Babe, B. A.: Being the Uneventful History of a Young Gentleman at Cambridge University

IF "The Babe, B.A," had been published anonymously, we imagine that no reviewer would have had the slightest hesitation in ascribing it to its rightful author, Mr. E. F. Benson, for the trail of "Dodo" is over it all; and surely none but Mr. Benson himself could have had the audacity to present so strange a hotch-potch of brilliant, inconsequent chatter, personal allusions, topical discussions, and general discursiveness, under the guise of a novel. To find fault with such a book as "The Babe, BA," is easy enough, for its defects as a work of art are glaringly, almost insolently, obtrusive; yet those defects are balanced by so much wit, brightness, and frolicsome charm, that the little jeu d'esprit may well claim exemption from too severe criticism. It is impossible to deny that nearly all the personages of Mr. Benson's story are merely lay-figures serving as a convenient basis for the fanciful wit with which he drapes them. They are characterless simulacra for the main part, bearing a strong family likeness to each other and to the former puppets of Mr. Benson's too facile mummery. But this inartistic convention is happily laid aside in the case of the titular hero, and the Babe himself is a truly delightful creation, so vividly realized that the reader feels on intimate terms of friendship -- nay, of positive affection-with this volatile young gentleman from the first page to the last. Mr. Benson's aim -- an entirely laudable one -- has been to paint la vraie vérilé of undergraduate life at Cambridge by means of a series of every-day episodes in the life of a perfectly normal specimen of that cruelly caricatured class. Arbuthnot of Trinity (commonly called "The Babe" by reason of his infantine appearance and ingenuous manners), is, indeed, as far removed from the sphere of the melodramatic hero of the conventional undergraduate of fiction as it is possible to conceive, and nothing could be more refreshingly unheroic than the persistent frivolity of his conduct as it is here set forth. Whether we behold him "sapping" for his Tripos examination by means of a constant course of social gaieties or goading to madness an ill-tempered fellow by his skill in croquet, the Babe is invariably charming, amusing, and intensely human. Flippant the book may be -- it is its author's métier to be ostentatiously flippant yet there is one episode in "The Babe, B.A.," which is serious enough, and which is handled most skillfully and delicately. We refer to the chapters in which the Babe detects a fellow-undergraduate in the act of cheating at cards, and subsequently taxes him with the offence, but does it in such a way as to render the culprit his friend for life. This episode is beautifully treated, and the hero emerges from a difficult and unpleasant task covered with honour by his manly frankness and tender compassion towards a sinning brother....