He suited it
and it suited him. Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection
of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as
a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains
in the history of literature. Men who were certainly not his inferiors
in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence
and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at
home in it: their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed,
by its soil and atmosphere. Dryden, one may safely say, would have been
greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one
cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work
under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his
contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations
were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was
conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been
impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and
spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his
age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the
link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve
and Fielding.
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