Wit & Attitude Quote by George Saintsbury

A critic’s compliment, sharpened into a warning: yes, the thing you love is valuable, but worshipping it makes you stupid. Saintsbury’s “gold” is deliberately double-edged. It concedes prestige and pleasure (gold as the highest standard), then deflates the reader’s impulse to turn preference into doctrine. The sentence performs that deflation in public, with the cool authority of someone who has watched literary fashion harden into a creed.

The target is aesthetic monomania: the habit of treating one “style of fiction” as the only serious one, the only morally or artistically legitimate form. Saintsbury’s choice of “fanatic” is doing cultural work. It drags the debate out of the parlor of taste and into the arena of zealotry, where arguments stop being about books and start being about identity, tribe, and purity. Then he twists the knife with “rather foolish,” a genteel insult that lands precisely because it’s understated; the fanatic isn’t evil, just embarrassingly narrow.

Context matters: late Victorian and early 20th-century criticism was full of manifestos and counter-manifestos, with realism, romance, naturalism, and aestheticism all angling for supremacy. Saintsbury, a professional reader with long memory, resists the era’s hunger for definitive rankings. “Summed up and exhausted” is bureaucratic language applied to art, and that’s the point: it mocks the fantasy that fiction’s value can be audited and closed.

The intent isn’t relativism; it’s pluralism with standards. Gold is real. It’s just not the only currency.