My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyarrogance, for which one of the sources of his thought had already provided a possiblejustification: CI love the great despisers, for their souls are the arrows which areyearning for the further shore'.The same tendency can be seen in Goethe: the concealment of truths for which theworld is not ready to protect the prophet from the fury which is the consequence ofpremature revelation.The few, who something therefore really learned,Unwisely frank, with hearts that spurned concealing,And to the mob laid bare each thought and feeling,Have evermore been crucified and burned.This is certainly intellectual support for the modern school of statesmanship in severalcountries, which clearly believes that the real objectives should always be concealedfrom the people. I, on the contrary, still believe that to achieve great ends it isnecessary to take the risk of clearly declaring high objectives and facing the stormuntil finally, with the aid of events, mind and will can persuade the people to attainthem. Quite simply, I do not believe that in a great age government by small trickswill work for long, and always maintain that great things can only be done in a greatway.Goethe in the limitations and also in the dangers of his epoch always stopped shortbefore he said too much: for instance, in his poem Die Geheimnisse. Shaw neverstopped short, but when he saw trouble looming, adopted the defensive attitude ofstanding on his head and twinkling his toes. The maddening result of this peculiaritywas to rob some of the finest passages of English literature, when a giggle wassubstituted for the last chord of a great orchestra; Shaw then lost his strength andbetrayed his genius. I experienced in him this characteristic of always withdrawingbefore a conclusion when he urged me to break with the Labour Party and to start anew movement. He had even invented a name for it; he suggested we should call ourpeople The Activists. Yet just before the new party was launched, he suddenlyinsisted that I must remain in the Labour Party, on the grounds that I was bound tosucceed MacDonald, who could not last long. Cimmie and I never knew exactly whatmade him so suddenly and belatedly changed his mind, but it always amused us laterto imagine that he went round to see his old friends the Webbs in one of his mostpuckish moods to impart the chuckling information that he had planted a real squibunder the Fabian chair, and had met with a stern rebuke from his grand oldschoolmistress, who told him it was most improper behaviour after a life-time spent inbuilding the Labour Party, and that he must pick it up at once. Like many other greatartists, he could portray action but he could not participate.191 of 424