My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleySamarkand, back to England and politics. I had for a space taken Schiller's advicewhich is appropriate to an earlier period of life— 'Bleibe die Blumen dem bluhendenLenze, scheine das Schone und flechte dich Kranze'—and felt it was allowed for alittle after so much; but I then all too soon remembered the concluding line: 'Aberdem mannlichen Alter ziemts einem ernsteren Gott zu dienen'. After this briefinterlude, life must again become deadly serious.Why not be a little more tactful and give an English quotation to describe yourfeelings at this point?—asked a good friend and most helpful adviser on reading mymanuscript. The answer introduces a subject which to me is very interesting. Variousthemes are best considered in different languages, and personally I know nothing inliterature which expresses that particular sentiment quite so exquisitely as the lines ofthe German poet. After the war I returned to Europe with my French improved andwas able for the first time to speak German; extensive reading in the prison years hadrevealed to me a whole new literature. Consequently, during the European journey Iwas moved by diverse experiences to think and feel in all three languages; newdimensions of the mind had been opened to me and with the stimulus of thesecontinually changing surroundings, often in scenery and architecture of rare beauty,the new capacity brought a supreme happiness.Years later, I was with friends in a crowded French restaurant of our particularaffection, and, in the relaxed mood of an atmosphere engendered by some of the bestthings of life, was talking in a rather expansive fashion. My theme was that for thoseendowed with the blessing of the three main European languages, a new idea mightwith benefit first be discussed in German, a language as rich as the sunrays glintingamong the shadows of the Urwalder, those deep forests, mysterious, imaginative andcreative; then lit by the full sunshine of the luminous English, which enables allthought to be presented by its masters with a clarity in some respects unique; thenreduced to a lapidary precision by the exquisite sculpture of French, which for goodreason is used in treaty and on other occasions when thought and language must beexact. At this point in these discursive observations a figure rose at a neighbouringtable, bowed, extended his hand, smiled, shook hands and resumed his seat and hisrepast without a word spoken. It was not so much the square aspect, suggesting acertain combination of erudition and geniality, as the action which immediatelydetermined his origin and background.Superficially it may seem that the different way of thinking in the three mainlanguages of Europe must lead to irreconcilable differences of character. Certainly itenriches life when we attain sufficient competence to be able to think in all three,because changing from one to the other can induce an entirely different mood and wesee the world with new eyes. Yet the actual experience, which is available to anyonewho takes the trouble, discounts an impression that difference of language inevitablyproduces discord; on the contrary, it can evoke in the thinking of the individual agreater harmony, and this new music of the mind everywhere awaits the Europeanwhen we have evolved from our present relative infancy to the maturity of thecontinental future.From the European journey we returned to farming in Wiltshire and were happy in thesense of roots again in native soil. Yet I had the feeling that the wind of their politicswas blowing the soil away from these roots. I farmed in Wiltshire from 1945 until355 of 424