Prince Paul Troubetzkoy is one of the few geniuses of whom it is not only safe but necessary to speak in superlatives. He is the most astonishing sculptor of modern times. … Troubetzkoy is a gigantic and terrifying humanitarian who can do anything with an animal except eat it. Some of us remember the inaugural banquet in London of the International Society of Painters, at which the late Lord Haldane, presiding, announced, when all the conventional speechmaking was over, that the illustrious sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy desired to address the company, and how a figure of Patagonian stature arose amid polite applause, and began "Mr. President: is it not a monstrous thing that we, who are supposed to be artists and civilized men, and not savages, should be celebrating a great artistic occasion by gorging ourselves on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures?"

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Prince Paul Troubetzkoy is one of the few geniuses of whom it is not only safe but necessary to speak in superlatives. He is the most astonishing sculptor of modern times. … Troubetzkoy is a gigantic and terrifying humanitarian who can do anything with an animal except eat it. Some of us remember the inaugural banquet in London of the International Society of Painters, at which the late Lord Haldane, presiding, announced, when all the conventional speechmaking was over, that the illustrious sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy desired to address the company, and how a figure of Patagonian stature arose amid polite applause, and began "Mr. President: is it not a monstrous thing that we, who are supposed to be artists and civilized men, and not savages, should be celebrating a great artistic occasion by gorging ourselves on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures?"" in the context of "George Bernard Shaw, Preface to the catalogue of an exhibition of sculpture by Paul Troubetskoy at the P. & D. Colnaghi Galleries, London, 1931, in The Complete Prefaces: 1930-1950 (Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 97-98." to mean that wisdom is timeless.