Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/52

 THE GENIUS OF POPE.

It can be easily shown that although the Restoration inaugurated in England an age of prose, yet the position of poetry as the chief and natural medium for pure literature was still accepted almost without question. For that reason Pope was taken in his own day to be the undisputed head and front of English letters. His contemporaries probably felt, as we feel, that Swift's was immeasurably the greater genius; but they held, and held rightly, that Pope in his work was the true representative of what has come to be called the Augustan literature. The two works in prose dating from that period which have sunk deepest into the mind of the race—Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels—were written by men who stood outside the main literary movement; for Defoe never at any time attained a place in the great literary coterie of which Swift, while he kept in touch with England, was a brilliant member; and Swift wrote Gulliver when lonely and rebellious in Ireland, thinking his own thoughts. Now the distinctive characteristic of the Augustan literature is that we have no longer in a book the mind of an individual, but the mind of a Society finding expression through the mouth of one of its members. It was a natural result of that