Part 37

This man without a congenial country has an unlimited talent for adapting himself to the necessities of time, place and opportunity. He has little or no power to assimilate himself to the real life of the people. He trailed like a comet through the land of his birth and left it in a mirage of finance before Canada had made him a citizen. He went to England where in a few months he had made himself intimate with public affairs; and in ten years, "with all his honours thick upon him," he has not yet become an Englishman.

Once only I met this extraordinary man, at close range, for a number of hours. He was a most absorbing study; and he knew it. There never was a moment when Beaverbrook could not consciously estimate the effect of his actions upon some other man, or group of men. As an actor he is not a mediocrity.

A personal friend vividly describes meeting him at a small semi-private dinner in a Canadian city. The ostensible occasion was a mere complimentary affair to his lordship. The psychological objective was--something else. There began the conjecture. What was it?

It must be inferred. There are some men who study the effect of themselves upon a group. The group method of psychology is essentially Beaverbrookian.

A number of speeches had been pre-arranged for this dinner on behalf of various interests. At the close of the talks Beaverbrook was asked to respond to a toast of his own health. He did so in a perfectly amazing confessional of a speech, saying things which he said he felt sure no journalist present would publish. He was asked questions. Each question meant one more speech. He made four in all, occupying much more than an hour of time in a most graphic and humanly interesting account of things that had happened behind the curtain in British politics, shrewd estimates of the signs of the times, forecasts of coming events and vivid delineations of great men whom he had intimately met in various parts of Europe.

In all this there was not a trace of embarrassment or of suspicion. The little dynamo with the prodigious head and the baby mouth and the intense, deepset, restless eyes stood by his chair, and with knuckles on the table much of the time, talked down into the flowers directly in front of him. He spoke sometimes in a husky, low voice, now and again in a smothered shriek, again in a tragic whisper. He was in a small gathering and he seemed to know that though the dingy, mysterious room was somewhat high, he had no need to lift his voice to the shrill impetuous discord that is said to characterize his speeches in Commons or Lords. He was carried away by some indefinable atmosphere. What it was he scarcely knew. After the dinner he shook hands with people, delivered himself of a number of snappy brusqueries, laughed a good bit and, almost the last to leave the charmed precinct where he had unbosomed himself among "congenial" souls, he wandered out.

Next day, lying poseurishly on a lounge in his room at the hotel, he said to a confidante who had been with him at the dinner:

"Bunting!" (that is not the true name) "Will you kindly repeat to me some of the things I seem to have said last evening. I know I talked an unconscionably great deal. What on earth did I say?"

As it had been a perfectly abstemious occasion, one imagines that Beaverbrook at the dinner was sincere, though playing the actor, and that in his room he was both theatrical and insincere.

This man has a confusing, but in his own mind seldom confused, orbit of his own. He was a conundrum in Canada. He is an enigma in England. That he still considers himself a Canadian, because he was born here, fortuned here and voluntarily exiled from here after he had completely mystified a large number of people as to his working psychology, is proved by the fact that he continues to come back here. He also professes to be manning the Daily Express with Canadians. He has been for ten years the intimate of Bonar Law, also a distinguished Canadian of sorts. And a few months ago there was a rumour, which no one remembers him to have refuted, that he was a likely candidate for the Governor-Generalship of Canada. Of course if ever Rideau Hall should take Beaverbrook for a tenant, it will be time to take refuge in a Canadian republic.

It is easy to think disagreeable things about Beaverbrook, because he is so enormously interesting, so pathologically unusual, and altogether so brilliant and resourceful a phenomenon. I have called him the Imperial brainstorm. A dozen other titles would fit him as well. There are times when one almost imagines himself mingling an element of real liking for the man with one's unfailing admiration of his remarkable ability. But always when you feel like that cordial handshake and talking to him with brusque familiarity, there is the intuitive feeling that one of the two, perhaps both, might live to regret it.

You cannot absorb the atmosphere of such a man. Whatever the sterling qualities of his character, the approximate miracles of his achievements, the warlike strategy of his career, you judge him at last by that indefinable but inexorable law of common congeniality. To live at close range with Beaverbrook, to become part of his daily scheme of vibrations, to work either with, or for, or even over him as a regular part of one's programme would be to a normal man a penalty almost amounting to a crime.

Though of course tastes differ, even in companions. There are people who rather like hobnobbing with Beaverbrook. Some are interested in his idiosyncrasies, as though he were a good subject for a novel. Some enjoy the sensation of playing moth to a social flame. Others--perhaps--have a deep respect for his money which, like Carnegie's, is supposed to be a perplexity to himself to know how to spend it that he may die poor.

Well, the noble lord has his idioms. Discussing the details of the little dinner already referred to a flippant but devoted critic said:

"I think he would enjoy speaking right in front of that huge fireplace. He would consider it Napoleonic."

As to the social orbit of Beaverbrook, one may suspect that it is a rather exotic atmosphere in which the sense of true human equation is lost in a jumble. A man who can entertain almost simultaneously, at his country home, financiers, politicians, authors, and actresses from his own theatre at Hammersmith, may be regarded as a shrewd social mergerist but scarcely as a subtle entertainer of congenial souls. As for the discomfort of knowing what to do with his money, Beaverbrook has never complained; during his latest visit to Canada he was offered and he refused the purchase of two bankrupt newspapers each of which thought that the acquisition of such a side line to the Daily Express might enable him to do some of the good in this country which he failed to achieve while he lived here.

Estimating this man by the superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war--nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked mainly with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most of the capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from the immediately increased earnings of companies which he amalgamated, nor directly from the pockets of the shareholders. Beaverbrook never made a dollar by defrauding a director or luring unsuspicious dollars out of the pockets of common people. That species of tactics so often practised by men who are near criminals was quite beneath him. The laboratory where he got his results was the stock market, which of course has its own codes of ethics and plays its own remorseless game of making or breaking men.

His career here had most of the elements of romance. Son of a poor parson born in a cross-roads Ontario hamlet, brilliant but erratic student at Dalhousie University, down-at-the-heels insurance agent in Halifax, youthful merger of two small banks at a time when he was unable to pay for his own clothes--we have here symptoms of a career which might have turned into a character of high value in Canadian politics, public service or social reform.

But Nature thrives on migrations. Even a man sometimes takes better root when he is transplanted. The Beaverbrook that England has is a more unusual character than the Max Aitken that Canada lost. Canada to be sure had lost enough brilliant men to other nations and imported enough able men from abroad. It was time to produce and to keep our own. There was national work for them all to do. Aitken came up in the boom time of Canada. He fitted the time. A nation's financial adversity was no occasion for him. He followed the wake and profited by the experiences of builders of railways, industries, banks and provinces. Every move forward of the country in commercial expansion was a nudge ahead for his chariot of fortune. He was the most successful "bull" factor Canada ever had. But in all probability, were he to be flung into one of the demoralized nations of democratized Europe he could make money even in disaster.

Before he was thirty-five Max Aitken had become a multi-millionaire. He worked much as clever but humbler men have invented formulae to beat bookmakers at the races. Having done all this, at so early an age, what was left? Superficially we should have said--public life. He had the money, the talent, the leisure. Canada had the need.

But Max Aitken never so much as became a pound-keeper in Canada, not because he had not the opportunity, but because he had the shrewd sense to feel that the land where he had made "his pile" was not the land in which to serve his country. To serve a nation means as a rule to deal directly with the public. Max Aitken had never dealt with the public. Neither does he yet--except indirectly through a big daily newspaper of phenomenal circulation. On his last visit to Canada he was invited to public functions. He consistently declined; not because he shunned popularity or hated the limelight, but because he would not have felt comfortable. In one of his speeches he pointed out that the securities which he put on the market years ago were all now listed as paying ventures. It was more comfortable to make that remark as a returned celebrity than to have made it as a citizen.

His own story of why he went to England, and stayed there, is ingenuous. He said that he went in order to do business; that he tried to talk business; that the public men with whom he had conference insisted on talking politics; that he succumbed and stayed, winning a seat in the Commons, and almost before an ordinary man could have said "Jack Robinson", he was hobnobbing with men the calibre of Bonar Law, Lloyd George, Northcliffe.

Only fragmentary accounts of Beaverbrook's political history in England have as a rule drifted over here. To show what an amazing story it is, nothing can be better than to quote a curiously apt summary written for two Canadian periodicals by Arthur Baxter, who for some years now has been a sort of Boswell to Beaverbrook.

* * * * * *

In 1910 captured the seat for Ashton-under-Lyne.

In 1912 a vigorous and successful attack on Lloyd George concerning finance matters in the House.

From 1911 to 1914 he entered parliamentary intrigue and gradually his home at Leatherhead became a Mecca for puzzled politicians.

During this time somebody made him a Knight.