visibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the ideal
which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which,
properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;
it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importance
is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might
conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful
criticism.

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 æsthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
æsthetic 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