My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyThese men should be given their chance as soon as possible, old or young, early orlate. It is another unfortunate fact of history and human nature that, apart frominheritance and revolution, good men tend to get their chance late rather than early.For example, a man much approved in age and much disapproved in youth was SirWinston Churchill. An old friend and contemporary of his—the Irish-Americansportsman, Ikey Bell—once said to me: 'The secret is to do what Winston did, live tillall the men who hate you are dead'. It was a long march for Winston Churchill tobecome the tribal deity of the Tory Party from those early days when Lady Milnerdescribed him as 'half an alien, and wholly undesirable'. Certainly in many of his bestyears when he was generously inspired by some original ideas and had an ardentpassion for social reform, Sir Winston Churchill was excluded from power by astawdry an array of mediocrity as has ever dulled the English landscape. It would havebeen better to use that talent for creation rather than for destruction.Chatham in his very different character and incomparably different achievementsuffered the usual fate of great Englishmen. It was a long journey too from his classicreply to Horace Walpole in the report of Dr. Johnson—'the atrocious crime of being ayoung man which the Right Honourable gentleman has charged against me with suchdecency and spirit I will attempt neither to palliate nor deny, but will content myselfwith wishing that I may be of those whose follies cease with their youth and not ofthose who continue ignorant in spite of age and experience'—to the brief four yearstoward the end of his life when, with the firm support of the mass of the Englishpeople, he was permitted to save his country and to win for it a great Empire.Jonathan Swift's penetrating dictum certainly applied to him: you may observe theentry of a genius into the world when you see that 'all the dunces are in league againsthim'. The same tendency may be discovered in the dramatic and turbulent history ofthe classic world.Personally I never found the least difficulty in dialogue with a different generation,and learn with no inhibition of years from anyone with anything to tell me. Youngmen and women should be consulted about their learning, which should relate to theirfuture lives. They should be treated as adult by universities—and by the law. Thepresent clash of age and youth seems to me one of the silliest misunderstandings incontemporary nonsense. The war of generations is more foolish than the war of class,for it has less reason. It is almost always the sign of some intellectual inadequacy onone side or the other; at a certain level of intelligence the clash of generations simplyceases to exist. Would two physicists at the age of twenty and fifty on the verge of anew discovery decide they could not work together on account of the difference ofage? On the other hand, between complete illiterates the difference of a few yearsseems to be all important. Primitives live in narrow little age compartments.When I was young some men in the older generation gave me the sense of beingeternal contemporaries. Lloyd George was many years older than I, but he alwaysmade me feel we were of the same generation. Nowadays I feel contemporary withmany of the young and the angry when I discuss subjects of mutual interest with them.At a certain level the difference in years makes no more difference than the colour ofthe hair. People without intellectual interest are divided by the most ephemeral things,like variations in contemporary fashion which in the course of a long life you seecome and go half a dozen times. What does it all matter? Bonaparte when he rodealone across the bridge at Arcola was wearing hair down to his shoulders, but by the112 of 424