Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/204

 194 F I N F I N ized by the licentia 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 the nots, or abstract of the proceedings, and the foot of 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 reversionary interest only, itc. 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, &quot;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.&quot; This barring by non-claim was 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 accord ing 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 statute 3 and 4 Will. IV. c. 74, 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 the vouchee, 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 a real action, such lands when recovered would have fallen under the settle ment 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 to form, 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. (E. E.) THE FINE AETS Prelimi nary de finition. Conflict ing re sults of inquiry iiitn the nature of beauty. FINE ART is the abstract or collective name given to the results of a whole group of human activities; the activities themselves which constitute the group being severally called the FFNE AETS. 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, schone Kunste). The fine or beautiful arts, then, are those among the arts of man which minister, not to his material necessities or con veniences, but to his love of beauty (using the word beauty in its widest sense); or 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 give pleasure by the aspect of strength, fitness, harmony and proportion of the masses, by disposition and contrast of light and shade, by colour and enrichment, by variety and relation of lines, surfaces, and intervals. There is no difference of opinion concerning the nature of fine art and the fine arts as thus generally described, and as contra-distinguished from art and the arts mechanical. It is acknowledged that the one set of arts exists to satisfy practical needs, and the other set exists to give delight and satisfy the sense of beauty, while as to an intermediate set of arts which exist for both purposes, it is possible to dis tinguish in each case the part which is beautiful or pleasur able from the part which is mechanical or merely useful. But as soon as we inquire further, and seek for more precise definitions, we find ourselves confronted with a mass of speculation and discussion as formidable as has been accumu lated in any department of human thought. Granting that the fine arts are those of which the end is beauty, or beauty and use conjointly, the question next arises, what is beauty 1 and next, how does the beauty of art differ from the beauty of nature ? and then, what place do the arts of beauty hold in the general scheme of things 1 what are the relations of these activities and their results to the idea of the universe, to the faculties of man, and to each other ? To such inquiries as these, enormous in extent and enormous in complexity, a separate place has been given in modern philosophy under the name ^Esthetics. &quot;It is the province of aesthetics,&quot; says Professor Ruskin, &quot; to tell you (if you did not know it before) that the taste and colour of a peach are pleasant, and to ascertain (if it be ascertainable, and you have any curiosity to know) why they are so.&quot; But in a less sarcastic and more extended definition, it would be said that the name Esthetics is intended to designate a scientific doctrine or account of beauty in nature and art, and of the faculties for enjoying and for originating beauty which exist in man. Instead, however, of an accepted or uniform science, we find on these subjects a multitude of speculations as conflicting as they are voluminous ; but yet conflicting more in appearance than in reality, because the source of their contradictions lies less in difference of judg ment concerning the facts themselves, than in difference of doctrine concerning the abstract order of the universe in which those facts find a place, and in consequent diversity of method in arranging and of formula in interpreting the facts. Of the principal speculations of /ESTHETICS the reader Plan already possesses a synopsis under the proper heading. of the Our present task is of a different kind. We shall, indeed, J^tide as well as our space admits, endeavour to state what char- acters all the fine arts possess in common, and in what they severally differ from one another, as well as to lay down certain leading facts of their history ; in other words, we shall submit (1) a definition of fine art in general, (2) a definition and classification of the fine arts severally, (3) some observations on their historical development. But in so doing, we shall not profess even to state the deeper pro blems either of metaphysics or psychology which will lie to right and left of our path, still less, as the exponents of any