A third interprets motions, looks and eyes;
At every word a reputation dies.
But social life has compensations: ‘Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.’ Her
dressing-table is a magic carpet:
This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white.
British trade has squeezed the world for jewels, perfumes and combs, to make a
British beauty more beautiful. The disproportion is absurd, but its results are poetic.
Pope’s couplets make the trivial exquisite: the coffee-table, the card-table, and the
fairy ‘Sylphs’ who fly around Belinda:
Transparent forms too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light.
Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,
Thin glittering textures of the filmy dew.
The articulation of the last line ‘echoes the sense’. Pope takes pleasure in refining the
precious world he ridicules. The joy of the writing makes the Rape lighter than
Pope’s later heroi-comedies.
In 1717 Pope added a moral, spoken by Clarissa. It is based on Sarpedon’s speech
to Glaucus (see pp. 191–2): ‘How vain are all these glories, all our pains, / Unless
good sense preserve what beauty gains? ...’
‘... But since, alas! frail beauty must decay,
Curled or uncurled, since locks will turn to grey,
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a man must die a maid;
What then remains,but well our power to use,
And kee p good humour still whate’er we lose?
And trust me, dear, good humour can prevail,
When airs, and flights, and screams,and scolding fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul!’
So spoke the dame, but no applause ensued.
Although a parody, this advice to women to use their power wisely balances older
attitudes, Puritan and Cavalier, to sexual love. We hear more of good sense, good
humour, merit and the soul in Pope’s later Epistle to a Lady.Mature verse
The later verse is chiefly satire, in which Pope ‘without method, talks us into sense’
in public epistles or essays: unromantic forms which show that readers looked to
poets for advice. The second of the four Moral Essays is the Epistle to a Lady: Of the
Characters of Women. Pope believed that the key to character in a man was the ‘ruling
passion’. If so, according to the epistle’s recipient, Martha Blount, ‘Most women have
no characters at all.’ On this frail hook Pope hangs several ‘characters’. Chloe fits one
modern idea of an 18th-century lady:
Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,
Content to dwell in decencies forever.194 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790