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Aug 24thMORE EMPATHY …
George Eliot, in 1856, quoted by Ben Winyard and Holly Furneaux in “Dickens, Science and the Victorian Literary Imagination”:
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment
