What the Sophisticated Butler Saw
By the standards of today's puritanism Laurence Sterne was a dirty old man. You must recall that chapter-ending in A Sentimental Journey when the file de chambre shows the author the broken buckle of her shoe: ` put- ting in the strap, and lifting up the other foot with it, when I had done, to see both were right —in doing it too suddenly it unavoidably threw the fair fille de chambre off her centre, and then—' That final dash is. of course, the last word in lewdness to the prigs who would today spell out every last phenomenal detail of the subsequent encounter. A journalist on Sunday was going on about a Somerset Maugham play on telly where dark deeds passed off without a murmur because they were told in hint, and innuendoes and veiled references to Byron This, said he, was `ten times more objectionable than a boy and a girl in bed in a wagon-lit.' That, one would suppose, depends Developing his thought, this reviewer opined that socially we are two nations. 'As a rough rule,' he said con- fidently, `those who came to maturity after the war are more sophisticated and more broad- minded than those who reached adulthood be- fore the war. It is, perhaps, the old people rather than the teenagers we should worry about.' What—if an anguished cry out of limb° is permitted—about those who came to maturity during the war? For myself, I don't in the last mind running the risk of being branded with the mark of the new lost generation if I venture my opinion that such `rough rules' as that adumbrated above are pretty fair twaddle and not a small bit less silly than the silliest utter- ances of the 'unsophisticated' Thirties. ST AL CO; 'As I see it, all this fuss is due to our having foolishly made a prestige symbol out of a city hundreds of miles inside Saracen territory!'
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