B.)

FINCH, FINCH-HATTON.This old English family has had many notable members, and has contributed in no small degree to the peerage. Sir Thomas Finch (d. 1563), who was knighted for his share in suppressing Sir T. Wyatt’s insurrection against Queen Mary, was a soldier of note, and was the son and heir of Sir William Finch, who was knighted in 1513. He was the father of Sir Moyle Finch (d. 1614), who was created a baronet in 1611, and whose widow Elizabeth (daughter of Sir Thomas Heneage) was created a peeress as countess of Maidstone in 1623 and countess of Winchilsea in 1628; and also of Sir Henry Finch (1558-1625), whose son John, Baron Finch of Fordwich (1584-1660), is separately noticed. Thomas, eldest son of Sir Moyle, succeeded his mother as first earl of Winchilsea; and Sir Heneage, the fourth son (d. 1631), was the speaker of the House of Commons, whose son Heneage (1621-1682), lord chancellor, was created earl of Nottingham in 1675. The latter’s second son Heneage (1649-1719) was created earl of Aylesford in 1714. The earldoms of Winchilsea and Nottingham became united in 1729, when the fifth earl of Winchilsea died, leaving no son, and the title passed to his cousin the second earl of Nottingham, the earldom of Nottingham having since then been held by the earl of Winchilsea. In 1826, on the death of the ninth earl of Winchilsea and fifth of Nottingham, his cousin George William Finch-Hatton succeeded to the titles, the additional surname of Hatton (since held in this line) having been assumed in 1764 by his father under the will of an aunt, a daughter of Christopher, Viscount Hatton (1632-1706), whose father was related to the famous Sir Christopher Hatton.

FINCH OF FORDWICH, JOHN FINCH,Baron(1584-1660), generally known as Sir John Finch, English judge, a member of the old family of Finch, was born on the 17th of September 1584, and was called to the bar in 1611. He was returned to parliament for Canterbury in 1614, and became recorder of the same place in 1617. Having attracted the notice of Charles I., who visited Canterbury in 1625, and was received with an address by Finch in his capacity as recorder, he was the following year appointed king’s counsel and attorney-general to the queen and was knighted. In 1628 he was elected speaker of the House of Commons, a post which he retained till its dissolution in 1629. He was the speaker who was held down in his chair by Holles and others on the occasion of Sir John Eliot’s resolution on tonnage and poundage. In 1634 he was appointed chief justice of the court of common pleas, and distinguished himself by the active zeal with which he upheld the king’s prerogative. Notable also was the brutality which characterized his conduct as chief justice, particularly in the cases of William Prynne and John Langton. He presided over the trial of John Hampden, who resisted the payment of ship-money, and he was chiefly responsible for the decision of the judges that ship-money was constitutional. As a reward for his services he was, in 1640, appointed lord keeper, and was also created Baron Finch of Fordwich. He had, however, become so unpopular that one of the first acts of the Long Parliament, which met in the same year was his impeachment. He took refuge in Holland, but had to suffer the sequestration of his estates. When he was allowed to return to England is uncertain, but in 1660 he was one of the commissioners for the trial of the regicides, though he does not appear to have taken much part in the proceedings. He died on the 27th of November 1660 and was buried in St Martin’s church near Canterbury, his peerage becoming extinct.

See Foss,Lives of the Judges; Campbell,Lives of the Chief Justices.

FINCH(Ger.Fink, Lat.Fringilla), a name applied (but almost always in composition—as bullfinch, chaffinch, goldfinch, hawfinch, &c.) to a great many small birds of the orderPasseres, and now pretty generally accepted as that of a group or family—theFringillidaeof most ornithologists. Yet it is one the extent of which must be regarded as being uncertain. Many writers have included in it the buntings (Emberizidae), though these seem to be quite distinct, as well as the larks (Alaudidae), the tanagers (Tanagridae), and the weaver-birds (Ploceidae). Others have separated from it the crossbills, under the title ofLoxiidae, but without due cause. The difficulty which at this time presents itself in regard to the limits of theFringillidaearises from our ignorance of the anatomical features, especially those of the head, possessed by many exotic forms.

Taken as a whole, the finches, concerning which no reasonable doubt can exist, are not only little birds with a hard bill, adapted in most cases for shelling and eating the various seeds that form the chief portion of their diet when adult, but they appear to be mainly forms which predominate in and are highly characteristic of the Palaearctic Region; moreover, though some are found elsewhere on the globe, the existence of but very few in the Notogaean hemisphere can as yet be regarded as certain.

But even with this limitation, the separation of the undoubtedFringillidae1into groups is a difficult task. Were we merely to consider the superficial character of the form of the bill, the genusLoxia(in its modern sense) would be easily divided not only from the other finches, but from all other birds. The birds of this genus—the crossbills—when their other characters are taken into account, prove to be intimately allied on the one hand to the grosbeaks (Pinicola) and on the other through the redpolls (Aegiothus) to the linnets (Linota)—if indeed these two can be properly separated. The linnets, through the genusLeucosticte, lead to the mountain-finches (Montifringilla), and the redpolls through the siskins (Chrysomitris) to the goldfinches (Carduelis); and these last again to the hawfinches, one group of which (Coccothraustes) is apparently not far distant from the chaffinches (Fringillaproper), and the other (Hesperiphona) seems to be allied to the greenfinches (Ligurinus). Then there is the group of serins (Serinus), to which the canary belongs, that one is in doubt whether to refer to the vicinity of the greenfinches or that of the redpolls. The mountain-finches may be regarded as pointing first to the rock-sparrows (Petronia) and then to the true sparrows (Passer); while the grosbeaks pass into many varied forms and throw out a very well marked form—the bullfinches (Pyrrhula). Some of the modifications of the family are very gradual, and therefore conclusions founded on them are likely to be correct; others are further apart, and the links which connect them, if not altogether missing, can but be surmised. To avoid as much as possible prejudicing the case, we shall therefore take the different groups ofFringillidaewhich it is convenient to consider in this article in an alphabetical arrangement.

Of the Bullfinches the best known is the familiar bird (Pyrrhulaeuropaea). The varied plumage of the cock—his bright red breast and his grey back, set off by his coal-black head and quills—is naturally attractive; while the facility with which he is tamed, with his engaging disposition in confinement, makes him a popular cage-bird,—to say nothing of the fact (which in the opinion of so many adds to his charms) of his readily learning to “pipe” a tune, or some bars of one. By gardeners the bullfinch has long been regarded as a deadly enemy, from its undoubted destruction of the buds of fruit-trees in spring-time, though whether the destruction is really so much of a detriment is by no means so undoubted. Northern and eastern Europe is inhabited by a larger form (P. major), which differs in nothing but size and more vivid tints from that which is common in the British Isles and western Europe. A very distinct species (P. murina), remarkable for its dull coloration, is peculiar to the Azores, and several others are found in Asia from the Himalayas to Japan. A bullfinch (P. cassini) has been discovered in Alaska, being the first recognition of this genus in the New World.

The Canary (Serinus canarius) is indigenous to the islands whence it takes its name, as well, apparently, as to the neighbouring groups of the Madeiras and Azores, in all of which it abounds. It seems to have been imported into Europe at least as early as the first half of the 16th century,2and has since become the commonest of cage-birds. The wild stock is of an olive-green, mottled with dark brown above, and greenish-yellow beneath. All the bright-hued examples we now see in captivity have been induced by carefully breeding from any chance varieties that have shown themselves; and not only the colour, but the build and stature of the bird have in this manner been greatly modified. The ingenuity of “the fancy,” which might seem to have exhausted itself in the production of topknots, feathered feet, and so forth, has brought about a still further change from the original type. It has been found that by a particular treatment, in which the mixing of large quantities of vegetable colouring agents with the food plays an important part, the ordinary “canary yellow” may be intensified so as to verge upon a more or less brilliant flame colour.3

Very nearly resembling the canary, but smaller in size, is the Serin (Serinus hortulanus), a species which not long since was very local in Europe, and chiefly known to inhabit the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. It has pushed its way towards the north, and has even been several times taken in England (Yarrell’sBrit. Birds, ed. 4, ii. pp. 111-116). A closely allied species (S. canonicus) is peculiar to Palestine.

The Chaffinches are regarded as the type-form ofFringillidae. The handsome and sprightlyFringilla coelebs4is common throughout the whole of Europe. Conspicuous by his variegated plumage, his peculiar call note5and his glad song, the cock is almost everywhere a favourite. In Algeria the British chaffinch is replaced by a closely-allied species (F. spodogenia), while in the Atlantic Islands it is represented by two others (F. tintillonandF. teydea)—all of which, while possessing the general appearance of the European bird, are clothed in soberer tints.6Another species of trueFringillais the brambling (F. montifringilla), which has its home in the birch forests of northern Europe and Asia, whence it yearly proceeds, often in flocks of thousands, to pass the winter in more southern countries. This bird is still more beautifully coloured than the chaffinch—especially in summer, when, the brown edges of the feathers being shed, it presents a rich combination of black, white and orange. Even in winter, however, its diversified plumage is sufficiently striking.

With the exception of the single species of bullfinch already noticed as occurring in Alaska, all the above forms of finches are peculiar to the Palaearctic Region.

(A. N.)

1About 200 species of these have been described, and perhaps 150 may really exist.2The earliest published description seems to be that of Gesner in 1555 (Orn.p. 234), but he had not seen the bird, an account of which was communicated to him by Raphael Seiler of Augsburg, under the name ofSuckeruögele.3See alsoThe Canary Book, by Robert L. Wallace;Canaries and Cage Birds, by W.A. Blackston; and Darwin’sAnimals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i. p. 295. An excellent monograph on the wild bird is that by Dr Carl Bolle (Journ. für Orn., 1858, pp. 125-151).4This fanciful trivial name was given by Linnaeus on the supposition (which later observations do not entirely confirm) that in Sweden the hens of the species migrated southward in autumn, leaving the cocks to lead a celibate life till spring. It is certain, however, that in some localities the sexes live apart during the winter.5This call-note, which to many ears sounds like “pink” or “spink,” not only gives the bird a name in many parts of Britain, but is also obviously the origin of the GermanFinkand the EnglishFinch. The similar Celtic formPincis said to have given rise to the Low LatinPincio, and thence come the ItalianPincione, the SpanishPinzon, and the FrenchPinson.6This is especially the ease withF. teydeaof the Canary Islands, which from its dark colouring and large size forms a kind of parallel to the AzoreanPyrrhula murina.

1About 200 species of these have been described, and perhaps 150 may really exist.

2The earliest published description seems to be that of Gesner in 1555 (Orn.p. 234), but he had not seen the bird, an account of which was communicated to him by Raphael Seiler of Augsburg, under the name ofSuckeruögele.

3See alsoThe Canary Book, by Robert L. Wallace;Canaries and Cage Birds, by W.A. Blackston; and Darwin’sAnimals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i. p. 295. An excellent monograph on the wild bird is that by Dr Carl Bolle (Journ. für Orn., 1858, pp. 125-151).

4This fanciful trivial name was given by Linnaeus on the supposition (which later observations do not entirely confirm) that in Sweden the hens of the species migrated southward in autumn, leaving the cocks to lead a celibate life till spring. It is certain, however, that in some localities the sexes live apart during the winter.

5This call-note, which to many ears sounds like “pink” or “spink,” not only gives the bird a name in many parts of Britain, but is also obviously the origin of the GermanFinkand the EnglishFinch. The similar Celtic formPincis said to have given rise to the Low LatinPincio, and thence come the ItalianPincione, the SpanishPinzon, and the FrenchPinson.

6This is especially the ease withF. teydeaof the Canary Islands, which from its dark colouring and large size forms a kind of parallel to the AzoreanPyrrhula murina.

FINCHLEY,an urban district in the Hornsey parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, 7 m. N.W. of St Paul’s cathedral, London, on a branch of the Great Northern railway. Pop. (1891) 16,647; (1901) 22,126. A part, adjoining Highgate on the north, lies at an elevation between 300 and 400 ft., while a portion in the Church End district lies lower, in the valley of the Dollis Brook. The pleasant, healthy situation has caused Finchley to become a populous residential district. Finchley Common was formerly one of the most notorious resorts of highwaymen near London; the Great North Road crossed it, and it was a haunt of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, and was still dangerous to cross at night at the close of the 18th century. Sheppard was captured in this neighbourhood in 1724. The Common has not been preserved from the builder. In 1660 George Monk, marching on London immediately before the Restoration, made his camp on the Common, and in 1745 a regular and volunteer force encamped here, prepared to resist the Pretender, who was at Derby. The gathering of this force inspired Hogarth’s famous picture, the “March of the Guards to Finchley.”

FINCK, FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON(1718-1766), Prussian soldier, was born at Strelitz in 1718. He first saw active service in 1734 on the Rhine, as a member of the suite of Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Soon after this he transferred to the Austrian service, and thence went to Russia, where he served until the fall of his patron Marshal Münnich put an end to his prospects of advancement. In 1742 he went to Berlin, and Frederick the Great made him his aide-de-camp, with the rank of major. Good service brought him rapid promotion in the Seven Years’ War. After the battle of Kolin (June 18th, 1757) he was made colonel, and at the end of 1757 major-general. At the beginning of 1759 Finck became lieutenant-general, and in this rank commanded a corps at the disastrous battle of Kunersdorf, where he did good service both on the field of battle and (Frederick having in despair handed over to him the command) in the rallying of the beaten Prussians. Later in the year he fought in concert with General Wunsch a widespread combat, called the action of Korbitz (Sept. 21st) in which the Austrians and the contingents of the minor states of the Empire were sharply defeated. For this action Frederick gave Finck the Black Eagle (Seyfarth,Beilagen, ii. 621-630). But the subsequent catastrophe of Maxen (seeSeven Years’ War) abruptly put an end to Finck’s active career. Dangerously exposed, and with inadequate forces, Finck received the king’s positive order to march upon Maxen (a village in the Pirna region of Saxony). Unfortunately for himself the general dared not disobey his master, and, cut off by greatly superior numbers, was forced to surrender with some 11,000 men (21st Nov. 1759). After the peace, Frederick sent him before a court-martial, which sentenced him to be cashiered and to suffer a term of imprisonment in a fortress. At the expiry of this term Finck entered the Danish service as general of infantry. He died at Copenhagen in 1766.

He left a work calledGedanken über militärische Gegenstände(Berlin, 1788). SeeDenkwürdigkeiten der militärischen Gesellschaft, vol. ii. (Berlin, 1802-1805), and the report of the Finck court-martial inZeitschrift für Kunst, Wissenschaft und Geschichte des Krieges, pt. 81 (Berlin, 1851). There is a life of Finck in MS. in the library of the Great General Staff.

FINCK, HEINRICH(d.c.1519), German musical composer, was probably born at Bamberg, but nothing is certainly known either of the place or date of his birth. Between 1492 and 1506 he was a musician in, and later possibly conductor of the courtorchestra of successive kings of Poland at Warsaw. He held the post of conductor at Stuttgart from 1510 till about 1519, in which year he probably died. His works, mostly part songs and other vocal compositions, show great musical knowledge, and amongst the early masters of the German school he holds a high position. They are found scattered amongst ancient and modern collections of songs and other musical pieces (see R. Eitner,Bibl. der Musiksammelwerke des 16. und 17. Jahrh., Berlin, 1877). The library of Zwickau possesses a work containing a collection of fifty-five songs by Finck, printed about the middle of the 16th century.

FINCK, HERMANN(1527-1558), German composer, the great-nephew of Heinrich Finck, was born on the 21st of March 1527 in Pirna, and died at Wittenberg on the 28th of December 1558. After 1553 he lived at Wittenberg, where he was organist, and there, in 1555, was published his collection of “wedding songs.” Few details of his life have been preserved. His theoretical writing was good, particularly his observations on the art of singing and of making ornamentations in song. His most celebrated work is entitledPractica musica, exempla variorum signorum, proportionum, et canonum, judicium de tonis ac quaedam de arte suaviter et artificiose cantandi continens(Wittenberg, 1556). It is of great historic value, but very rare.

FINDEN, WILLIAM(1787-1852), English line engraver, was born in 1787. He served his apprenticeship to one James Mitan, but appears to have owed far more to the influence of James Heath, whose works he privately and earnestly studied. His first employment on his own account was engraving illustrations for books, and among the most noteworthy of these early plates were Smirke’s illustrations to Don Quixote. His neat style and smooth finish made his pictures very attractive and popular, and although he executed several large plates, his chief work throughout his life was book illustration. His younger brother, Edward Finden, worked in conjunction with him, and so much demand arose for their productions that ultimately a company of assistants was engaged, and plates were produced in increasing numbers, their quality as works of art declining as their quantity rose. The largest plate executed by William Finden was the portrait of King George IV. seated on a sofa, after the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. For this work he received two thousand guineas, a sum larger than had ever before been paid for an engraved portrait. Finden’s next and happiest works on a large scale were the “Highlander’s Return” and the “Village Festival,” after Wilkie. Later in life he undertook, in co-operation with his brother, aided by their numerous staff, the publication as well as the production of various galleries of engravings. The first of these, a series of landscape and portrait illustrations to the life and works of Byron, appeared in 1833 and following years, and was very successful. But by hisGallery of British Art(in fifteen parts, 1838-1840), the most costly and best of these ventures, he lost the fruits of all his former success. Finden’s last undertaking was an engraving on a large scale of Hilton’s “Crucifixion.” The plate was bought by the Art Union for £1470. He died in London on the 20th of September 1852.

FINDLATER, ANDREW(1810-1885), Scottish editor, was born in 1810 near Aberdour, Aberdeenshire, the son of a small farmer. By hard study in the evening, after his day’s work on the farm was finished, he qualified himself for entrance at Aberdeen University, and after graduating as M.A. he attended the Divinity classes with the idea of entering the ministry. In 1853 he began that connexion with the firm of W. & R. Chambers which gave direction to his subsequent activity. His first engagement was the editing of a revised edition of theirInformation for the People(1857). In this capacity he gave evidence of qualities and acquirements that marked him as a suitable editor forChambers’s Encyclopaedia, then projected, and his was the directing mind that gave it its character. Many of the more important articles were written by him. This work occupied him till 1868, and he afterwards edited a revised edition (1874). He also had charge of other publications for the same firm, and wrote regularly for theScotsman. In 1864 he was made LL.D. of Aberdeen University. In 1877 he gave up active work for Chambers, but his services were retained as consulting editor. He died in Edinburgh on the 1st of January 1885.

FINDLAY, SIR GEORGE(1829-1893), English railway manager, was of pure Scottish descent, and was born at Rainhill, in Lancashire, on the 18th of May 1829. For some time he attended Halifax grammar school, but left at the age of fourteen, and began to learn practical masonry on the Halifax railway, upon which his father was then employed. Two years later he obtained a situation on the Trent Valley railway works, and when that line was finished in 1847 went up to London. There he was for a short time among the men employed in building locomotive sheds for the London & North-Western railway at Camden Town, and years afterwards, when he had become general manager of that railway, he was able to point out stones which he had dressed with his own hands. For the next two or three years he was engaged in a higher capacity as supervisor of the mining and brickwork of the Harecastle tunnel on the North Staffordshire line, and of the Walton tunnel on the Birkenhead, Lancashire & Cheshire Junction railway. In 1850 the charge of the construction of a section of the Shrewsbury & Hereford line was entrusted to him, and when the line was opened for traffic T. Brassey, the contractor, having determined to work it himself, installed him as manager. In the course of his duties he was brought for the first time into official relations with the London & North-Western railway, which had undertaken to work the Newport, Abergavenny & Hereford line, and he ultimately passed into the service of that company, when in 1862, jointly with the Great Western, it leased the railway of which he was manager. In 1864 he was moved to Euston as general goods manager, in 1872 he became chief traffic manager, and in 1880 he was appointed full general manager; this last post he retained until his death, which occurred on the 26th of March 1893 at Edgware, Middlesex. He was knighted in 1892. Sir George Findlay was the author of a book on theWorking and Management of an English Railway(London, 1889), which contains a great deal of information, some of it not easily accessible to the general public, as to English railway practice about the year 1890.

FINDLAY, JOHN RITCHIE(1824-1898), Scottish newspaper owner and philanthropist, was born at Arbroath on the 21st of October 1824, and was educated at Edinburgh University. He entered first the publishing office and then the editorial department of theScotsman, became a partner in the paper in 1868, and in 1870 inherited the greater part of the property from his great uncle, John Ritchie, the founder. The large increase in the influence and circulation of the paper was in a great measure due to his activity and direction, and it brought him a fortune, which he spent during his lifetime in public benefaction. He presented to the nation the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, opened in Edinburgh in 1889, and costing over £70,000; and he contributed largely to the collections of the Scottish National Gallery. He held numerous offices in antiquarian, educational and charitable societies, showing his keen interest in these matters, but he avoided political office and refused the offer of a baronetcy. The freedom of Edinburgh was given him in 1896. He died at Aberlour, Banffshire, on the 16th of October 1898.

FINDLAY,a city and the county-seat of Hancock county, Ohio, U.S.A., on Blanchard’s Fork of the Auglaize river, about 42 m. S. by W. of Toledo. Pop. (1890) 18,553; (1900) 17,613, (1051 foreign-born); (1910) 14,858. It is served by the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, the Lake Erie & Western, and the Ohio Central railways, and by three interurban electric railways. Findlay lies about 780 ft. above sea-level on gently rolling ground. The city is the seat of Findlay College (co-educational), an institution of the Church of God, chartered in 1882 and opened in 1886; it has collegiate, preparatory, normal, commercial and theological departments, a school of expression, and a conservatory of music, and in 1907 had 588 students, the majority of whom were in the conservatory of music. Findlay is the centre of the Ohio natural gas and oil region, and lime and building stoneabound in the vicinity. Among manufactures are refined petroleum, flour and grist-mill products, glass, boilers, bricks, tile, pottery, bridges, ditching machines, carriages and furniture. The total value of the factory product in 1905 was $2,925,309, an increase of 73.6% since 1900. The municipality owns and operates the water-works. Findlay was laid out as a town in 1821, was incorporated as a village in 1838, and was chartered as a city in 1890. The city was named in honour of Colonel James Findlay (c.1775-1835), who built a fort here during the war of 1812; he served in this war under General William Hull, and from 1825 to 1833 was a Democratic representative in Congress.

FINE,a word which in all its senses goes back to the Lat.finire, to bring to an end (finis). Thus in the common adjectival meanings of elegant, thin, subtle, excellent, reduced in size, &c., it is in origin equivalent to “finished.” In the various substantival meanings in law, with which this article deals, the common idea underlying them is an end or final settlement of a matter.

A fine, in the ordinary sense, is a pecuniary penalty inflicted for the less serious offences. Fines are necessarily discretionary as to amount; but a maximum is generally fixed when the penalty is imposed by statute. And it is an old constitutional maxim that fines must not be unreasonable. In Magna Carta, c. 111, it is ordained “Liber homo non amercietur pro parvo delicto nisi secundum modum ipsius delicti, et pro magno delicto secundum magnitudinem delicti.”

The term is also applied to payments made to the lord of a manor on the alienation of land held according to the custom of the manor, to payments made by a lessee on a renewal of a lease, and to other similar payments.

Fine also denotes a fictitious suit at law, which played the part of a conveyance of landed property. “A fine,” says Blackstone, “may be described to be an amicable composition or agreement of a suit, either actual or fictitious, by leave of the king or his justices, whereby the lands in question become or are acknowledged to be the right of one of the parties. In its original it was founded on an actual suit commenced at law for the recovery of the possession of land or other hereditaments; and the possession thus gained by such composition was found to be so sure and effectual that fictitious actions were and continue to be every day commenced for the sake of obtaining the same security.” Freehold estates could thus be transferred from one person to another without the formal delivery of possession which was generally necessary to a feoffment. This is one of the oldest devices of the law. A statute of 18 Edward I. describes it as the most solemn and satisfactory of securities, and gives a reason for its name—“Qui quidem finis sic vocatur, eo quod finis et consummatio omnium placitorum esse debet, et hac de causa providebatur.” The action was supposed to be founded on a breach of covenant: the defendant, owning himself in the wrong,1makes overtures of compromise, which are authorized by thelicentia concordandi; then followed the concord, or the compromise itself. These, then were the essential parts of the performance, which became efficient as soon as they were complete; the formal parts were thenotes, or abstract of the proceedings, and thefootof the fine, which recited the final agreement. Fines were said to be of four kinds, according to the purpose they had in view, as, for instance, to convey lands in pursuance of a covenant, to grant revisionary interest only, &c. In addition to the formal record of the proceedings, various statutes required other solemnities to be observed, the great object of which was to give publicity to the transaction. Thus by statutes of Richard III. and Henry VII. the fine had to be openly read and proclaimed in court no less than sixteen times. A statute of Elizabeth required a list of fines to be exposed in the court of common pleas and at assizes. The reason for these formalities was the high and important nature of the conveyance, which, according to the act of Edward I. above mentioned, “precludes not only those which are parties and privies to the fine and their heirs, but all other persons in the world who are of full age, out of prison, of sound memory, and within the four seas, the day of the fine levied, unless they put in their claim on the foot of the fine within a year and a day.” This barring bynon-claimwas abolished in the reign of Edward III., but restored with an extension of the time to five years in the reign of Henry VII. The effect of this statute, intentional according to Blackstone, unintended and brought about by judicial construction according to others, was that a tenant-in-tail could bar his issue by a fine. A statute of Henry VIII. expressly declares this to be the law. Fines, along with the kindred fiction of recoveries, were abolished by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833, which substituted a deed enrolled in the court of chancery.

Fines are so generally associated in legal phraseology with recoveries that it may not be inconvenient to describe the latter in the present place. A recovery was employed as a means for evading the strict law of entail. The purchaser or alienee brought an action against the tenant-in-tail, alleging that he had no legal title to the land. The tenant-in-tail brought a third person into court, declaring that he had warranted his title, and praying that he might be ordered to defend the action. This person was called thevouchee, and he, after having appeared to defend the action, takes himself out of the way. Judgment for the lands is given in favour of the plaintiff; and judgment to recover lands of equal value from the vouchee was given to the defendant, the tenant-in-tail. In real action, such lands when recovered would have fallen under the settlement of entail; but in the fictitious recovery the vouchee was a man of straw, and nothing was really recovered from him, while the lands of the tenant-in-tail were effectually conveyed to the successful plaintiff. A recovery differed from a fine, as toform, in being an action carried through to the end, while a fine was settled by compromise, and as to effect, by barring all reversions and remainders in estates tail, while a fine barred the issue only of the tenant. (See alsoEjectment;Proclamation.)

1Hence calledcognizor; the other party, the purchaser, is thecognizee.

FINE ARTS,the name given to a whole group of human activities, which have for their result what is collectively known as Fine Art. The arts which constitute the group are the five greater arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, with a number of minor or subsidiary arts, of which dancing and the drama are among the most ancient and universal. In antiquity the fine arts were not explicitly named, nor even distinctly recognized, as a separate class. In other modern languages besides English they are called by the equivalent name of the beautiful arts (belle arti,beaux arts,schöne Künste). The fine or beautiful arts then, it is usually said, are those among the arts of man which minister, not primarily to his material necessities or conveniences, but to his love of beauty; and if any art fulfils both these purposes at once, still as fulfilling the latter only is it called a fine art. Thus architecture, in so far as it provides shelter and accommodation, is one of the useful or mechanical arts, and one of the fine arts only in so far as its structures impress or give pleasure by the aspect of strength, fitness, harmony and proportion of parts, by disposition and contrast of light and shade, by colour and enrichment, by variety and relation of contours, surfaces and intervals. But this, the commonly accepted account of the matter, does not really cover the ground. The idea conveyed by the words “love of beauty,” even stretched to its widest, can hardly be made to include the love of caricature and the grotesque; and these are admittedly modes of fine art. Even the terrible, the painful, the squalid, the degraded, in a word every variety of the significant, can be so handled and interpreted as to be brought within the province of fine art. A juster and more inclusive, although clumsier, account of the matter might put it that the fine arts are those among the arts of man which spring from his impulse to do or make certain things in certain ways for the sake, first, of a special kind of pleasure, independent of direct utility, which it gives him so to do or make them, and next for the sake of the kindred pleasure which he derives from witnessing or contemplating them when they are so done or made by others.

The nature of this impulse, and the several grounds of these pleasures, are subjects which have given rise to a formidable body of speculation and discussion, the chief phases of which will be found summarized under the headingAesthetics. In the present article we have only to attend to the concrete processes and results of the artistic activities of man; in other words, we shall submit (1) a definition of fine art in general, (2) a definition and classification of the principal fine arts severally, (3) some observations on their historical development.

I.Of Fine Art in General.

According to the popular and established distinction between art and nature, the idea of Art (q.v.) only includes phenomena of which man is deliberately the cause; while the idea of Nature includes all phenomena, both in manPremeditation essential to art.and in the world outside him, which take place without forethought or studied initiative of his own. Art, accordingly, means every regulated operation or dexterity whereby we pursue ends which we know beforehand; and it means nothing but such operations and dexterities. What is true of art generally is of course also true of the special group of the fine arts. One of the essential qualities of all art is premeditation; and when Shelley talks of the skylark’s profuse strains of “unpremeditated art,” he in effect lays emphasis on the fact that it is only by a metaphor that he uses the word art in this case at all; he calls attention to that which (if the songs of birds are as instinctive as we suppose) precisely makes the difference between the skylark’s outpourings and his own. We are slow to allow the title of fine art to natural eloquence, to charm or dignity of manner, to delicacy and tact in social intercourse, and other such graces of life and conduct, since, although in any given case they may have been deliberately cultivated in early life, or even through ancestral generations, they do not produce their full effect until they are so ingrained as to have become unreflecting and spontaneous. When the exigencies of a philosophic scheme lead some writers on aesthetics to include such acts or traits of beautiful and expressive behaviour among the deliberate artistic activities of mankind, we feel that an essential distinction is being sacrificed to the exigencies of a system. That distinction common parlance very justly observes, with its opposition of “art” to “nature” and its phrase of “second nature” for those graces which have become so habitual as to seem instinctive, whether originally the result of discipline or not. When we see a person in all whose ordinary movements there are freedom and beauty, we put down the charm of these with good reason to inherited and inbred aptitudes of which the person has never thought or long since ceased to think, and could not still be thinking without spoiling the charm by self-consciousness; and we call the result a gift of nature. But when we go on to notice that the same person is beautifully and appropriately dressed, since we know that it is impossible to dress without thinking of it, we put down the charm of this to judicious forethought and calculation and call the result a work of art.

The processes then of fine art, like those of all arts properly so called, are premeditated, and the property of every fine art is to give to the person exercising it a special kind of active pleasure, and a special kind of passive orThe active and the passive pleasures of fine art.receptive pleasure to the person witnessing the results of such exercise. This latter statement seems to imply that there exist in human societies a separate class producing works of fine art and another class enjoying them. Such an implication, in regard to advanced societies, is near enough the truth to be theoretically admitted (like the analogous assumption in political economy that there exist separate classes of producers and consumers). In developed communities the gifts and calling of the artist constitute in fact a separate profession of the creators or purveyors of fine art, while the rest of the community are its enjoyers or recipients. In the most primitive societies, apparently, this cannot have been so, and we can go back to an original or rudimentary stage of almost every fine art at which the separation between a class of producers or performers and a class of recipients hardly exists. Such an original or rudimentary stage of the dramatic art is presented by children, who will occupy themselves for ever with mimicry and make-believe for their own satisfaction, with small regard or none to the presence or absence of witnesses. The original or rudimentary type of the profession of imitative sculptors or painters is the cave-dweller of prehistoric ages, who, when he rested from his day’s hunting, first took up the bone handle of his weapon, and with a flint either carved it into the shape, or on its surface scratched the outlines, of the animals of the chase. The original or rudimentary type of the architect, considered not as a mere builder but as an artist, is the savage who, when his tribe had taken to live in tents or huts instead of caves, first arranged the skins and timbers of his tent or hut in one way because it pleased his eye, rather than in some other way which was as good for shelter. The original type of the artificer or adorner of implements, considered in the same light, was the other savage who first took it into his head to fashion his club or spear in one way rather than another for the pleasure of the eye only and not for any practical reason, and to ornament it with tufts or markings. In none of these cases, it would seem, can the primitive artist have had much reason for pleasing anybody but himself. Again, the original or rudimentary type of lyric song and dancing arose when the first reveller clapped hands and stamped or shouted in time, in honour of his god, in commemoration of a victory, or in mere obedience to the blind stirring of a rhythmic impulse within him. To some very remote and solitary ancestral savage the presence or absence of witnesses at such a display may in like manner have been indifferent; but very early in the history of the race the primitive dancer and singer joined hands and voices with others of his tribe, while others again sat apart and looked on at the performance, and the rite thus became both choral and social. A primitive type of the instrumental musician is the shepherd who first notched a reed and drew sounds from it while his sheep were cropping. The father of all artists in dress and personal adornment was the first wild man who tattooed himself or bedecked himself with shells and plumes. In both of these latter instances, it may be taken as certain, the primitive artist had the motive of pleasing not himself only, but his mate, or the female whom he desired to be his mate, and in the last instance of all the further motive of impressing his fellow-tribesmen and striking awe or envy into his enemies. The tendency of recent speculation and research concerning the origins of art has been to ascribe the primitive artistic activities of man less and less to individual and solitary impulse, and more and more to social impulse and the desire of sharing and communicating pleasure. (The writer who has gone furthest in developing this view, and on grounds of the most careful study of evidence, has been Dr Yrjö Hirn of Helsingfors.) Whatever relative parts the individual and the social impulses may have in fact played at the outset, it is clear that what any one can enjoy or admire by himself, whether in the way of mimicry, of rhythmical movements or utterances, of imitative or ornamental carving and drawing, of the disposition and adornment of dwelling-places and utensils—the same things, it is clear, others are able also to enjoy or admire with him. And so, with the growth of societies, it came about that one class of persons separated themselves and became the ministers or producers of this kind of pleasures, while the rest became the persons ministered to, the participators in or recipients of the pleasures. Artists are those members of a society who are so constituted as to feel more acutely than the rest certain classes of pleasures which all can feel in their degree. By this fact of their constitution they are impelled to devote their active powers to the production of such pleasures, to the making or doing of some of those things which they enjoy so keenly when they are made and done by others. At the same time the artist does not, by assuming these ministering or creative functions, surrender his enjoying or receptive functions. He continues to participate in the pleasures of which he is himself the cause, and remains a conscious member of his own public. The architect, sculptor, painter, are able respectivelyto stand off from and appreciate the results of their own labours; the singer enjoys the sound of his own voice, and the musician of his own instrument; the poet, according to his temperament, furnishes the most enthusiastic or the most fastidious reader for his own stanzas. Neither, on the other hand, does the person who is a habitual recipient from others of the pleasures of fine art forfeit the privilege of producing them according to his capabilities, and of becoming, if he has the power, anamateuror occasional artist.

Most of the common properties which have been recognized by consent as peculiar to the group of fine arts will be found on examination to be implied in, or deducible from, the one fundamental character generally claimed forPleasures of fine art disinterested.them, namely, that they exist independently of direct practical necessity or utility. Let us take, first, a point relating to the frame of mind of the recipient, as distinguished from the producer, of the pleasures of fine art. It is an observation as old as Aristotle that such pleasures differ from most other pleasures of experience in that they are disinterested, in the sense that they are not such as nourish a man’s body nor add to his riches; they are not such as can gratify him, when he receives them, by the sense of advantage or superiority over his fellow-creatures; they are not such as one human being can in any sense receive exclusively from the object which bestows them. Thus it is evidently characteristic of a beautiful building that its beauty cannot be monopolized, but can be seen and admired by the inhabitants of a whole city and by all visitors for all generations. The same thing is true of a picture or a statue, except in so far as an individual possessor may choose to keep such a possession to himself, in which case his pride in exclusive ownership is a sentiment wholly independent of his pleasure in artistic contemplation. Similarly, music is composed to be sung or played for the enjoyment of many at a time, and for such enjoyment a hundred years hence as much as to-day. Poetry is written to be read by all readers for ever who care for the ideas and feelings of the poet, and can apprehend the meaning and melody of his language. Hence, though we can speak of a class of the producers of fine art, we cannot speak of a class of its consumers, only of its recipients or enjoyers. If we consider other pleasures which might seem to be analogous to those of fine art, but to which common consent yet declines to allow that character, we shall see that one reason is that such pleasures are not in their nature thus disinterested. Thus the sense of smell and taste have pleasures of their own like the senses of sight and hearing, and pleasures neither less poignant nor very much less capable of fine graduation and discrimination than those. Why, then, is the title of fine art not claimed for any skill in arranging and combining them? Why are there no recognized arts of savours and scents corresponding in rank to the arts of forms, colours and sounds—or at least none among Western nations, for in Japan, it seems, there is a recognized and finely regulated social art of the combination and succession of perfumes? An answer commonly given is that sight and hearing are intellectual and therefore higher senses, that through them we have our avenues to all knowledge and all ideas of things outside us; while taste and smell are unintellectual and therefore lower senses, through which few such impressions find their way to us as help to build up our knowledge and our ideas. Perhaps a more satisfactory reason why there are no fine arts of taste and smell—or let us in deference to Japanese modes leave out smell, and say of taste only—is this, that savours yield only private pleasures, which it is not possible to build up into separate and durable schemes such that every one may have the benefit of them, and such as cannot be monopolized or used up. If against this it is contended that what the programme of a performance is in the musical art, the same is amenuin the culinary, and that practically it is no less possible to serve up a thousand times and to a thousand different companies the same dinner than the same symphony, we must fall back upon that still more fundamental form of the distinction between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic bodily senses, upon which the physiological psychologists of the English school lay stress. We must say that the pleasures of taste cannot be pleasures of fine art, because their enjoyment is too closely associated with the most indispensable and the most strictly personal of utilities, eating and drinking. To pass from these lower pleasures to the highest; consider the nature of the delight derived from the contemplation, by the person who is their object, of the signs and manifestations of love. That at least is a beautiful experience; why is the pleasure which it affords not an artistic pleasure either? Why, in order to receive an artistic pleasure from human signs and manifestations of this kind, are we compelled to go to the theatre and see them exhibited in favour of a third person who is not really their object any more than ourselves? This is so, for one reason, evidently, because of the difference between art and nature. Not to art, but to nature and life, belongs love where it is really felt, with its attendant train of vivid hopes, fears, passions and contingencies. To art belongs love displayed where it is not really felt; and in this sphere, along with reality and spontaneousness of the display, and along with its momentous bearings, there disappear all those elements of pleasure in its contemplation which are not disinterested—the elements of personal exultation and self-congratulation, the pride of exclusive possession or acceptance, all these emotions, in short, which are summed up in the lover’s triumphant monosyllable, “Mine.” Thus, from the lowest point of the scale to the highest, we may observe that the element of personal advantage or monopoly in human gratifications seems to exclude, them from the kingdom of fine art. The pleasures of fine art, so far as concerns their passive or receptive part, seem to define themselves as pleasures of gratified contemplation, but of such contemplation only when it is disinterested—which is simply another way of saying, when it is unconcerned with ideas of utility.

Modern speculation has tended in some degree to modify and obscure this old and established view of the pleasures of fine art by urging that the hearer or spectator is not after all so free from self-interest as he seems; that in theAn objection and its answer.act of artistic contemplation he experiences an enhancement or expansion of his being which is in truth a gain of the egoistic kind; that in witnessing a play, for instance, a large part of his enjoyment consists in sympathetically identifying himself with the successful lover or the virtuous hero. All this may be true, but does not really affect the argument, since at the same time he is well aware that every other spectator or auditor present may be similarly engaged with himself. At most the objection only requires us to define a little more closely, and to say that the satisfactions of the ego excluded from among the pleasures of fine art are not these ideal, sympathetic, indirect satisfactions, which every one can share together, but only those which arise from direct, private and incommunicable advantage to the individual.

Next, let us consider another generally accepted observation concerning the nature of the fine arts, and one, this time, relating to the disposition and state of mind of the practising artist himself. While for success in other arts it is onlyFine arts cannot be practised by rule and precept.necessary to learn their rules and to apply them until practice gives facility, in the fine arts, it is commonly and justly said, rules and their application will carry but a little way towards success. All that can depend on rules, on knowledge, and on the application of knowledge by practice, the artist must indeed acquire, and the acquisition is often very complicated and laborious. But outside of and beyond such acquisitions he must trust to what is called genius or imagination, that is, to the spontaneous working together of an incalculably complex group of faculties, reminiscences, preferences, emotions, instincts in his constitution. This characteristic of the activities of the artist is a direct consequence or corollary of the fundamental fact that the art he practices is independent of utility. A utilitarian end is necessarily a determinate and prescribed end, and to every end which is determinate and prescribed there must be one road which is the best. Skill in any useful art means knowing practically, by rules and the application of rules, the best road to the particularends of that art. Thus the farmer, the engineer, the carpenter, the builder so far as he is not concerned with the look of his buildings, the weaver so far as he is not concerned with the designing of the patterns which he weaves, possesses each his peculiar skill, but a skill to which fixed problems are set, and which, if it indulges in new inventions and combinations at all, can indulge them only for the sake of an improved solution of those particular problems. The solution once found, the invention once made, its rules can be written down, or at any rate its practice can be imparted to others who will apply it in their turn. Whereas no man can write down, in a way that others can act upon, how Beethoven conquered unknown kingdoms in the world of harmony, or how Rembrandt turned the aspects of gloom, squalor and affliction into pictures as worthy of contemplation as those into which the Italians before him had turned the aspects of spiritual exaltation and shadowless day. The reason why the operations of the artist thus differ from the operations of the ordinary craftsman or artificer is that his ends, being ends other than useful, are not determinate nor fixed as theirs are. He has large liberty to choose his own problems, and may solve each of them in a thousand different ways according to the prompting of his own ordering or creating instincts. The musical composer has the largest liberty of all. Having learned what is learnable in his art, having mastered the complicated and laborious rules of musical form, having next determined the particular class of the work which he is about to compose, he has then before him the whole inexhaustible world of appropriate successions and combinations of emotional sound. He is merely directed and not fettered, in the case of song, cantata, oratorio or opera, by the sense of the words which he has to set. The value of the result depends absolutely on his possessing or failing to possess powers which can neither be trained in nor communicated to any man. And this double freedom, alike from practical service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts. Architecture shares one-half of this freedom. It has not to copy or represent natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its aid; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether. The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest; but upon this sphere he can only enter on condition that he at the same time fulfils the strict practical task of supplying the required accommodation, and obeys the strict mechanical necessities imposed by the laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance and other properties of solid matter. The sculptor again, the painter, the poet, has each in like manner his sphere of necessary facts, rules and conditions corresponding to the nature of his task. The sculptor must be intimately versed both in the surface aspects and the inner mechanism of the human frame alike in rest and motion, and in the rules and conditions for its representation in solid form; the painter in a much more extended range of natural facts and appearances, and the rules and conditions for representing them on a plane surface; the poet’s art of words has its own not inconsiderable basis of positive and disciplined acquisition. So far as rules, precepts, formulas and other communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist’s operation, its very bloom and virtue, lies in those parts of it which fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on the other. His merit varies according to the felicity with which he is able, in that region, to exercise his free choice and frame his individual ideal, and according to the tenacity with which he strives to grasp and realize his choice, or to attain perfection according to that ideal.

In this connexion the question naturally arises, In what way do the progress and expansion of mechanical art affect the power and province of fine art? The great practical movement of the world in our age is a movement for the development ofFine arts and machinery: “art manufactures.”mechanical inventions and multiplication of mechanical products. So far as these inventions are applied to purposes purely useful, and so far as their products to not profess to offer anything delightful to contemplation, this movement in no way concerns our argument. But there is a vast multitude of products which do profess qualities of pleasantness, and upon which the ornaments intended to make them pleasurable are bestowed by machinery; and in speaking of these we are accustomed to the phrases art-industry, industrial art, art manufactures and the like. In these cases the industry or ingenuity which directs the machine is not fine art at all, since the object of the machine is simply to multiply as easily and as perfectly as possible a definite and prescribed impress or pattern. This is equally true whether the machine is a simple one, like the engraver’s press, for producing and multiplying impressions from an engraved plate, or a highly complex one, like the loom, in which elaborate patterns of carpet or curtain are set for weaving. In both cases there exists behind the mechanical industry an industry which is one of fine art in its degree. In the case of the engraver’s press, there exists behind the industry of the printer the art of the engraver, which, if the engraver is also the free inventor of the design, is then a fine art, or, if he is but the interpreter of the invention of another, is then in its turn a semi-mechanical skill applied in aid of the fine art of the first inventor. In the case of the weaver’s loom there is, behind the mechanical industry which directs the loom at its given task, the fine art, or what ought to be the fine art, of the designer who has contrived the pattern. In the case of the engraving, the mechanical industry of printing only exists for the sake of bringing out and disseminating abroad the fine art employed upon the design. In the case of the carpet or curtain, the fine art is often only called in to make the product of the useful or mechanical industry of the loom acceptable, since the eye of man is so constituted as to receive pleasure or the reverse of pleasure from whatever it rests upon, and it is to the interest of the manufacturer to have his product so made as to give pleasure if it can. Whether the machine is thus a humble servant to the artist, or the artist a kind of humble purveyor to the machine, the fine art in the result is due to the former alone; and in any case it reaches the recipient at second-hand, having been put in circulation by a medium not artistic but mechanical.

Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical contrivances but to their invention; is not, it may be inquired, the title of artist due to the inventor of some of the astonishingly complex and astonishingly efficientPerfected machines: are they works of fine art?machines of modern-times? Does he not spend as much thought, labour, genius as any sculptor or musician in perfecting his construction according to his ideal, and is not the construction when it is done—so finished, so responsive in all its parts, so almost human—is not that worthy to be called a work of fine art? The answer is that the inventor has a definite and practical end before him; his ideal is notfree; he deserves all credit as the perfector of a particular instrument for a prescribed function, but an artist, a free follower of the fine arts, he is not; although we may perhaps have to concede him a narrow sphere for the play of something like an artistic sense when he contrives the proportion, arrangement, form or finish of the several parts of his machine in one way rather than another, not because they work better so but simply because their look pleases him better.

Returning from this digression, let us consider one common observation more on the nature of the fine arts. They are activities, it is said, which were put forth not because they need but because they like. They have theFine arts called a kind of play.activity to spare, and to put it forth in this way pleases them. Fine art is to mankind what play is to the individual, a free and arbitrary vent for energy which is not needed to be spent upon tasks concerned with the conservation, perpetuation or protection of life. To insist on the superfluous or optional character of the fine arts, to call them the play or pastime of the human race as distinguished from its inevitable and sterner tasks, is obviously only to reiterate our fundamentaldistinction between the fine arts and the useful or necessary. But the distinction, as expressed in this particular form, has been interpreted in a great variety of ways and followed out to an infinity of conclusions, conclusions regarding both the nature of the activities themselves and the character and value of their results.

For instance, starting from this saying that the aesthetic activities are a kind of play, the English psychology of association goes back to the spontaneous cries and movements of children, in which their superfluous energies find aThe play idea as worked out by the English associationists.vent. It then enumerates pleasures of which the human constitution is capable apart from direct advantage or utility. Such are the primitive or organic pleasures of sight and hearing, and the secondary or derivative pleasures of association or unconscious reminiscence and inference that soon become mixed up with these. Such are also the pleasures derived from following any kind of mimicry, or representation of things real or like reality. The association psychology describes the grouping within the mind of predilections based upon these pleasures; it shows how the growing organism learns to govern its play, or direct its superfluous energies, in obedience to such predilections, till in mature individuals, and still more in mature societies, a highly regulated and accomplished group of leisure activities are habitually employed in supplying to a not less highly cultivated group of disinterested sensibilities their appropriate artistic pleasures. It is by Herbert Spencer that this view has been most fully and systematically worked out.

Again, in the views of an ancient philosopher, Plato, and a modern poet, Schiller, the consideration that the artistic activities are in the nature of play, and the manifestations in which they result independent of realities and utilities,By Plato.has led to judgments so differing as the following. Plato held that the daily realities of things in experience are not realities, indeed, but only far-off shows or reflections of the true realities, that is, of certain ideal or essential forms which can be apprehended as existing by the mind. Holding this, Plato saw in the works of fine art but the reflections of reflections, the shows of shows, and depreciated them according to their degree of remoteness from the ideal, typical or sense-transcending existences. He sets the arts of medicine, agriculture, shoemaking and the rest above the fine arts, inasmuch as they produce something serious or useful (σπουδαῖόντι). Fine art, he says, produces nothing useful, and makes only semblances (εἰδωλοποιϊκή), whereas what mechanical art produces are utilities, and even in the ordinary sense realities (αὐτοποιητική).

In another age, and thinking according to another system, Schiller, so far from holding thus cheap the kingdom of play and show, regarded his sovereignty over that kingdom as the noblest prerogative of man. Schiller wrote hisBy Schiller.famousLetters on the Aesthetic Education of Manin order to throw into popular currency, and at the same time to modify and follow up in a particular direction, certain metaphysical doctrines which had lately been launched upon the schools by Kant. The spirit of man, said Schiller after Kant, is placed between two worlds, the physical world or world of sense, and the moral world or world of will. Both of these are worlds of constraint or necessity. In the sensible world, the spirit of man submits to constraint from without; in the moral world, it imposes constraint from within. So far as man yields to the importunities of sense, in so far he is bound and passive, the subject of outward shocks and victim of irrational forces. So far as he asserts himself by the exercise of will, imposing upon sense and outward things the dominion of the moral law within him, in so far he is free and active, the rational lord of nature and not her slave. Corresponding to these two worlds, he has within him two conflicting impulses or impulsions of his nature, the one driving him towards one way of living, the other towards another. The one, or sense-impulsion (Stofftrieb), Schiller thinks of as that which enslaves the spirit of man as the victim of matter, the other or moral impulsion (Formtrieb) as that which enthrones it as the dictator of form. Between the two the conflict at first seems inveterate. The kingdom of brute nature and sense, the sphere of man’s subjection and passivity, wages war against the kingdom of will and moral law, the sphere of his activity and control, and every conquest of the one is an encroachment upon the other. Is there, then, no hope of truce between the two kingdoms, no ground where the two contending impulses can be reconciled? Nay, the answer comes, there is such a hope; such a neutral territory there exists. Between the passive kingdom of matter and sense, where man is compelled blindly to feel and be, and the active kingdom of law and reason, where he is compelled sternly to will and act, there is a kingdom where both sense and will may have their way, and where man may give the rein to all his powers. But this middle kingdom does not lie in the sphere of practical life and conduct. It lies in the sphere of those activities which neither subserve any necessity of nature nor fulfil any moral duty. Towards activities of this kind we are driven by a third impulsion of our nature not less essential to it than the other two, the impulsion, as Schiller calls it, of Play (Spieltrieb). Relatively to real life and conduct, play is a kind of harmless show; it is that which we are free to do or leave undone as we please, and which lies alike outside the sphere of needs and duties. In play we may do as we like, and no mischief will come of it. In this sphere man may put forth all his powers without risk of conflict, and may invent activities which will give a complete ideal satisfaction to the contending faculties of sense and will at once, to the impulses which bid him feel and enjoy the shocks of physical and outward things, and the impulse which bids him master such things, control and regulate them. In play you may impose upon Matter what Form you choose, and the two will not interfere with one another or clash. The kingdom of Matter and the kingdom of Form thus harmonized, thus reconciled by the activities of play and show, will in other words be the kingdom of the Beautiful. Follow the impulsion of play, and to the beautiful you will find your road; the activities you will find yourself putting forth will be the activities of aesthetic creation—you will have discovered or invented the fine arts. “Midway”—these are Schiller’s own words—“midway between the formidable kingdom of natural forces and the hallowed kingdom of moral laws, the impulse of aesthetic creation builds up a third kingdom unperceived, the gladsome kingdom of play and show, wherein it emancipates man from all compulsion alike of physical and of moral forces.” Schiller, the poet and enthusiast, thus making his own application of the Kantian metaphysics, goes on to set forth how the fine arts, or activities of play and show, are for him the typical, the ideal activities of the race, since in them alone is it possible for man to put forth his whole, that is his ideal self. “Only when he plays is man really and truly man.” “Man ought only to play with the beautiful, and he ought to play with the beautiful only.” “Education in taste and beauty has for its object to train up in the utmost attainable harmony the whole sum of the powers both of sense and spirit.” And the rest of Schiller’s argument is addressed to show how the activities of artistic creation, once invented, react upon other departments of human life, how the exercise of the play impulse prepares men for an existence in which the inevitable collision of the two other impulses shall be softened or averted more and more. That harmony of the powers which clash so violently in man’s primitive nature, having first been found possible in the sphere of the fine arts, reflects itself, in his judgment, upon the whole composition of man, and attunes him, as an aesthetic being, into new capabilities for the conduct of his social existence.

Our reasons for dwelling on this wide and enthusiastic formula of Schiller’s are both its importance in the history of reflection—it remained, indeed, for nearly a century a formula almost classical—and the measure of positive valueThe strong points of Schiller’s theory.which it still retains. The notion of a sphere of voluntary activity for the human spirit, in which, under no compulsion of necessity or conscience, we order matters as we like them apart from any practical end, seems coextensive with the widest conception of fine art and the fine arts as they exist in civilized and developed communities.It insists on and brings into the light the free or optional character of these activities, as distinguished from others to which we are compelled by necessity or duty, as well as the fact that these activities, superfluous as they may be from the points of view of necessity and of duty, spring nevertheless from an imperious and a saving instinct of our nature. It does justice to the part which is, or at any rate may be, filled in the world by pleasures which are apart from profit, and by delights for the enjoyment of which men cannot quarrel. It claims the dignity they deserve for those shows and pastimes in which we have found a way to make permanent all the transitory delights of life and nature, to turn even our griefs and yearnings, by their artistic utterance, into sources of appeasing joy, to make amends to ourselves for the confusion and imperfection of reality by conceiving and imaging forth the semblances of things clearer and more complete, since in contriving them we incorporate with the experiences we have had the better experiences we have dreamed of and longed for.

One manifestly weak point of Schiller’s theory is that though it asserts that man ought only to play with the beautiful, and that he is his best or ideal self only when he does so, yet it does not sufficiently indicate what kinds ofIts weak points.play are beautiful nor why we are moved to adopt them. It does not show how the delights of the eye and spirit in contemplating forms, colours and movements, of the ear and spirit in apprehending musical and verbal sounds, or of the whole mind at once in following the comprehensive current of images called up by poetry—it does not clearly show how delights like these differ from those yielded by other kinds of play or pastime, which are by common consent excluded from the sphere of fine art.

The chase, for instance, is a play or pastime which gives scope for any amount of premeditated skill; it has pleasures, for those who take part in it, which are in some degree analogous to the pleasures of the artist; we all knowKinds of play which are not fine art.the claims made on behalf of the noble art of venerie (following true medieval precedent) by the knights and woodmen of Sir Walter Scott’s romances. It is an obvious reply to say that though the chase is play to us, who in civilized communities follow it on no plea of necessity, yet to a not remote ancestry it was earnest; in primitive societies hunting does not belong to the class of optional activities at all, but is among the most pressing of utilitarian needs. But this reply loses much of its force since we have learnt how many of the fine arts, however emancipated from direct utility now, have as a matter of history been evolved out of activities primarily utilitarian. It would be more to the point to remark that the pleasures of the sportsman are the only pleasures arising from the chase; his exertions afford pain to the victim, and no satisfaction to any class of recipients but himself; or at least the sympathetic pleasures of the lookers-on at a hunt or at a battle are hardly to be counted as pleasures of artistic contemplation. The issue which they witness is a real issue; the skilled endeavours with which they sympathize are put forth for a definite practical result, and a result disastrous to one of the parties concerned.

Back to Index Next