Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Progress, Abercrombie insists, is a messy spiral, not an arrow. The phrasing sounds almost scientific - "development", "process", "series" - but it’s a poet’s way of smuggling in a worldview: history advances by looping, revisiting its old stories under new conditions. Calling it "the epic process" is the giveaway. He’s not talking about data points; he’s talking about how societies narrate themselves, how they keep returning to foundational dramas: war and homecoming, revolution and restoration, exile and belonging.

The line’s craft is in its double refusal. First, it rejects the Victorian-into-Edwardian fantasy of inevitable straight-line improvement, a faith badly shaken by industrial upheaval and, soon, the mechanized catastrophe of World War I. Second, it rejects fatalism: "though not in exact repetition" is a brake on the lazy slogan that history simply repeats. Abercrombie sketches something subtler: recurrence with variation, like a refrain that changes meaning each time it comes back.

Subtextually, he’s defending the continued relevance of epic in a modern age that often treated it as obsolete. If society doesn’t move "straight forward", then the epic isn’t a museum form; it’s a recurring cultural tool for making sense of discontinuity. The sentence’s slightly clotted symmetry ("recurring process... recurring series") enacts what it describes, circling back on itself. Form becomes argument: we feel the loop as we read it, and the loop is the point.