My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleypassionate love letter from Cato's sister, Servilia, mother of Brutus. That is why in thefinal scene Caesar is credibly reputed to have said: 'Kai su teknon', rather than 'Et tuBrute'; the habit of such Romans was to talk Greek with intimates, in rather the sameway as French was used in the circle of Frederick the Great.There we can observe even in this limited sphere an altogether different kind of man,a type which is certainly more appropriate to a period when action is required. Men inthe classic European tradition showed not only a profoundly different attitude to someof the basic facts of life, but an altogether different character in the handling ofsituations of all kinds. Hysteria was excluded, all was ruled by purpose served bycharacter. We need in England today a return to character with neither the hysteria ofrepression nor of licence, in harmony with life, nature and purpose reaching everhigher. 'The world is character.'It is at present too much to hope that we may secure a plenitude of the men in politicsof whom Shaw wrote that if enough of them appeared on earth, 'all our political,ecclesiastical and moral institutions would vanish to make way for a higher order'.Yet we might, if not in politics at any rate in art, come nearer to the ideal described ina view of the moral future written in one of Nietzsche's moments of inspiration fromwhich Shaw and some of the best of his contemporaries derived so much:'The work of such poets—poets that is, whose vision of man is exemplary— would bedistinguished by the fact that they appear immune from the glow and blast of thepassions. The fatal touch of the wrong note, the pleasure taken in smashing the wholeinstrument on which the music of humanity has been played, the scornful laughter andthe gnashing of teeth, and all that is tragic and comic in the old conventional sense,would be felt in the vicinity of this new art as an awkward, archaic crudeness and adistortion of the image of man. Strength, goodness, gentleness, purity, and that innateand spontaneous sense of measure and balance shown in persons and their actions in aclear sky reflected on faces and events, knowledge and art at one; the mind withoutarrogance and jealousy, dwelling together with the soul, drawing from the oppositesof life the grace of seriousness, not the impatience of conflict: all this would make thebackground of gold on which to set up the real portrait of man, the picture of hisincreasing nobleness.'The knowledge given by modern science can help in choosing men today, and intraining them tomorrow. I seemed perhaps too crude, too ambitious, and too fantastic,when I once wrote that mankind with the aid of modern science could now play themidwife to destiny, in accelerating evolution. Yet history and science together can atleast point to the kind of men required when action is needed.For the immediate purpose of realising new values in a failing society, I believe weshould look not to Puritanism but rather to the classic Greeks and to our ownElizabethans. There is a real danger that a 'biological revulsion'—in the acuteMuggeridge phrase—from the crude disgust which our present situation evokes maylead back to Puritanism, setting in motion another cycle of fatality ending again indecadence. I am at this stage concerned chiefly with economics and practical action,and considerations of ethics and philosophy belong to the conclusion of this book.Meantime, I suggest as a principle adequate to the present question: not back toPuritanism and forward with hysteria; but back to Hellas and forward with science.205 of 424