in each, affect the other. They turn in a vicious, or a virtuous, circle. Only a fine society could have bred Homer: and he left it finer for hearing him." His criticism, while acknowledging that morality is historically relative, was thus values-based. "Writers can make men feel, not merely see, the values that endure." Believing that too many modern writers encouraged men and women to flee to unreason, decadence and barbarism, he condemned the trahisons des clercs of the twentieth century, and used his lectures and writing to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom. "One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat," he wrote in his last published letter (1966), "that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it." The writer or artist serving up "slapdash nightmares out of his Unconscious", "in an age morbidly avid of uncivilised irreticence", not only exhibited his own neuroses, but fed neurosis in others. Literary critics, too, had to take more responsibility. "Much cant gets talked," he noted of the Structuralists, "by critics who care more for the form and organisation of a work than for its spirit, its content, its supreme moments." The serious note in his criticism was counterbalanced by wit and urbanity, by lively anecdote and quotation, and by a gift for startling imagery and epigram. What Lucas wrote about Housman's Name and Nature of Poetry in 1933 (though he contested some of its ideas) sums up what he himself aspired to as a literary critic: "… the kind of critical writing that best justifies itself before the brevity of life; that itself adds new data to our experience as well as arguing about the old; that happily combines, in a word, philosophy with autobiography, psychology with a touch of poetry – of the 'poetic' imagination. It can make acceptable even common sense. There are sentences here which recall the clear-cut Doric strength of the Lives of the Poets ..." His Cambridge colleague T. R. Henn noted that Lucas's approach and style were influenced by the Strachey of Books and Characters (1922). Controversy Lucas's impatience with the "obscurantism" and coterie-appeal of much modern poetry made him in the interwar years one of the foremost opponents of the new schools. "As for 'profundity'," he wrote, "it is not uncommonly found also in dry wells; which may likewise contain little but obscurity