Except in reviews of work by contemporaries, Lucas adopted the historical and biographical approach to criticism and examined the views of earlier critics, whose dogmatism he was swift to rebut. He increasingly linked his studies to developments in psychology, notably in "Literature and Psychology" (1951). "The real 'unwritten laws'," he observed, "seem to me those of human psychology." Centrally, he discussed the writer's psychology as revealed through style. "Even science," he noted, "has invented no pickle for embalming a man like "style"."