Imagination tries to conceive of any Englishman coming over here to merge
Borden, Laurier and Crerar. Imagination fails. Not even Aitken could
have done it. That he succeeded in England where he must have failed in
Canada must have reasons.
1. Experience in mergers.
2. Prestige as a Canadian.
3. Advantage of being—Max Aitken.
The first we understand. The second involves the Empire. Aitken was—if anything that could be labelled—a Tory. He had no trouble becoming a Unionist. His success with Bonar Law made it possible in getting rid of Asquith. He could call Carson "Edward". He could think as fast as Lloyd George. It was a time for quick thinking—and action. He had opened all the heavy doors in Montreal—and closed them upon all but those he wanted inside. He tried the same thing in England. His audacity was inspired. Something had to be done. Somebody must be the middleman. Aitken had an uncanny faculty for sizing up situations; for manipulating men; for interpreting ambition—because no man in England had an ambition surpassing his own. He could play political chess and absorb superficial culture at the same time. Books, plays, authors, artists, manners, accent—all were grist to his mill. He was an astute actor. He could assume a virtue; simulate anxiety; hover about closed doors on tiptoe; speak in the awed whisper; in the event of a crisis peer tragically into men's faces.
England knew she had taken a queer character to bosom; a child who was growing up at Gargantuan speed, an enfant terrible of sudden and prodigious experience; a creature who could sit up o' nights and plot and organize and cabal and next morning rub out the wrinkles at tennis, amiable if he beat his opponent, growling and savage if beaten, ready for a campaign in the afternoon, a speech in the evening and a conference at midnight. Or he could plunge into polite arts, talk familiarly of literature with duchesses, undergo a surgical operation to-day and sit up for correspondence to-morrow. He has a brain whose recipe for complete rest is "change of work"! Barring Lloyd George and De Valera, he has perhaps the most unusual brain in Great Britain.
No Canadian, already a millionaire, had ever done these things. Not even Gilbert Parker had so amazingly cultivated the accent. Greenwood, diligent and talented, had been slow and determined. Aitken—opened the heavy doors. As in Canada, he was at last able to close out all but those who could play the game of the hour. This Canadian could not only talk, but act, Empire; not merely ape, but superficially assimilate, England; and he understood the United States—because he was temperamentally something of an American.
His success on the surface is incomprehensible. The one key to it is his persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who in the Coalition was the great prop to the Premier. Beaverbrook hugely admires Lloyd George. He reverences Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points, though not characteristics, in common to become running mates. Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader, Aitken was never allowed to become indispensable to the Premier. His brief term as member of the War Cabinet terminated almost suddenly. Was it voluntary? Or ambitious? What did this Warwick want as reward more than the peerage which may have been designed to chloroform an electric battery?
We are not told. Once during the second year of war he offered to raise and equip and command a battalion from New Brunswick. His offer was not accepted. He went to Sam Hughes. "Sam," he said, "I want a job in the Canadian Army!"
He got it. Aitken's work as Eye Witness to the Canadian troops and the publication of "Canada in Flanders" was the performance of a man who in the great crisis of war had found a sudden and sincere interest in his native land that he had never exhibited while he was a citizen of this country. He showed a grasp of the human as well as the technical side of war. A man who could so rediscover his own nation could surely do something new in helping to co-ordinate the Empire. He has an astonishing knowledge of great public men in all countries, a thorough commercial knowledge of Europe and Asia, and—may we say a genius for a sort of secret diplomacy? His war record demonstrates most of these qualities. His Canadian War Memorials are a proof that he understands how to make his own country useful to British artists.