George Watson, in a little book, The Literary Critics (1962), has told us that the history of criticism is 'a record of chaos marked by sudden revolution'. 'The great critics do not contribute: they interrupt', he says strikingly. At the risk of confirming Mr Watson's view that I belong to the 'Tidy School of Critical History' (pp. Io, I I), I shall argue that the case is not that desperate. Even in England, which Mr Watson had primarily in mind, one could hardly deny that Dr Johnson learned from Dryden and that T. S. Eliot learned from Coleridge and Arnold. There are continuities. The history of criticism is rather like a long drawn-out debate about a few contested concepts. We can see today and in history the conflict of two endeavours: the search for poetics, for laws, or at least for rules or constants in literature, for a universal matrix on the one hand, and the unending attempts to interpret individual works or minds of authors on the other. We might recognize that these are both legitimate tasks and that they correspond to age-old distinctions in the workings of the human mind. Poetics or theory of literature aims ultimately at the establishment of a science of literature which many today would like to make over into a social science on the model of linguistics, using even such tools of quantification as statistics. The interpreters want to get at the hidden meaning of a text, unmasking its mysteries with the assumptions of Freudian psycho-analysis orJungian archetypal anthropology or, more recently, with existentialist ambitions of identifying with the mind of an author. It is, to put it in gross terms, the old conflict between rationalism and irrationalism, or simply the contrast of concern for either the universal or the individual. It might be, shifting the emphasis slightly, the concern for the work of literature as an object somewhere out there, compared to the concern for the self behind or below it. It is the contrast between interest in craftsmanship and technique versus a glad or resigned admission of the incomprehensible, the ineffable in the inspiration of the poet, which we have rechristened the workings of the unconscious. We could call Aristotle the father of both of these strands. Besides the Poetics he