_That self-examination to which every spectator is impelled by a
representation of human beings which he feels to be true and solely
pre-occupied with truth._
Let me quote the following passage concerning the civilizing effects of
such representation:--
‘This spectacle of man offered to man has considerable moral effects.
First, a valuable exercise of the intelligence, an increase of
reflection, a widening of the view in every direction, result from the
habit thus set up of getting out of oneself and entering into others,
to understand their actions, to share in their passions, sympathize
with their sufferings, appreciate their motives. This faculty of the
artist communicated to the spectator or the listener, this faculty of
participation and assimilation, is something set up in opposition to
egotism and is a condition of tolerance and benevolence, frequently
even of justice. Then, lessons of virtue, frequently not the least
effective, are given to the spectator, from the very fact that he
is placed in a position to praise or condemn acts or thoughts which
are set before him relative to cases where his own interests are not
involved. He recognizes his own image in the actor of the epic, a man
like himself, a voluntary and impassioned agent, whose dangers though
perhaps magnified are not foreign to his own experience. Then the
essential phenomena which characterize conscious humanity and morality
occur in him who thus witnesses himself in the person of another,
i.e. disinterested objectivity of himself to himself, generalization
of passion, motive and maxim, judgment founded on the universal,
self-examination to arrive at what is duty, clear and defined sentiment
of the direction of the will.
‘_But this must not lead us to think that the poet’s object is utility
or morality. If it were, he would be lacking in the true feeling of
art._ Teaching, moralizing--this object of the artist is indirect, i.e.
does not exist systematically for him. He must only attain it without
having sought it, and sometimes he attains it when he seems to have
departed from it. What he desires to do, is to touch the feelings,
to arouse emotions. But it happens that by doing so he elevates,
purifies, moralizes. The poet (I am especially speaking of him) does
indeed address himself to everyone. _That means he can only sing the
universal_, however curious such an assembly of words may appear. He
may indeed sing it under the form of the particular, without which
his fictions would be lacking in life, he none the less excludes the
pure, incomprehensible, inexplicable individual, shorn of all truth
if he does not express a relationship.[181] He generalizes passion,
therefore ennobles it and renders it at once the object of observation,
reflection and disinterested emotion. The listener, carried away from
his own relatively base private preoccupations and transported without
hope or fear (at least, too personal and too present hope and fear)
into the superior sphere of humanity’s common passion, feels the
benefit of an elevation of soul; his consciousness is temporarily freed
from egotism.’ (Renouvier, _Introduction à la philosophie analytique de
l’Histoire_, p. 354.)