Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie draws a bright line between two moral operating systems: the negotiated ethics of “civilized” life and the absolute, self-authored code of the “Heroic Age.” The sentence is built like a seesaw. “Balance” and “general welfare” signal a modern, institutional imagination - morality as social engineering, a settlement between private appetite and public stability. It’s an ethics of contracts, laws, and compromises, the kind that makes cities function and empires administrable.

Then comes the turn: heroic morality isn’t a better balance; it’s a different species. “Founded on individuality, and on nothing else” has the ring of myth: Achilles’ wrath, Beowulf’s pride, the lone figure whose honor is its own justification. Abercrombie is not naively praising selfishness; he’s isolating the engine that makes heroic narratives go. Epics need people who refuse the softening logic of the collective. A hero who consults “general welfare” before acting is already halfway to being a bureaucrat.

The subtext is early 20th-century unease about modernity’s moral arithmetic. Abercrombie, writing in the shadow of industrial mass society and on the eve (or memory) of mechanized war, understands how “civilized morals” can feel like a reduction: virtue as compliance, goodness as managed equilibrium. His move is to remind readers that older moral glamour came from extremity - from the dangerous pleasure of watching an individual treat their own will as the only court of appeal.

It’s also a quiet warning. Heroic individuality is thrilling because it’s unbalanced. The same fuel that makes legend also makes collateral damage.