Life & Wisdom Quote by Eduard Hanslick

Hanslick is doing something sly here: he sounds like he is handing sentimentality its due, only to quietly cordon it off. If beauty is apprehended through imagination, then art does not operate like a syringe for emotion. It doesn’t inject feeling; it provokes the mind to generate feeling as a secondary effect. That “grant that” is a rhetorical feint, a lawyerly move that frames his premise as common sense while smuggling in his larger agenda: to defend art (especially music) against the 19th-century demand that it narrate, confess, or morally instruct.

The key word is “indirectly.” Hanslick isn’t denying that art moves people; he’s denying that the movement is the art’s primary job or its measurable content. Subtext: the audience’s tears are not evidence of artistic truth, just evidence of an imaginative reaction. This is aesthetic anti-populism in a velvet glove. He’s shifting authority away from the spectator’s feelings and back toward form, structure, and the internal logic of the artwork.

Context matters: Hanslick wrote in a period when Romanticism had elevated personal emotion into a kind of artistic currency, and when music in particular was being treated as a language of the soul. His line pushes back, insisting that the artwork’s power is mediated, not raw. The implication is bracingly modern: if feelings are indirect, they’re also variable, culturally conditioned, even manipulable. That makes art less like a diary entry and more like a machine for producing meaning in the viewer’s head, with all the unsettling responsibility that entails.