Time & Perspective Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie writes like someone watching a moral weather system change and realizing yesterday’s storms are today’s climate. The sentence is purposefully knotted, almost self-obstructing, because it’s trying to capture a slippery historical sensation: the way certain feelings harden into default settings. He’s not marveling at “progress” in a congratulatory way; he’s registering disbelief at how quickly the radical becomes routine.

The key move is his pairing of “conduct” with “the metaphysic of living.” He’s pointing past etiquette or policy toward the deeper architecture underneath them: what a culture takes to be real, valuable, and thinkable. “Sentiments” here aren’t Hallmark emotions; they’re shared moral reflexes that carry an “imperative” (you must act this way) and a metaphysical premise (this is what life is). When those sentiments become “habitual,” they stop presenting themselves as opinions and start posing as nature.

The subtext is a warning disguised as awe. If today’s ethical common sense was once not common at all, then our present certainties are historically contingent - achieved, not inevitable. That’s a bracing thought for a poet shaped by the early 20th century’s upheavals, when Victorian assurances were cracking and modernity was busy inventing new instincts: about nation, class, war, art, even the inner self.

His insistence on “by no means altogether habitual” leaves room for unevenness - the lag between declared ideals and lived reality. The line captures that awkward middle stage of cultural change, when a new worldview is spreading, but still not fully automatic. That’s exactly when literature tends to get most interesting.