Love Quote by George Saintsbury

Saintsbury opens like a man deliberately wading into a flood he has no intention of swimming. “To pass to the deluge, and beyond it” is a sly bit of scholarly stagecraft: he signals that the question he’s about to raise has already drowned better minds than ours, then keeps walking anyway. The phrasing is mock-heroic, as if literary history were a battlefield and the critic’s job were to “come to close quarters” with it. But the real move is the retreat hidden inside the advance.

Calling the origin of Romance “a very debatable subject” sets up the expected academic sport. Then he undercuts that sport with a clinician’s dismissal: “the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.” Saintsbury isn’t merely hedging; he’s policing the conversation. The subtext is a critique of the philological obsession of his era, when nineteenth-century literary scholarship often prized provenance, classification, and origin stories as the highest form of seriousness. He’s skeptical of that prestige. Origins, he implies, are an attractive trap: endless argument, little payoff, lots of reputational noise.

The intent, then, is to reframe authority. Saintsbury gestures toward vast learning, but he claims wisdom by refusing the noisy contest of certainty. He wants permission to move from genealogies to textures: from “where did Romance begin?” to “what does Romance do, and why does it endure?” It’s an argument for criticism as judgment and sensibility rather than forensic proof. The irony is that even this refusal is a power play: he wins the debate by declaring it not worth having.