Life & Wisdom Quote by George Saintsbury

A whole century “loathed” melancholy? Saintsbury isn’t just summarizing mood; he’s poking at a cultural self-image that liked to call itself rational, sociable, and well-lit. The line works because it’s both sweeping and sly: “on the whole” pretends to be careful scholarship even as “loathed” lands like a verdict. That tension is the tell. Saintsbury is writing from the long shadow of Victorian sensibility, with its cultivated seriousness and taste for interior weather, and he’s eyeing the eighteenth century as an era that treated sadness less as insight than as bad manners.

The subtext is a map of public taste. In the eighteenth-century salon, coffeehouse, and drawing room, melancholy is socially inconvenient: it stalls conversation, disrupts the performance of ease, threatens the Enlightenment fantasy that problems can be talked through, categorized, improved. What replaces it is “cheerfulness” as civic virtue and politeness as emotional discipline. Even when the era makes room for feeling - the “man of sensibility,” sentimental fiction, early graveyard poetry - it often packages emotion into controlled forms: tears you can applaud, gloom you can aestheticize, pain that proves refinement rather than destabilizing the room.

Saintsbury’s intent is also polemical. By charging the century with an aversion, he sets up a contrast with the Romantic turn, where melancholy becomes credential, even glamour. The sentence is a tiny hinge in literary history: it frames melancholy not as timeless temperament but as something cultures authorize or repress, depending on what kind of person they want to manufacture.