Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/457

 and Lady Curzon, and she narrated the incidents of the pageantry in letters to the London 'Daily Graphic' and 'Collier's Weekly' of New York, which were collected as 'Imperial India' in 1903. To the 'Academy,' the ownership of which her father acquired in 1896, she contributed in a very different style during 1903 a series of thoughtful essays, 'Letters from a Silent Study' (republished in 1904). Her critical power was seen to best advantage in an admirable notice of George Eliot written in 1901 for the 10th edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and in a critical essay on George Sand prepared for a series of English translations of French novels edited by Mr. Edmund Gosse (1902). At the end of 1905 she undertook a lecture tour in America, where her popularity ran high, but she overtaxed her strength and abandoned the tour in Feb. 1906.

In England, where she lately found her chief recreation in motor tours, she mainly divided her time between her father's residences, 56 Lancaster Gate, London, and Steephill Castle, Ventnor. Since 1900 she rented near Steephill Castle a small house, St. Lawrence Lodge, where she wrote much. On Sunday 12 Aug. 1906 she left Ventnor for her London home. The next morning she was found dead in bed of cardiac failure. Her will directed that her body should be cremated; but cremation was forbidden by the Roman church, and she was buried in St. Mary's cemetery, Kensal Green, after a requiem mass at the church of the Jesuit fathers in Farm Street. Her gross personalty was proved at 24,502l. 8s., but the net personalty only amounted to 975l. 3s. l1d. (The Times, 26 Sept. 1906).

Mrs. Craigie wrote that she lived two lives in one. Her worldly delight in social pleasures and activities seemed to be combined with a mystical conviction of their hollowness and futility. In spite of marked business aptitudes and a capacity to make money, she spent more than she could afford, and failed to husband her resources. With her sincere devotion to the creed of her adoption, there went a deep despondency which colours much of her intimate correspondence and is in painful contrast with her vivacity in social intercourse. Her sensitiveness to criticism and her eagerness to defend her work at all hazards against public censure are hard to reconcile with her claim to be treated as an idealist. Such inconsistencies were doubtless due in part to uncertain health and the shock of her unhappy marriage, but mainly to intellectual instability and impulsive emotion. Well acquainted with French and Italian, and widely read in philosophy and theology as well as in fiction and belles lettres, she was more ambitious of the reputation of a serious thinker than of a witty novelist. Her philosophic ideas are, however, too dim and elusive to be quite intelligible; her psychological insight, although fitfully luminous, lacked a steady glow, while her plots were too often without adequate coherence. But her command of epigram humorous, caustic, and cynical gives her work high value, and her style, which owes much to her literary heroes, Newman, Disraeli, George Meredith, and George Eliot, is notable for its vivid picturesqueness.

An oil painting by Miss L. Stacpoole in 1885, which is reproduced in the 'Life' (1911), belongs to her family. A portrait plaque in bronze was placed by her friends in University College, London, being unveiled by Lord Curzon of Kedleston on 2 July 1908. A replica was presented to Barnard College, New York. A John Oliver Hobbes scholarship for English literature was founded at University College at the same time. After her death her house at Ventnor was purchased by her father and renamed 'Craigie Lodge.'

 CRANBROOK, first. [See (1814-1906).]

CRAVEN, HAWES (1837–1910), scene-painter, whose full name was Henry Hawes Craven Green, was born at Kirkgate, Leeds, on 3 July 1837. His father, James Green (d. 1881), at first a publican of Leeds and amateur pugilist, became known as a comedian and pantomimist. His mother, Elizabeth Craven, was an actress, who left the stage, and published several volumes of prose and verse. As a boy young Craven acted with his father on tour, but early evincing an artistic bent, attended the school of design at Marl borough House (1851–3), where he won numerous prizes. Apprenticed in 1853 to John Gray, scene-painter of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, he passed with him to the Olympic Theatre, and provided in his absence through illness the scenery for Wilkie Collins's drama 'The Lighthouse' (23 July 1857). His work won the approval of Clarkson 