32 Quotes by Arnold Hauser

But it was not forgotten that an outside historical influence is never the ultimate reason for an intellectual revolution, for such an influence can become effective only if the preconditions fro its reception are already in existence.

No, the shepherd’s life in poetry has always been an ideal in which the negative features, the tearing of oneself away from the great world and the disregarding of its customs, have been the decisive elements. It was a kind of sport to imagine oneself in a situation which held the promise of liberation from the fetters of civilization whilst retaining its advantages.

The Tyrants who, at the end of the seventh century, had everywhere gained control, first in the leading Ionian states and then on the mainland, signify a decisive victory for individualism over the ideology of kinship. In this respect, as in others, they form the bridge to democracy, many of whose conquests they anticipate, for all their own undemocratic character.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.

The reaction against utilitarianism was a second romanticism, in which the fight against social injustice and the opposition to the actual theories of the "dismal science" played a much smaller part than the urge to escape from the present, whose problems the anti-utilitarians had no ability and no desire to solve, into the irrarionalism of Burke, Coleridge, and German romanticism.

He could do nothing else but follow this intrinsically conservative tendency, conservative because tending towards a timeless and abstract canon of form, but nevertheless progressive in the stylistic situation of the time.

Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words— a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

It is not the experience which leads him to the problem, but the problem which leads him to the experience. That is also Zola’s method and procedure. He begins a new novel as the German professor of the anecdote begins a new course of lectures, in order to obtain more exact information about a subject with which he is unfamiliar.