VIEWSrnColeridge and the Battle of WaterloornCritical Theory Among the Englishrnby George WatsonrnThere is a story told about the late Roland Barthes. Once,rnin his Paris seminar on critical theory, a British visitorrnbravely remarked that something he had just said soundedrnrather like a point made by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria.rnAn embarrassed silence followed. Then Barthes, in hisrnponderous voice, spoke: “One can never be sure what is not tornbe found in the writings of the Anglo-Saxons.”rnThe story is illustrative. If the British have no great reputationrnas theorists in the present age, whether in continental Europernor the United States, it is because there is a damning feelingrnthat, having dedicated themselves to empiricism withrnLocke’s Essay of 1690, if not earlier, they are naturally hostile torntheory. It is a view contradictory in itself, since empiricism wasrnplainly a theory, good or bad; Locke and his successors arguedrnagainst a lively opposition; and whatever the merits of that longrnargument, it does not suggest theoretical incuriosity. On thernother hand, there is a healthy suspicion that English theoristsrnmay occasionally have got there first, and that an insular civilizationrnis puzzlingly unsynchronized with its neighbors. It isrnGeorge Watson, who is a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge,rnis the author of The Literary Critics, The Certainty ofrnLiterature, and British Literature since 1945, and general editorrnof the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.rnneither old-fashioned nor new-fashioned—just odd. As FrankrnKermode has recently remarked, William Empson in his Structurernof Complex Words (1951) anticipated Deconstruction by arnwhole generation.rnThat is a suspicion worth encouraging: it is often, thoughrnnot always, right. English criticism began with theory, it is easilyrnforgotten, its first notable work, Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologiernfor Poetrie, being composed as early as the 1580’s. That makesrnliterary theory a lot older in England than literary history. If thernearliest notable work of literary history in the language wasrnSamuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779-81)—the earliest, atrnall events, still read for its original purpose—then theory inrnEngland is two centuries older than literary history. Coleridge’srnBiographia, too, is plainly a work of theory, which makes thernalleged modernity of critical theory hard to fathom. In the daysrnwhen I haunted theoretical classes in Paris, some 30 years agornand more, and critical conferences in the United States andrnelsewhere, it was always assumed that literary history was a traditionalrnactivity and critical theory the latest thing, and as a literaryrnhistorian I was expected to stand before it humble andrnamazed, uncomplainingly accepting the title of a traditionalist.rnThe trouble was that I knew too much literary history to do anyrnsuch thing.rnSo let the word go forth. The literary history of vernacularrn12/CHRONICLESrnrnrn