Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/301

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Howard, R.
D.N.B. 1912–1921
Howard, R.

and actions were in diametric opposition to her political theories, of which he disapproved.

Divided in politics, the Howard family remained united in its support of total abstinence. Licensed houses were suppressed on the Howard estates. The family crusade for teetotalism left its mark for good on the hard-drinking habits of the north. As president, from 1903, of the National British Women's Temperance Association, Lady Carlisle became an ardent leader of the political temperance party; but the aims of that party were frustrated.

Fortune was kinder to Lady Carlisle's other object, the winning of the vote for women; in this cause was made her main contribution to the nation's life. The daughter of a liberal chief whip, as she often remembered, she gave unswerving support to the principles of the party as she saw them. It was difficult fighting ground; before the European War all the parties were divided on women's suffrage. She had organized many women's liberal associations in the country, primarily for aid in the Home Rule struggle. But the union of these bodies, the Women's Liberal Federation (of which she was president from 1891 to 1901 and from 1906 to 1914), was not to be the meek handmaid of the party. Lady Carlisle had the balanced task, which became delicate at by-elections, of supporting her party while pressing her claim for the vote. She saw the blunder of aiming at the enfranchisement of a limited class of propertied women; and it was her circle that demanded the broader and more democratic franchise ultimately adopted. She would have nothing to do with the phase of suffragette violence which, in spite of the self-delusion of the fanatics, was throwing back the movement before the War. The suffrage came in the end as the outcome or recognition of the war-services of womanhood; but Lady Carlisle's initiative and leadership within her own party counted along with the working of other causes and the efforts of other women in the result.

The European War in its strange reactions solved for her what seemed an insoluble problem; but, for her as for other social reformers, it shattered political ideals. She had believed in the possibilities of international arbitration; but when the War came she had no doubts as to the part England had to play. The last years of her life were overclouded. Her husband died in 1911. Five of her six sons predeceased her, the last of the five falling in the War. Broken health handicapped her in the latter part of her life, but she was capable to the end of surprising physical and mental exertions. She died in London of encephalitis lethargica 12 August 1921.

[Personal knowledge.]

C. H. R.


HUGHES, ARTHUR (1832–1915), painter, the third and youngest son of Edward Hughes, of Oswestry, was born in London 27 January 1832, and educated at Archbishop Tenison's grammar school, Castle Street, Long Acre. He revealed in early boyhood so irresistible an inclination towards art that in 1846, at the age of fourteen, he was allowed to join the school of design at Somerset House, where, under Alfred Stevens, he worked with such industry that in the following year he secured an art studentship in the Royal Academy schools. There, two years later (1849), he won the silver medal for antique drawing, and attained, at the age of seventeen, a place on the walls of the annual exhibition for a painting of Musidora.

Hughes was, therefore, at a critical stage when the founding of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (1848), and especially the publication (1850) of the first number of its short-lived periodical, The Germ, determined once for all the lines along which his artistic individuality was to be developed. That art must be founded directly upon nature down to its smallest details; that nothing was insignificant; that the least leaf or flower was as deserving of loving care as the most outstanding feature in the picture, was, put very briefly, the creed which he then adopted, and followed faithfully through a long and productive career.

This adhesion to the principles of the pre-Raphaelites, though he never assumed the title of a brother, brought Hughes into intimate connexion with those young enthusiasts. He at once won the approval of Ruskin; Millais painted him in 1853 as ‘The Proscribed Royalist’; William Morris bought his picture of ‘April Love’, now in the Tate Gallery, in 1856; and in 1857, on Rossetti's invitation, he took part in the decoration of the Oxford Union, contributing a panel depicting ‘The Death of Arthur’. It was, perhaps, this preoccupation which prevented his following up at the Academy of 1857 the success in 1856 of his exquisite triptych of ‘St. Agnes' Eve’; but in 1858 he exhibited ‘The Nativity’, which with its pendant, ‘The Annunciation’, and ‘The Long Engagement’, is now in the muni--

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