Forty Years and an Epilogue : An Auto- biography. By
Stephen Hobhouse. (James Clarke. 12s. 6d.) MANY who lived through the first World War will recall a considerable agitation over the prison treatment of conscientious objec- tors. At that time a novel called Mr. Stirling Sticks It Out showed a spiritually- motivated C.O. dying through prison con- ditions. The model for this character, Mr. Stephen Hobhouse, was in fact released in alarm of his possible death, and, with health undermined, worked on a prison system enquiry organised by the Webbs, Shaw and other leading socialists, finally producing an exhaustive report on English Prisons Today. Looking back on his life now, at the age of 70, Mr. Hobhouse places this incident where it belongs in the general harmony of a career devoted to humane and peace-loving service. Born to a rich inherit- ance, his turning-point came at 21 through the overwhelming impact of the Tolstoyan creed. After it his course was unwavering and consistent, though it could not alto- gether please his family. To his disappointed father he was always to be" the eldest son who had 'abandoned his inheritance, given up his civil service career, joined the odd sect of Quakers, and disgraced the family name by two sentences of hard labour in prison." Yet the delinquent son was build- ing on his own convictions, living in a slum to aid his welfare work, and labouring, at the most; unpopular junctures, for inter- national peace. In this candid, unelabor- ated narrative Mr. Hobhouse's most moving personal chapters tell of his " celestial " love for a German hospital nurse, and the more earthly passion shared with the wife of a dissolute genius, where denial and sublim- ation had their questionable triumph. Related to Beatrice Webb and Sir Stafford Cripps—as also to that friend of Byron's who had the Memoirs burnt—Mr. Hob- house brings back an attractive pre-wars atmosphere of Fabianism and the " landed gentry " into a society threatened both extern- ally and internally by collapse. S. N.
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