To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a great debt.  It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived.  But the root of the matter was there, and in Coleridge’s fertile mind the Aristotelian theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the validity and process of the poetic imagination.  And partly because the foundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the whole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge’s criticism.  In him, too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the moral and the aesthetic values.  This is the firm ground beneath his feet when he—­too seldom—­proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite aesthetic discrimination.

In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration.  Dryden, too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him—­it was in itself false and mistaken. Corruptio optimi pessima.  He took over from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his French exemplars, but he used it very little better than they.  It was in his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the unities.  Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly chafed by it.  He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein:  he is continually tossing his head after a minute or two of ’good manners and action,’ and saying, ‘Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow’; ‘Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.’  It is a gesture with which all decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as Dryden’s prose it has a lasting charm.  Dryden’s heart was in the right place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of Aristotle and Coleridge.

Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous.  We have seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is precisely by reason of the ‘pureness’ in him that he is to be relegated into a rank inferior to theirs.  It looks as though we might have to pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic.  Yet the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation of philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge.  Yet three of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth) were professional philosophers.  It is evidently not the philosophy as such that makes the difference.