was the first president of the National Free Religious Association (1867) and an early and ardent disciple of Darwin and Spencer. To his radical views he was always faithful. It is a mistake to say that he grew more conservative in later years; but his judgment grew more generous and catholic. He was a greater orator than man of letters, and his sermons in New York were delivered to large audiences, averaging one thousand at the Masonic Temple, and were printed each week; in eloquence and in the charm of his spoken word he was probably surpassed in his day by none save George William Curtis. Personally he seemed cold and distant, partly because of his impressive appearance, and partly because of his own modesty, which made him backward in seeking friendships.
His principal published works are: Stories from the Life of the Teacher (1863), A Child’s Book of Religion (1866), and other works of religious teaching for children; several volumes of sermons; Beliefs of Unbelievers (1876), The Cradle of the Christ: a Study in Primitive Christianity (1877), The Spirit of New Faith (1877), The Rising and the Setting Faith (1878), and other expositions of the “new faith” he preached; Life of Theodore Parker (1874), Transcendentalism in New England (1876), which is largely biographical, Gerrit Smith, a Biography (1878), George Ripley (1882), in the “American Men of Letters” series, Memoir of William Henry Channing (1886), Boston Unitarianism, 1820–1850 (1890), really a biography of his father; and Recollections and Impressions, 1822–1890 (1891).
FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY (1818–1894), English historian, son of R. H. Froude, archdeacon of Totnes, was born at Dartington, Devon, on the 23rd of April 1818. He was educated at Westminster and Oriel College, Oxford, then the centre of the ecclesiastical revival. He obtained a second class and the chancellor’s English essay prize, and was elected a fellow of Exeter College (1842). His elder brother, Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836), had been one of the leaders of the High Church movement at Oxford. Froude joined that party and helped J. H. Newman, afterwards cardinal, in his Lives of the English Saints. He was ordained deacon in 1845. By that time his religious opinions had begun to change, he grew dissatisfied with the views of the High Church party, and came under the influence of Carlyle’s teaching. Signs of this change first appeared publicly in his Shadows of the Clouds, a volume containing two stories of a religious sort, which he published in 1847 under the pseudonym of “Zeta,” and his complete desertion of his party was declared a year later in his Nemesis of Faith, an heretical and unpleasant book, of which the earlier part seems to be autobiographical.
On the demand of the college he resigned his fellowship at Oxford, and mainly at least supported himself by writing, contributing largely to Fraser’s Magazine and the Westminster Review. The excellence of his style was soon generally recognized. The first two volumes of his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada appeared in 1856, and the work was completed in 1870. As an historian he is chiefly remarkable for literary excellence, for the art with which he represents his conception of the past. He condemns a scientific treatment of history and disregards its philosophy. He held that its office was simply to record human actions and that it should be written as a drama. Accordingly he gives prominence to the personal element in history. His presentations of character and motives, whether truthful or not, are undeniably fine; but his doctrine that there should be “no theorizing” about history tended to narrow his survey, and consequently he sometimes, as in his remarks on the foreign policy of Elizabeth, seems to misapprehend the tendencies of a period on which he is writing.
Froude’s work is often marred by prejudice and incorrect statements. He wrote with a purpose. The keynote of his History is contained in his assertion that the Reformation was “the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe.” Hence he overpraises Henry VIII. and others who forwarded the movement, and speaks too harshly of some of its opponents. So too, in his English in Ireland (1872–1874), which was written to show the futility of attempts to conciliate the Irish, he aggravates all that can be said against the Irish, touches too lightly on English atrocities, and writes unjustly of the influence of Roman Catholicism. A strong anti-clerical prejudice is manifest in his historical work generally, and is doubtless the result of the change in his views on Church matters and his abandonment of the clerical profession. Carlyle’s influence on him may be traced both in his admiration for strong rulers and strong government, which led him to write as though tyranny and brutality were excusable, and in his independent treatment of character. His rehabilitation of Henry VIII. was a useful protest against the idea that the king was a mere sanguinary profligate, but his representation of him as the self-denying minister of his people’s will is erroneous, and is founded on the false theory that the preambles of the acts of Henry’s parliaments represented the opinions of the educated laymen of England. As an advocate he occasionally forgets that sobriety of judgment and expression become an historian. He was not a judge of evidence, and seems to have been unwilling to admit the force of any argument or the authority of any statement which militated against his case. In his Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1891) he made an unfortunate attempt to show that certain fresh evidence on the subject, brought forward by Dr Gairdner, Dr Friedmann and others, was not inconsistent with the views which he had expressed in his History nearly forty years before. He worked diligently at original manuscript authorities at Simancas, the Record Office and Hatfield House; but he used his materials carelessly, and evidently brought to his investigation of them a mind already made up as to their significance. His Life of Caesar (1879), a glorification of imperialism, betrays an imperfect acquaintance with Roman politics and the life of Cicero; and of his two pleasant books of travel, The English in the West Indies (1888) shows that he made little effort to master his subject, and Oceana (1886), the record of a tour in Australia and New Zealand, among a multitude of other blunders, notes the prosperity of the working-classes in Adelaide at the date of his visit, when, in fact, owing to a failure in the wheat-crop, hundreds were then living on charity. He was constitutionally inaccurate, and seems to have been unable to represent the exact sense of a document which lay before him, or even to copy from it correctly. Historical scholars ridiculed his mistakes, and Freeman, the most violent of his critics, never let slip a chance of hitting at him in the Saturday Review. Froude’s temperament was sensitive, and he suffered from these attacks, which were often unjust and always too savage in tone. The literary quarrel between him and Freeman excited general interest when it blazed out in a series of articles which Freeman wrote in the Contemporary Review (1878–1879) on Froude’s Short Study of Thomas Becket.
Notwithstanding its defects, Froude’s History is a great achievement; it presents an important and powerful account of the Reformation period in England, and lays before us a picture of the past magnificently conceived, and painted in colours which will never lose their freshness and beauty. As with Froude’s work generally, its literary merit is remarkable; it is a well-balanced and orderly narrative, coherent in design and symmetrical in execution. Though it is perhaps needlessly long, the thread of the story is never lost amid a crowd of details; every incident is made subordinate to the general idea, appears in its appropriate place, and contributes its share to the perfection of the whole. The excellence of its form is matched by the beauty of its style, for Froude was a master of English prose. The most notable characteristic of his style is its graceful simplicity; it is never affected or laboured; his sentences are short and easy, and follow one another naturally. He is always lucid. He was never in doubt as to his own meaning, and never at a loss for the most appropriate words in which to express it. Simple as his language is, it is dignified and worthy of its subject. Nowhere perhaps does his style appear to more advantage than in his four series of essays entitled Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867–1882), for it is seen there unfettered by the obligations of narrative. Yet his narrative is admirably told. For the most part flowing easily along, it rises on fit occasions to splendour, picturesque beauty or pathos. Few more brilliant pieces of historical
