Today marks the birthday of James Anthony Froude (1818–94,) a prolific Victorian novelist, historian, and biographer. His literary accomplishment is remarkable not only for its variety and its originality, but also for the controversy it generated.
Froude’s autobiographical melodramatic novel The Nemesis of Faith (1849) described the reasons for and outcomes of a young priest’s crisis of faith. The book created a furor and was publicly burned. Froude was disgraced and resigned his Oxford fellowship. (Forty-three years later, he returned to Oxford as a distinguished professor of modern history and held this position until death.)
After resigning from Oxford, Froude took up historical writing and published History of England (1856–1870, twelve volumes.) This book was well liked for its research and spirited narrative but attracted controversy for its Protestant interpretation of historical events. Froude also wrote Biographies of Benjamin Disraeli, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, Thomas Becket, Robert Burns, Francis Bacon, Henry VIII, and numerous other historical figures.
Froude is best known as the literary executor and biographer of his mentor, the historian Thomas Carlyle, as well as Carlyle’s wife Jane Welsh. Froude’s biography of Thomas Carlyle is considered one of the finest examples of English literary biography. Froude’s publication of Welsh’s letters attracted debate for alluding to the less-pleasant aspects of her marriage to Carlyle. Froude also contended that Jane had given up her own literary talents and ambitions in favor of her husband’s career. Though Froude claimed that a sincere biographer must fully explore a subject’s defects of character, his critics interpreted his frankness as a betrayal of Carlyle’s memory.
Inspirational Quotations by James Anthony Froude
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not only difficult, but is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. In historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach least to agreement.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Human improvement is from within outward.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone like the bloom from a soiled flower.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
If we think of religion only as a means of escaping what we call the wrath to come, we shall not escape it; we are under the burden of death, if we care only for ourselves.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
The secret of a person’s nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
What is called virtue in the common sense of the word has nothing to do with this or that man’s prosperity, or even happiness.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway, the passion and infirmity of age.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
No person is ever good for much, that hasn’t been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)
Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)