Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Lord Durham: A Biography of John George Lambton, First Earl of Durham
These historical developments are dramatized for us by association with his personality. Much of the storminess of his life may be ascribed to the con?ict of great political and social forces, but not a little of it was due to the directness of his methods, the loftiness of his courage, his hypersensitive pride, and his Violent temper. In him a magnificent manhood was hampered and marred by a singular childishness - a strange blending of noble visions and petty vanities, high sacrifices and puny impatience, sustained devotion and fiery temper, and through it all more than a touch of heroism. All his life the state of his health was such that few men so circumstanced would have thought of engaging in any form of public work. Through seasons of intense pain, and into one physical breakdown after another, he laboured on for the love of England that was in him; though frequently em bittered, he responded to every call and continued to make labour and trouble for himself until tuberculosis, added to his other maladies, cut off his life. He was spurred on, no doubt, by ambition as well as by patriotism, but it was the sort of ambition that we covet for our sons and daughters.
I do not pretend to have been unmoved by such considera tions, but I believe that the weaker elements in Lord Dur ham's character are also clearly revealed. My business has been primarily to describe and interpret, and not to praise or blame. I have conceived of the task of the biographer as simply to set the stage and permit the central figure, his colleagues, friends, and opponents, to speak and act for themselves.
From this conception of biography it follows that the pre face is the author's only refuge from anonymity. Here I have only one confession to make. I am a Canadian of the third generation and all of my grandparents were living in Canada in Lord Durham's day. That subjects me, I feel confident, to no party bias, but it does expose me to a pride that in the life of my own country there have developed certain world shaping conceptions. It was my original intention to add an epilogue tracing those ideas from Lord Durham to their fulfilment in our own day, showing that it was our Canadian forefathers who cherished most warmly Durham's concep tions, that it was they who took the lead in insisting that the British Empire should not break up again, and in bringing his vision of the permanence and character of the Empire to a fuller fruition than even he had dreamed. But I decided that that was another story and that my task should end with his death.
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