Life & Wisdom Quote by George Saintsbury

Saintsbury is warning you that “realism” is only as solid as the reality it raids, and his reality was shifting underfoot. Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was in a churn of class mobility, new money, mass literacy, and accelerated urban life; manners and language, the social GPS of the novel, were being recalibrated in public. When he calls this a “transition state,” he’s naming a cultural awkwardness: the codes that used to tell you who belonged where no longer reliably do. The result is not just social confusion but artistic risk.

The bite of the passage is in its double-ended pressure. “Both ends” means society and art, model and material. If the “model to copy” is uncertain, the novelist can’t safely build character by reading speech and etiquette as stable signals of rank or morality. If the “materials” are unstable, even the medium - idiom, slang, levels of formality - won’t sit still long enough to become style. Saintsbury’s subtext is quietly conservative but not simple nostalgia: he’s defending craft. A novel that depends on fine-grained observation needs a legible world, not a kaleidoscope.

There’s also an implied critique of “affected” change: manners and language aren’t merely evolving; they’re being performed, imitated, and gamed. In that atmosphere, the artist of “fictitious life” risks becoming a copier of poses rather than a recorder of truth. Saintsbury insists on this point “too often” because modernity keeps tempting writers to confuse novelty with insight.