Fifty years from now some Canadian Drinkwater, charmed by the eloquent
perspectives of time, may write an "Abraham Lincoln" string of personal
scenes from the lives of Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald. The
narrative will thus begin in the very year that the story of Lincoln
ends, and it will carry on down just fifty years in our national
history to the time when Wilfrid Laurier, passionate student of the
Civil War, reached the end of his climax in the affairs of Canada and
the Empire. But the poet who does this must be inspired; because no
young country at that period of time in the world had had two such
remarkable men as contemporaries, and political foes, and lucky is the
nation which at any period has such a man as Laurier.
Outwardly Laurier's political career was complex where Macdonald's was
simple. John A. was as great a Canadian as Laurier; but in the simpler
times in which he lived he had less cause to be puzzled by the web of
fate and of political cross-currents at home and abroad, even though he
was immensely more baffled by politicians and party emergencies.
Laurier swung in a great romantic orbit of political sentiment, vaster
than that of any other statesman we ever had. For the fifteen years up
till about 1906, he seemed like the greatest man ever born a citizen of
Canada. Before that period he was a romance. After it he was a
national hallucination. The last three years of his life he was a
tragedy.
Yet the tragedy kept on smiling. Half a century of smiles. We never
had a statesman who could smile so potently. Never one with such
mellifluous music in his voice, such easy grace in his style, such a
cardinal's hauteur when he wanted to be alone, and such a fascinating
urbanity when he wanted to impress a company, a caucus or a crowd. The
Romist whom Orangemen admired, the Frenchman who made an intellectual
hobby of British democracy, the poetic statesman who read Dickens and
re-read in two languages Uncle Tom's Cabin and sometimes played the
flute, and the Premier of a bilingual country who had a passion for the
study of the war which emancipated the negro, was the kaleidoscopic
enigma of Canadian public life.
Laurier was nearly all things to all men. He was sometimes many things
to himself. He idolized himself and laughed at himself. He venerated
British institutions and passionately loved Quebec. He came to his
flowering period in a party of Free Trade and went to seed in a party
committed to a species of protection. He spoke English as fluently as
Bach wrote fugues, and with more passion and beauty of utterance than
any of our English-Canadian orators. One moment he could be as
debonair as Beau Brummel, the next as forbidding and repellent as a
modern Caesar. He was consistently the best-dressed public man in
Canada. A misfitting coat to him was as grievous as a misplaced verb
in a peroration. He superficially loved many things. Life was to him,
even apart from politics, a gracious delight. He knew how to pose, to
feign affability and to be sincere. With more culture Laurier would
have been the most exquisite dilettante of his age. But he cared
little for poetry in verse, not much for fine music, had small taste
for _objets d'art_ or the precious in anything. His greatest affection
was in his home, his greatest charm in fine manners, his master passion
in speech, and in managing Cabinets to win elections for the party
which to him meant a greater and more inspiring Canada. We have had
better debaters; but never a man except himself who in the House could
make a sort of grand music out of an apologetic oration on National
Transcontinental grades.
A writer who at various periods of time was very intimate with Laurier
thinks he was a man of deep emotions. This may be doubted. A man who
talked so easily and was so exquisitely conscious of himself could
scarcely be considered spiritually profound. Other men and events
played upon him like the wind on an Aeolian harp. He was tremendously
impressionable; and by turns grandly impressive. A personal friend
relates how a man with some experience as a critic of drama--probably
himself--went to see Laurier by request for a talk on the political
situation; how Laurier invited him to a chair and immediately took one
beside him an inch or two lower so that his own face was on a level
with the visitor's; how for some minutes he sat feeling the power of
this actor who tried to persuade him to run as a Liberal candidate, and
when he rose again seemed taller and more aloof than ever.
That is acting. Some other man might have done the same thing and made
no impression. Laurier could perform obvious tricks with a consummate
grace. And he performed many. There never was a moment of his waking
life when he could not have been lifted into a play. His movements,
his words, his accent, his clothes, his facial lineaments were never
commonplace, even when his motives often may have been. He was
Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun; poetry and charm all the days of his
life.
During the ridiculous deadlock on the Naval Aid Bill, when his
supporters went so grotesquely far as to read the Bible to talk out the
Bill, he was away from the House for a week, reported as quite ill, in
reality having a very delicious time at home reading light literature.
The day he came back the news of his coming was heralded to the
Commons. The benches were packed. Not till they were all full, every
Minister in his place, every page at attention and the House like a
pent-up Sabbath congregation, did the then leader of the Opposition
make his grand, swift entry, bowing with courtly dignity to the Speaker
and taking his seat amid a claque from his supporters, in which even
the Tories felt like joining.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier had the infallible knack of adjusting his makeup,
not always himself--to any occasion from which he could extract
profitable publicity, or upon which he could do some charming thing for
somebody else. He is reputed once to have worn overalls among a gang
of timber-jammers, but he felt rather ridiculous and soon took them
off. Interviewed abed in his private car at a railway station by a
political friend, he suddenly became conscious of his pyjamas and
rolled back into the bedclothes with a smile. He was not happy in
_deshabille_. Entertained at an arts luncheon in 1913, he made the
most of a very Spartan meal, consented with much dignity to exchange
his plate of cold beef for another man's cold mutton, listened with
great gravity to a short programme of music, asked the names of the
composers and the players and spent most of his brief speech denying
that he was anything but a philistine in art, and pledging himself if
ever he was Premier again to do more for Canadian art than had ever
been done before. In conversation at a friend's house with a stranger
he claimed that at college he was always a "lazy dog." Visited once by
an agent who tried to sell him a phonograph, he consented to play the
flute for a record; after listening to the record and being assured
that it was a faithful replica of his own performance and asked if now
he would not buy the machine, he answered gravely, "No, I think I will
sell the flute." This story may be apocryphal, but it is delightfully
true to character.
On one of the thousands of "occasions" in a career that was almost
perpetual drama he was buttonholed in his office by an American
reporter who, having been warned that the Premier of Canada never gave
interviews, boasted that he would break the rule. After half an hour
the American reporter came out to his confreres of the press gallery,
sat down at a typewriter, lighted three or four cigarettes, nervously
aware that he was being watched for the forthcoming article, and after
spoiling a number of sheets and tearing them all up he confessed,
"Well, boys, I thought I was pumping Laurier, but it's a cinch he spent
most of my time pumping me."
To the Liberal press gallery men he was as much a captain as he was to
his followers in the House. He gave them daily audience during the
Session, very often in a group, and at such times he usually asked,
"Well, boys, what's the news?" He wanted good news; and many a
reporter tricked up the truth now and then to give it to him. Informed
once that "Bob" Rogers had vehemently in his office denied any cabal in
the Cabinet against the Premier he swiftly replied, with that splendid,
satirical smile, "Well, the fact that Bob Rogers says there is none
would convince me that there probably is."
Laurier was the kind of man to whom other people naturally happened.
He was a human solar system in which many kinds of people wanted to
gravitate, even to the ragged little girl on the prairie who picked him
the wild flowers that he wore in his coat as far as she could see him
on the train platform. He discovered early in life that he could
interest other people much as some men find out they can juggle or
sing. It was a fatal gift. Laurier was far too long in this country,
much too interesting. Women in Ottawa could make delirious
conversation out of how this man at 72 got into a taxi. He was more
phenomenal to English than to French. He never cultivated Paris and
would not have been at home there. At Imperial Conferences and
Coronations he was an Imperial matinee idol in London. In Ontario he
was regarded with much the same awe as the small boy views the
long-haired medicine man. To the Quebecker he was the grand magic;
until Bourassa came, irresistible, incomparable on stage. But Laurier
had no great intensity; no Savonarola gift to sway a crowd; he just
charmed them; when they came to remember his song--what was it?
Earlier in life he was a sort of Ulysses, led by magic. He loved the
_petit ville_ of Lin where he was born. But it was too small for him.
He was lured into studies, to college, to the bilingual university
McGill, to law, to discourse with learned Anglo-Saxons, to the study of
British Government by democracy, to the translation of himself into
English. The translation, which was almost a masterpiece, made him the
first and perhaps the last French Premier of Canada, and in many
respects the greatest Premier we ever had.
This alone was something. Speaking their own tongue, Laurier could
impress the English. He could tour Ontario and feel grandly at home in
the Liberal shires, among the men of the Maple Leaf. He could follow
one of his two transcontinentals up the Saskatchewan, and to multitudes
of many nations led from Europe by his own immigration policy conduct a
Pentecost for the two new Provinces. He could fling magic over
Manitoba, and on the Pacific he had power. But in Nova Scotia he could
never equal the memory of Joseph Howe, a greater orator than Laurier.
What this man's sensations were as he studied himself in the art of
politics may be compared to what an English Canadian of similar
temperament would feel like if he could fling a spell over Quebec.
Laurier made a second conquest of Canada. He took a great Cobden party
from Edward Blake and made it almost protectionist, Imperial and his
own. He grafted a sort of Liberalism on to polyglot nationalities. In
about the same tenure of power he created a personal ascendancy the
equal of Macdonald's, in a nation almost twice as big and much more
complex. In ten years he changed the face of Canada as no Premier had
ever done before or ever can do again. He was looked at in Imperial
London as though he were the joint picturesque descendant of Wolfe and
Montcalm, with a mandate to make Canadian Liberalism an instrument of
Empire, a bi-racial Government a final proof of the eternal wisdom of
the British North America Act, and a measure of reciprocity a safeguard
of Anglo-American entente.
So the son of the village surveyor from the tin-spired parish of St.
Lin had made himself very nearly monarch of all he surveyed, with the
notion that his right there was none to dispute. Sprung from the most
backward province in Confederation, he pushed Canada forward with
hectic speed, not counting the cost, nor caring what the end might be,
so long as he died Premier of a prosperous nation and therefore happy.
At about the age of sixty a reaction came over Laurier; first
noticeable in less enthusiasm and more reticence at the Imperial
Conferences. The French-Canadian who had lost a segment of his
idolatrous following in Quebec because of clashes with the clergy and
the sending of a contingent to the South African War, began to resist
the cold machinations of the Chamberlain group. He began to see
Empire, not as a commonwealth of democracies, but as domination from
Downing Street. At home he was shrewd to observe that the Canada of
his own domination was a complex of many "nationals," only a few of
which were historically rooted in the Anglo-Saxon idea. He saw that
the bigger half of this Canada was arising in the West, which he
believed he had truly because politically created; and the West had but
a slender minority of people to whom the Maple Leaf meant anything.
If the party which he also had recreated into a Laurier Liberal party
was to continue dominating Canada until white-plumed Laurier had
finished his work, it must be by a stronger leverage than Imperialism.
He had managed to hold Quebec, which now thanks to himself and Lomer
Gouin, was almost solidly Liberal. The prairie farmers he must not
lose. And the grain growers were not keen about an England which
bought their wheat at open world prices in competition with cheap wheat
countries like Russia, and their cattle at prices dictated by the
Argentine; when both cattle and wheat were cheapened to the producer by
the long-haul railways which Laurier and the Tories had built.
And although the "Old Man" had scant knowledge of business, he had the
wisdom of the serpent to translate the signs of the times; yet lacking
somehow the vision to foresee that a play for the western vote by a
measure of reciprocity would resolve itself into a boomerang at the
polls. Laurier had a wonderful Canadian vision. In 1904 he refused a
Liberal M.P. from the Pacific Federal interference in the Oriental
problem, saying, "The day will come when we shall be glad of Japanese
warships on our Pacific coast." Yet in 1912, in a letter to a friend,
he gravely minimized the German menace. He understood America and Asia
better than Europe. His vision was keener in power than in defeat.
And then the war, which in a few strokes finished the almost complete
picture of Laurier. His support of the Government in going to the aid
of Britain was at first a flash of the old generously impulsive Laurier
who loved England. That love he never lost. He expressed it in the
House down near to the end of the war. He loved England a thousand
times better than some Englishmen do. For the Empire it is doubtful if
he was ever profoundly enthusiastic except as he saw in it the glorious
evolution of self-governing democracies such as Canada, his first love.
He understood this country. It is not remarkable that he did. Any
public man of Canada should. But Laurier's love for his own country
was of an especially intense character, because it was for a long while
so deeply romantic.
As he grew older the original veneration he had for England as the
mother of democracy was more and more transferred to Canada as an
experiment in that form of government. The more he won elections, the
greater grew his passion for democracy and for interpreting his native
land. The pity is that a man cannot go on winning and losing elections
without suffering some damage to his clear love of country. The
highest patriot is he who knows best how to lose himself and his
election, all but his conscience and his cause, for the sake of the
land he loves. Laurier did not remain till the end of his life the
highest patriot. Weary as he is said to have been of public life as
far back as 1905, he was lured into winning more elections by the
adulation of his followers and his own love of swaying men as a master,
until elections with him became a habit and the loss of one a tragedy.
And even the war which shook so many men's love of country to the
depths--some of them over the precipice of profits, others to the
passionate heights of sacrifice--did not obliterate in Laurier the
fatal desire to win elections. One has almost to cease thinking to
remember that Wilfrid Laurier did hope that an election would yet be
held during the war that would return him to power. The failure of the
Government in the war would be largely the fault of Quebec which he
still in large measure controlled. He held that ace. And when the
time came he would play it. The Premier wanted no advice from him.
Laurier offered him none.
When the bilingual dispute was transferred to the Commons, Laurier took
the only side consistent with his character and his career. He avowed
his belief, as always, in Provincial rights, but he asked Ontario to
use its strength with clemency. Even with an element of bitterness he
did not lose his dignity. But the fine sparkle of the Laurier we all
knew was gone. He was beset with complexities and contradictions. The
one simple thing about him was his hope to finish his work by winning
another election. In the debate on the Nickle motion for the abolition
of any further king-made aristocracy in Canada, he was an acidulous old
cynic, offering to go and burn his title in the market place if certain
others would do likewise. Those photographs of Laurier in the Windsor
Uniform, making him look like a refulgent relique of the court of Louis
XIV. were no longer prized in the family album. Away with them!
Poor, splendid old man! Even in his crotchets and quavers he was
charming. To the very last he could rise in the Commons and with a
voice as thick as wool make members opposite fancy they were hearing
great music.
In 1916 an artist painted a portrait of Laurier to hang in the
Legislative halls of Quebec, where the sound of his magic voice had
first been heard in parliamentary speech. The artist began to paint
the Laurier of "the sunny ways." The old man corrected him. "No, if
you please," he said gravely, "paint me as a ruler of men."
It was the Cardinal speaking; the man who had disciplined more Cabinet
politicians than even Macdonald, the master of Cabinets; the old man
who remembered the power of an earlier day.
Early in 1917 he was offered coalition by the Premier. He refused.
Laurier knew that coalition meant conscription, and conscription meant
dragooning Quebec.
It came home vividly to the old leader in Opposition, whatever it may
have done had he been in power, that to advocate conscription would
drive Quebec into the camp of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin
had between them managed to save a large majority of French-Canadians.
The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the Boer War. It
was fated not to end until either leader or the other should quit.
Before the war Bourassa was flamboyant and defiant. After it began he
was openly and brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were
inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizenship in so
conglomerate a thing as Empire. The easiest thing in the world is for
a high wind to sweep a prairie fire. The war and Bourassa together had
the power to sweep Quebec, had Laurier and Gouin shown signs of
yielding to the demand for conscription. I am told that Laurier
personally believed in conscription but saw this terrible danger of
disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war only had staved off the
Irish question, a conference on which was in session when war was
declared. Laurier dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec.
He knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his own methods,
mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most of his life to achieve unity.
He dreaded to see that unity imperilled. I think he would have been
glad to see Quebec enlist as Ontario and other Provinces had done.
That was impossible. Conscription was a menace in Quebec to the man
who had failed to estimate the jack-boot menace in Germany, but who had
not failed to oppose the idea that navalism in England was as bad as
militarism anywhere.
No judgment of Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the
historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader
to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending
his original passion for the solidarity of Empire.
The Winnipeg convention of 1917 was a piece of almost calculated
cruelty on the part of men who should have known that the old chief's
day was politically done. His party which for years he had penetrated
with his personality was slipping into disunion. Vaguely he knew that
the western wing of it was almost gone over to Radicalism such as he
could not control. But in Ottawa there was an even more direct split.
There, conscriptionist Liberals called the Convention for the purpose
of proclaiming win-the-war independence of Laurier and considering
Coalition on its merits. But the western Liberal machine captured it
by a fluke. For a few days the old chief dreamed that the West had
rallied to his standards. Then he awoke to the reality that even in
the east he was head of a divided house.
The man who in 1916 had been painted as a ruler of men found in that
summer of 1917 the Win-the-War Liberals deserting him, some of them
with sobs. They loved him well. He was the old king. Conscription
was now the issue. The Government had decided upon it late in 1916.
In 1917 the Military Service Act was brought down in the House.
Laurier knew at what it was most directly aimed--Quebec. He fell back
on the ruse of invoking the Militia Act which called for defence only.
There was no defence. He knew it. He moved for a Referendum, knowing
that in the West, sore over the Wartime Elections Act, and in Quebec,
and in the absence of the soldier vote it might carry by a majority
sufficient to defeat the Government, to force an election and send him
back to power. He was beaten. Conscription became the law. To
enforce it came the Coalition. The election was held. The Liberals
were again beaten--partly by men from their own ranks.
Still the old king hung on. He was now too old to let go. Even the
Coalition might fail. Or the war might be ended And then----? The
last fighting act of his life was to call the Ottawa Liberal
Convention, of the men who had not abandoned his colours; the men for
whom he was not still holding the open door. But a few months before
he died here he was "up on his toes," as George Graham said of him,
sending out battle calls for some election that must come now. The war
was over; the army coming home. The Coalition's day was "done." Those
stalwarts must return to the fold.
But most of them came not. There was still work for them to do, and
surely no haste for an election.
What? No more elections for Laurier? Not one more chance, after all
the waiting, for him to finish his work? Poor old infatuate! splendid
even in his illusions. There was no work for Laurier to do now. There
was no room for him to do it if there had been. There were few to
follow him except in Quebec--for in his dotage he would not believe
that the West had so forsaken him.
In a few months he was dead. And when dead, once again men forgot
their political opinions and for a brief while somehow worshipped the
memory of the man whose life was almost the coming true of a dream,
whose work was never done, whose evening of life was a tragedy. And
case-hardened politicians who had borne the burden and the heat of the
day with Laurier, wept.
But the power of Laurier is not dead. In the long perspective of
history the figure of this great Canadian, with his "sunny ways" and
his bewildering Atlas load, will stand out vividly when many of his
successors will be scarcely visible in the haze.