Although it is now over a year since the Lady Chatterley trial took place, the issues it raised continue to be absorbing for anyone interested in the relation between literature and morality. And only now, perhaps, when the angry dismay of those who disapproved of the verdict and the somewhat shrill jubilation of those who welcomed it have both subsided, can one look at those issues in a dispassionate spirit. So I make no apology for opening this paper with a consideration of some key aspects of the trial, before I pass on to other and more general questions. Reading through the Penguin volume, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, which contains a transcript of most of the proceedings, one is struck by the frequency with which the defence witnesses came into collision with the judge or prosecuting counsel over the fundamental meanings of words. Mr Richard Hoggart, for instance, puzzled and irritated the prosecuting counsel by insisting on giving to the word ‘puritanical’ its full historical significance; while Mrs Joan Bennett and the learned judge found themselves quite comically at cross-purposes about what they meant by ‘marriage’. Another witness, Mr Raymond Williams, has since suggested that these clashes were inevitable when literary and legal minds had to meet on ground chosen by the latter; and no doubt he is right in finding them unedifying. Nevertheless, certain of these disagreements are, I think, fruitful if properly considered, and this is particularly true of the profound and sustained disagreement about the significance of the word ‘moral’, which formed a continuous undercurrent to the trial, intermittently manifesting itself in the witnesses’ evidence, and the speeches by counsel and the judge. This disagreement became more overt in the public controversy that followed the trial, notably in the correspondence columns of The Times.

The English visitor, returning from America, seems rarely to have found much to praise. Dickens, Trollope, Kipling—to mention only the Victorian big guns—cast a dyspeptic glance on the continent and found it wanting. ‘Hell with the lid off’, was Dickens’ judgment on Pittsburgh, and Kipling found little sign of gracious living in New York.

Travellers, it is true, can always find some evidence to confirm their own prejudices, and the Americans—in this, as in all else, a generous people—are liberal in providing it. Thus, innumerable films have prepared one for the usual Mid West town, but it is still a surprise to see it articulated, to realize that the image is not a Hollywood set inspired by a reading of Sinclair Lewis. A sort of Slough extending to infinity: it can underline the story of the man arriving at an American airport late at night, who, having booked in at the universal convention hotel, had to telephone room service in the morning to discover where he was. But generalizations of this sort are singularly unfaithful to the essential American fact. The Main Street snapshot, with its drive-in cinema and its ten-cent store, is as misleading as the British Tourist Board’s advertisements suggesting that England is all cottages with roses round the door.

One of the most remarkable features of the Church’s life today is its persistent and widespread effort to return to the springs of that life. In every domain—biblical, liturgical, catechetical—there is a desire to rediscover the sources in their freshness, to re-animate the Church with the primitive vitality, and power which enabled it to reach out all over the world. So far as biblical studies go, this effort finds one concrete expression in archaeological and anthopological research into the history of the Jewish people. The object of this research, as Fr Joseph Bourke, o.p., suggested in his recent ‘Survey of Old Testament Studies’ in this review, is to reconstruct the ‘living context’ in which the Old Testament traditions were originally formulated.

It is remarkable to find that this concern for the revival of the past also exists in the African continent. Anthopologists in Africa are more and more interested in the study of African culture, and particularly African religion and ritual, not in order to reject them but to re-discover virgin Africa. Seized by the passion for négritude, this movement to renew negro-African culture, occurs just at the moment when Africa is opening out into modern life, and seeks to advance but realizes it cannot do so without returning to the authentic roots of its history.