My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley4 - The Gaining of ExperienceIT is easier to rise from a bed of thorns than from a bed of roses. I make this strangeobservation at this point because if any credit is due to me, it is on account of thedeliberate choice of a hard life in pursuit of certain purposes rather than the altogetherdelightful existence which circumstances and my temperament offered to me. I had anunlimited capacity for enjoyment, and fortune had given me the means to indulge it.Moreover, once my war service was over there seemed no particular reason why Ishould not do so, provided my war companions received what they had been so firmlypromised. In fact, I have sometimes wondered why I did not just relax and enjoy life.Why trouble so much with the attempt to make better a world which seemed quitecontent with the bad?The question struck me years later, during a period of adversity, when a public officialof ability and insight told me that he had always wanted to meet me to see whether Iwas mad or not; he was surprised to discover when he got to know me well that I wassane. He considered that any man must prima facie be mad if his whole careercontradicted his own interest and comfort. It was easy to make the obvious reply thatpolitics had come to a pretty pass if a sensible fellow like him thought a man must bemad if he did not put what he conceived to be the interest of his country and ofhumanity before his own interest. Yet it was inevitable that I myself shouldsometimes wonder if there were not better, more profitable and happier things to dothan insist on saving people who were bent on drowning.Let me not be misunderstood: I do not pretend to be a saint, let alone a Puritan. Ialways seized every opportunity to enjoy life to the full, provided it did not impedemy purpose, and many opportunities came my way. But I gave a clear priority topurpose, an attitude which is simply commonsense. Any other course means thatboundless capacity and considerable opportunity for enjoyment always win, or at leastconfront you with a continuing series of agonising choices between duty and pleasure.He who hesitates between the Grail and the Venusberg is lost. But happily there aremoments of repose. Life should be a march toward great objectives, but with time towarm your hands before camp fires, a process which preserves both sanity and energy.At first there was no conflict; purpose and pleasure entirely coincided. Clearly theway to getting things done was to enter politics, and I was offered a choice of theprimrose paths with much classic tinkling of the lutes and flutes. This account willnow be for many pages a success story. The summits of private happiness werebalanced by the heights of public acclamation. It began directly I emerged fromhospital in the war and continued for a good fifteen years. I enjoyed every moment ofit. There was no conflict between purpose and happiness because during this period itstill seemed possible to do what was necessary by normal and reasonable means. We,of the war generation, had not really believed all the guff turned out by the politicians—'a land fit for heroes to live in' and so forth—at least most of us had not. But we hadthought that a decent home and living wage could be provided for our companions,who survived the war, because it seemed so relatively easy to do. Yet they had to waituntil after a second world war for the precarious possession of a living wage, andmany of them are waiting still for the decent homes. It was the slow realisation thatthe old world could not or would not give these elementary things, and was headinginstead towards further and possibly irretrievable disaster, which finally brought the63 of 424