Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!

Forbid it, Heaven, a favour or a debt

She e’er should cancel...

Safe is your secret still in Chloe’s ear;

Of all her dears she never slandered one...

Chloe is prudent.

There is quite a catalogue of virtue here—in fact all the virtues
conventionally associated with high society in the eighteenth
century: prudence, decorum, propriety, reasonableness,
unflappable calm, discriminating taste, discretion, control,
dignity—but in the brilliant dialectic of the couplet the
antithetical reply insisting that her virtue is a denial of nature
turns all her qualities into the essential limitation of mere social
form. The wit may be said to be present in the ridiculing
dialectic of the satire, but in the larger sense of wit meaning the
imagination and what it creates we may applaud the wit of
Pope in painting his portrait with such appropriateness in the
colouring and such precise clarity of outline. There are just
enough details—and the props are all there for a purpose and
not unduly obtrusive—to place the society lady in her world:
the Indian chest (finely rhyming with breast), the chintz and
mohair, and the footman. Finally, in phrases like ‘Forbid it,
Heaven’ or ‘Of all her dears’, the poet catches her very accent.
This portrait of an elegant society lady is itself elegant and
polished and as such embodies the virtues of the age in which it
was painted. But elegance and polish are not enough. The
values of the age are turned against itself. The moral point
made through and controlling the wit could not be clearer. But
for further clarity, the positive moral content of the poem is
embodied in the winsome portrait of Martha herself whose
virtues of good sense, good taste, and true feeling are wittily
praised at the close of the poem.
On satire and Warton’s objection to it, it may be useful
here to offer the judgement of Byron:

There may or may not be, in fact, different ‘orders’ of

poetry, but a poet is always judged according to his

execution, not according to his branch of the art.^25

On Pope’s satire on women, a contrast may be suggested with
Juvenal’s notorious sixth satire on the subject of women, a long