Arnold Hauser on Getting Your Timing Right

In The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser achieves what many have attempted: he makes a kind of “Marxist art criticism” at once interesting and (somewhat) plausible. Necessarily, it works better with some people/works than others. Probably no single author suits Hauser’s purposes better than Stendhal:

The social problem consists … ion the face of these ambitious young people rising from the lower classes and uprooted by their education, who find themselves without money and without connections at the end of the revolutionary period, and who, deluded, on the one hand, by the opportunities of the Revolution, on the other, by Napoleon’s good fortune, want to play a role in society in accordance with their talents and ambitions. But now they discover that all power, all influence, all important posts are held by the old nobility and the new financial aaristocracy and that superior gifts and greater intelligence are being displaced everywhere by mediocrity. … [Julien Sorel, the hero of The Red and the Black] was born too late or too early, and stands between the times, just as he stands between the classes. Where does he belong, whose side is he really on? It is the old familiar question, the problem of romanticism … “

—Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art IV at 29 (RKP ed. 1962)