Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, _Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These men anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.
Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these Italians when he gave us his correct interpretation of the passage in the preface to _Samson Agonistes_. Milton properly understood Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper and reduce them (the passions) to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated."
We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function of tragedy from a passage in his _Politics_. He was thinking of the relief the spectators' surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing similar emotions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri Weil and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish classical scholars of Germany. Bernays states moreover in his work,[180:A] first published in 1857, that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us. Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his _History of Aesthetics_, believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to admit that even _Vanity Fair_ and _Cousin Bette_ would come within the definition of tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his own emotions expressed in these works no less than in Sophocles and obtains relief when he reads them. Bosanquet further admits that any serious and even formless portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in Aristotle's theory."