Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Heroism, Abercrombie insists, isn’t a medal you pin on history after the fact; it’s an atmosphere a culture breathes. The line reads like a rebuke to the modern habit of treating “heroic” as a highlight reel of deeds. For him, heroic poetry can’t be manufactured by collecting brave actions and arranging them into verse. It requires an “heroic age” first: a shared imaginative world where courage, fate, honor, and the supernatural aren’t niche aesthetics but the operating system.

That reversal - an age is heroic because of what it is, not what it does - is the trick. It quietly shifts the burden from individual accomplishment to collective self-understanding. People in an heroic age don’t perform heroism to impress posterity; they live inside a moral and metaphysical framework that makes extreme action feel not exceptional but necessary. Epic isn’t journalism with better metaphors. It’s a social consensus rendered in story: who counts as fully human, what violence means, what glory is worth, what gods (or abstractions) are watching.

Abercrombie, writing in the early 20th century, is also reading the room. Industrial modernity had made “heroic” feel both irresistible and suspicious - ripe for nostalgia, propaganda, and the cheapening of grandeur. His point has bite: you can stage grand gestures in a non-heroic age, but the poetry will ring hollow because the audience no longer shares the old premises. The quote isn’t denying courage; it’s diagnosing a cultural mismatch between modern consciousness and epic form.