Posted Wednesday morning, November 25, 2020.
Detail from a portrait of Leonard Woolf by his wife Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell, 1940. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
"Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to be or remain a civilized man."
---Leonard Woolf, born 140 years ago today.
Robert E. Howard wrote:
Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.
Howard also wrote:
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
J.R. R. Tolkien read Howard's Conan stories. I don't know whether Leonard Woolf did.
Posted by: Charles Sperling | Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 05:27 PM