The Book-Friend

He took refuge in his eloquence; he over-powered her with a torrent of Philosophical paradoxes, to which, not understanding them, it was impossible for her to reply.

Matthew Lewis, The Monk (London, 1973), 257.

The rise of the negative charge of obscurity in these years was definitive and irreversible. But it was also deliberately perpetuated - and perpetrated - by Coleridge’s firm adherence to The Friend’s Romantic obscurity throughout the book-Friend, as he appropriated the figure of obscurity through a pattern of inversion and transvaluation. In the work of the book-Friend, Coleridge deliberately developed and sustained a metaphysical rhetoric of obscurity that involved a systematic reflexive reference to the function its own obscurantist metaphysics. It is the ultimate work on obscurity in the project of The Friend, in spite of the fact that it is so often overshadowed by the obscurity of the Biographia.

When Coleridge published the book-Friend in 1818, he had so fully revised the content and structure of his earlier work that he claimed the ‘present volumes are rather a rifacciamento than a new edition’.¹ In his contradictory fashion Coleridge had always hoped his work, like The Watchman (which he also intended to have bound into a single, coherent work, as though, like the 1812 Friend, binding alone could confer internal coherence on separate issues),² would eventually be received as a permanent work of something approaching philosophy. This change also represents a shift in Coleridge’s opinion of newspaper circulation and readership in the course of the project of The Friend: ‘[b]y this time Coleridge’s excitement at the speed of newspaper circulation had evaporated into alarm at the size and rapidly changing composition of the reading public’.³ By resurrecting the periodical-Friend in a new form, Coleridge metarhetorically subsumed his earlier periodical work, with its radical connotations, along with his earlier self.

Most of Coleridge’s structural changes are related to changes in content, and they are organized around the central paradox of Romantic obscurity: forming the reader for obscurity while he is being informed by obscurity. This new spiralling structure, modelled on the ascent of a staircase with occasional landing-places represented as a rest from the labour of obscurity, is constructed as the statements of its own reflexive self-construction. The book-Friend is made up not of one but of many ‘staircases’ which ascend and descend, twist and turn, stop and start without any principled pattern in spite of repeated statements announcing a solid structure. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Thomas De Quincey offers what I would like to take as an apposite analogy for this structure in his well-known account of Coleridge’s description of the eighteenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Carceri series, stating that ‘with the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in my dreams.⁴ David Jasper has nicely summed up the Coleridgean element of these ‘Imaginary Prisons’:

[t]he great pieces of machinery express power exercised against power in a series of counterbalances, tensioned like the poles of a vast magnet. [Piranesi] himself, an insignificant and indistinct figure, is seen toiling up a staircase which ascends mysteriously and infinitely into the vaulted recesses. Aspiration matches the endlessness of a prison which both traps the artist in his finitude and suggests a possible escape into infinity for the man who would persevere against terrible odds. The toils of mortality are dreadful engines of torture and chains which hang heavily, yet aspiration is infinite and hope endless. The prison itself, and its staircases, is unfinished, an emblem of endless growth and possibilities; the artist is repeatedly rediscovered, his figure reflected time and again until lost in the indistinctness of the upper vault.⁵

No wonder Coleridge identified himself with Piranesi. In a similar fashion, the first numbers of the book-Friend are made up of proliferating introductions which never deliver the systematic work promised, since the reader of The Friend is never fully prepared, but always being indefinitely prepared for obscurity by obscurity. In the project of The Friend, Romantic obscurity is endless.

The staircase structure functions as a curious Romantic metarhetorical invocation of the unity of form and content rather than a metaphysical or Romantic mimesis – or if it is anything like the latter, it is represented and defended as a rhetorically as well as a philosophically necessary mimesis.⁶ It recalls the relation of ascent to hermeneutical labour in the Christian tradition of Augustine to which I referred earlier: thus Kevin Dungey claims of the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon scholar Aldhelm that ‘[t]he higher one went in spiritual matters, the more one needed mortification of the mind, the necessary discipline and fixity that would allow, even if briefly, a vision of Divinity’, and ‘[a] complex and hidden topic requires a complex and hidden style to do it justice. Thus does his style mirror the cosmos and its eternal enigmas’.⁷ This structure is invoked in a slightly different manner in Boccaccio’s Decamorone, which Coleridge would echo repeatedly in The Friend: ‘Boccaccio apprises the reader in his introduction that the sombre opening of the book must not cause in him or her any more displeasure than a traveller experiences at the foot of a steep mountain, beyond which he or she knows delightful plains await him, plains the more alluring after the travails of the ascent’.⁸ Finally, the ascent from obscurity to clarity which is at work in the figure of the staircase invokes an influential poetic paradigm, what Tilottama Rajan has called ‘the Dantesque pattern of a steady ascent from darkness to light’.⁹

Dungey claims that ‘[o]ddly, Aldhelm’s obscurity is liberating’ in a theological sense, but Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity is also rhetorical and practical, and this reveals its darker side. As David Simpson has noted in a discussion of Burkean rhetorical obscurity, ‘Burke’s own psychic incoherence… accommodated a darker purpose; he reproduced in his own style enough of the confusion that he claimed to see around him to play upon the reader’s passions, but never put at risk the still point of patriarchal control’.¹⁰ Though Frederick Burwick has argued that ‘the Neoplatonists (and with them, Coleridge too) recognized the exaltation of artistic mimesis as replicating the very process of divine creation’,¹¹ for my purposes here it is the rhetorical function and not the metaphysical meaning of Coleridge’s obscure Romantic mimesis which is of interest. Metarhetorically speaking, that is, the claim of mimesis is an instrument for controlling reception. It is, in other words, doing something, not simply stating something. Thus the sympathetically metaphysical Dungey notes that ‘we tend to believe that obscurity expresses a personal elitism. For Aldhelm, however, stylistic obscurity expressed a cultural esotericism, in fact embodied the objective reality of the universe and denoted a writer of profound spiritual accomplishment and vision’.¹² Commenting on Boccaccio’s figure of ascent, Mehtonen insightfully remarks that ‘[t]hough this may be interpreted as a typical manifestation of the eschatological optimism of suffering – toil on earth brings its Heavenly reward – here significance also attaches to the way that the notion echoes Boccaccio’s theoretical defences of obscurity’.¹³ To consider mimesis and metaphysics from the standpoint of Romantic metarhetoric is to, as it were, raise ourselves above the cave of philosophical exegesis and consider them from the standpoint of what their invocations are meant to achieve. In the following section I will take a closer look at the way various elements of obscurity are mixed and blended into the book-Friend, achieving something more like the collection of staircases depicted by Piranesi (or indeed the staircases of Escher) than the single staircase The Friend claims to have built. The types of Romantic obscurity all offer steps to climb, but their direction and their destination is always already indeterminate or achieves at best a negative identity, and their interaction is more fractured than organic.

The book-Friend begins with the articulation of its central principle as a paradox. As Denise Degrois has emphasised,

[t]he beginning of the 1818 edition of The Friend is certainly one of the best examples of how a sense of urgency clashes with an awareness of the practical obstacles to immediate understanding between essayist and reading public…. His tireless introspective observations of the intricacies of the speaking and writing subject are inseparable from the way he deals with the theoretical dilemma and practical difficulty of addressing or “educating” an audience.¹⁴

This aspect of the book-Friend is captured in a motto that is not translated until some pages later, fittingly deploying the concept of obscure delay,¹⁵ after Coleridge has retold his ominous tale of deliberate self-martyrdom, the fable of the maddening rain. The motto, Coleridge announces, ‘comprizes’ the ‘plan of THE FRIEND’ and describes a paradoxical activity like communicating ‘Light to the Blind’.¹⁶ The rest of the introduction proceeds as an extended apology for obscurity. It is a deliberate, provocative response to the profusion of negative public charges relating to this governing figure of the public Coleridge and the persona of The Friend, and comes in the form of a question asked by a fictional interlocutor who articulates Coleridge’s paradoxes for him: ‘[e]ither says the Sceptic, you are the Blind offering to lead the Blind, or you are talking the language of Sight to those who do not possess the sense of seeing. If you mean to be read, try to entertain and do not pretend to instruct’.¹⁷

The Friend’s solution to this paradox is not to decrease miscellaneous bits of indulgent fun, but to announce their incorporation into a managed ‘staircase’ system of obscure labour and light leisure. Leisure is necessary to facilitate labour, once learning is understood as a process unfolding in time and one abandons the hope for immediate, comprehensive inspiration.¹⁸ The responsibility for this process lies initially with the author, but primarily with the reader: ‘[b]ut it is with dullness as with obscurity. It may be positive, and the author’s fault; but it may likewise be relative, and if the author has presented his bill of fare at the portal, the reader has only himself to blame. The main question is, of what class are the persons to be entertained?’¹⁹ Light entertainment is an important element of this deliberately weighty book (another consequence of its binding, I might add), but the governing metaphor of entertainment and instruction throughout this as throughout all of the Friends is medical: thus in this protracted introductory section Coleridge admits ironically that his work may be called by poor readers, like Paradise Lost might be, ‘a most inapt medicine for an occasional propensity to yawn’.²⁰ The primary targets here are those readers who are convinced that difficulty, the most glaring type of obscurity, is the opposite of truth, because in their own (probably unconscious) metaphysics clarity is associated at once with pleasure and ease, immediacy and truth. This relates to what Nancy Struever has identified as the Humean association of virtue with pleasure and truth: ‘[f]or Hume, virtue is “whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation”. Pleasure, in sum, is not simply a mode of edification; pleasure is a sign of the truth’.²¹ Clearly, in the argument of the book-Friend, Coleridge would disagree, and the function of the ‘staircase’ of labour and leisure is determined by his overall commitment to the labour of obscurity.

One of the ‘staircases’ in the book-Friend is Coleridge’s incoherent critique of clarity, which appears in random places and at random times. The ‘letter’ to RL, transposed to the initial sections of the book from the middle of the periodical, supplies the initial introduction to this critique through its attack on readers’ unrealistic expectations. The relation of this critique of clarity to Hazlitt’s dissenting ‘plain speaking’ is introduced in Coleridge’s new conclusion to the letter, the original ending of which he has replaced with a reflexive comment on his three new ‘introductory Numbers’ which are devoted explicitly to ‘giving an honest bill of fare, both as to the objects and the style of the Work’.²² Translating a passage he has introduced from the ‘Candido Lectori’ of Simon Grynaeus,²³ Coleridge claims that the political consequences of placing an exclusive, positive value on light reading is ‘barbarism’ – shorthand in this context, of course, for the untamed forces of revolution. But barbarism itself is not the worst evil:

but with all its [barbarism’s] blind obstinacy it has less power of doing harm than this self-sufficient, self-satisfied plain good common-sense sort of writing, this prudent saleable popular style of composition, if it be deserted by Reason and scientific Insight; pitiably decoying the minds of men by an imposing shew of amiableness, and practical Wisdom, so that the delighted Reader knowing nothing knows all about almost everything.²⁴

Plain speaking, for Coleridge, is falsely represented as the language of a virtuous common sense which metarhetorically figures itself as a direct communication with truth, itself a substitute for the ancient belief in direct access to the divine, which has its own modern manifestation in the ‘left-wing’, Protestant Inner Light.²⁵

Another aspect of the rhetoric of clarity which Coleridge critiques is its apparent confidence in human perfection, and the lure of its positivity, which Coleridge counters with his ‘deep conviction of our general fallibility’.²⁶ It is perhaps a perverse aspect of this fallen fallibility that we are all ‘necessarily subjected to the risk of mistaking positive opinions for certainty and clear insight… it is the price and consequence of our progressiveness’.²⁷ Though the perfection of knowledge and communication, and therefore the human universal nature, is impossible, our tendency to believe in this possibility is equally natural and inevitable. The effort to withstand the seduction of clarity is therefore as imperative in philosophy as it is in politics, for they both struggle in the world against the eternal and simultaneous, impossible desire for the Millennium or revolution which will bring about that perfection. Jerome Christensen nicely articulates the paradoxical nature of this situation when he writes that for Coleridge truth ‘is morally meaningless unless communicated but is morally compromised by any vehicle of communication’.²⁸ The critique of clarity grounds its pessimism concerning human nature in the nature of truth, and leads at its topmost step to an abyss, figured as the fall from Eden and promising the comfort of mystery.

This critique of the dangers of clarity is complicated by the simultaneous presence in The Friend of a ‘staircase’ concerning the dangers of obscurity. With the inscription of obscurity in all language comes the need to prepare readers to confront these dangers. If all language is in some sense obscure, its dangers are universal. Obscurity is pervasive, and destructive, and the primary judicious deployment of it is, paradoxically, that which is meant to guard against it. In this sense the whole book, and the whole project of The Friend, is a sustained warning against its own form and content.

The power of obscurity to heighten feeling without any necessary correspondence to truth or peaceful and viable political action is one of its primary dangers. In one important example of this power, Coleridge claims to have exclaimed when he saw the Queen of Prussia in 1799: ‘[s]pread but the mist of obscure feeling over any form, and even a woman incapable of blessing or of injury to thee shall be welcomed with an intensity of emotion adequate to the reception of the Redeemer of the world!’²⁹ Shortly afterwards Coleridge associates this dark power with the internal corruption of feelings:

[i]t is by the agency of indistinct conceptions, as the counterfeits of the Ideal and Transcendent, that evil and vanity exercise their tyranny on the feelings of man. The Powers of Darkness are politic if not wise; but surely nothing can be more irrational in the pretended children of Light, than to enlist** themselves under the banners of Truth, and yet rest their hopes on an alliance with Delusion.³⁰

This kind of attack on the abuse of obscurity by false governments and authorities invokes the latent radical content in Coleridge’s rhetoric of Romantic obscurity, which reflexively and as it were ironically always acts as a warning against itself.³¹ For example, in a discussion of the legal constraints on the communication of truth, he claims that if a law of libel is not well-defined, juries ‘will consequently consider the written law as a blank power provided for the punishment of the offender, not as a light by which they are to determine and discriminate the offence’.³² In cases of libel, which are based on linguistic acts and so doubly damned to indeterminacy, the ‘eye of the understanding, indeed, sees the determinate difference in each individual case, but language is most often inadequate to express what the eye perceives, much less can a general statute anticipate and pre-define it’.³³ The project of enlightening the people through the paradoxical instrument of Romantic obscurity is the only guarantee of stability in a world where idealistic positivity is an essential element of a universal human nature:

there is no slight danger from general ignorance: and the only choice, which providence has graciously left to a vicious Government, is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.³⁴

The combination of distinct and public laws with the freedom of the press, Coleridge argues, is the only guarantee that the various negative forces of legal and imperial, false sublimity will not abuse and perpetuate the ignorance of the populace.

The foremost danger of obscurity lies with the indeterminate ‘people’, the weak or ‘uninstructed and unprotected man’ who is subject to the manipulations of false religion, politics and philosophy.³⁵ Coleridge articulates the political force of this danger with familiar figures of revolution: ‘[t]o have written innocently, and for wise purposes, is all that can be required of us: the event lies with the Reader…. There is no wind but feeds a volcano, no work but feeds and fans a combustible mind’.³⁶ One can read an at once sad and defiant capitulation in Coleridge’s ultimate rejection of the value of popular politics through his condemnation of popular literature of all kinds, even if he does acknowledge, at least implicitly, the possibility of proper communication if one keeps the right kind of reader in mind. Thus he condemns misdirected communication in an implicit reinforcement of his decision to bind The Friend:

[a] passage, which in a grave and regular disquisition would be blameless, might become highly libellous and justly punishable if it were applied to present measures or persons for immediate purposes, in a cheap and popular tract.** I have seldom felt greater indignation than at finding in a large manufactory a sixpenny pamphlet, containing a selection of inflammatory paragraphs from the prose-writings of Milton, without a hint given of the time, occasion, state of government, &c. under which they were written – not a hint, that the Freedom, which we now enjoy, exceeds all that Milton dared hope for[.]³⁷

The influence of such writing is the opposite of ‘light’ inflammatory writing. Serious writing should not be distributed cheaply, for its lack of economic value will lead to an unequal exchange between the value, or difficulty, of the writing and the understanding of the reader.

Fatally, however, the grandeur and authoritative obscurity of the writing will either mislead by engendering a disgust in the reader, or a mindless, uncomprehending, passionate acquiescence. The inevitable consequence of this mock-authority, deliberate or not, is a distrust of all obscurity, and all effort. ‘So grievously, indeed,’ writes the indignant Friend in defence of his own integrity,

have men been deceived by the showy mock theories of unlearned mock thinkers, that there seems a tendency in the public mind to shun all thought, and to expect help from any quarter rather than from seriousness and reflection: as if some invisible power would think for us, when we gave up the pretence of thinking for ourselves.³⁸

The result of such reactionary indolence is weakness, but this does not resolve the recurring problem of identifying a truly benevolent obscurity. The connection of this false authority to destructive manipulation of the weakened people is once again described in the context of French excess, as Coleridge himself falls into the excesses of rhetoric even as he condemns rhetorical excess:

and by these high-sounding phrases led on the vain, ignorant, and intoxicated populace to wild excesses and wilder expectations, which entailing on them the bitterness of disappointment cleared the way for military despotism, and the satanic Government of Horror under the Jacobins, and of Terror under the Corsican.³⁹

Like those I discussed in my section on the decline of the rhetoric of clarity, such rants and rhetorical excesses contradict metarhetorical comments like the one that precedes it by just a few pages: ‘where there is the most… unalloyed truth, there will be the greatest and most permanent power of persuasion’.⁴⁰

This contradiction leads the ‘staircase’ of dangers to another abysmal end. Just as difficulty is inscribed in the reception of clear speech by Coleridge’s critique of its potential (or inevitable) falsehood, so is an extra difficulty heaped on the magisterial excess of obscurantist rhetoric. An author’s reflexive identification of the origin of any communication in either the divine or the demonic is no guarantee of its effect on the reader. It is, as Jerome Christensen puts it in his article on the method of The Friend, ‘the problem of how to discriminate the counterfeiter’s artifice from the genius’s method’⁴¹ which I introduced in my first two chapters. This is perhaps the darkest conclusion of the project of The Friend, and perhaps the reason too that the persona of The Friend is given to contradictions which reflect the implicit impossibility of his paradoxical task of steering a course between the Scylla of readerly rejection and the Charybdis of readerly misapprehension.

The final ‘staircase’ of obscurity in the book-Friend concerns Coleridge’s construction of the function of metaphysics. Rather than providing a metaphysical system, Coleridge provides a an apology for the obscurity of metaphysical speculation, beginning as usual with a reactionary, defensive attack: ‘I am fully aware,’ he argues, ‘that what I am writing and have written… will expose me to the censure of some, as bewildering myself and readers with Metaphysics… and to the objection of most as obscure’.⁴² And in a convincing but, to the uncharitable reader, rather ironic, style, he continues shortly thereafter:

[b]ut what are my metaphysics?… To what purposes do I, or am I about to employ them? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts?… No! to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed machine of language… to make reason spread light over our feelings.⁴³

Just how Coleridge meant to overcome our bewitchment by means of language, by bewitching us in turn with an obscure metaphysics that would not perplex our clearest notions, is another crucial aspect of the paradox of Romantic obscurity, an attempt to undertake a sort of witchery by daylight.

The obscurity of metaphysical speculation is important partly because of the precise form of labour it imposes on the reader. ‘The investigation of these subtleties,’ writes the ever self-conscious Friend about the distinction between sense, understanding, and reason, and the difference between distinction and division, ‘though it is of no use to the construction of machines to grind corn with, yet clears the mind from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it for other things’.⁴⁴ But the goal of perfected metaphysical contemplation is one which is at once unattainable and undesirable because while ‘REASON… swells in every man potentially… in perfect purity [it] is found in no man and no body of men’.⁴⁵ Reason, as with all mental faculties, is manifest only in activity, and in its activity it is constantly assailed by various temptations and corruptions. Thus metaphysics must represented as an essential part of the book-Friend because it is our duty to ‘habitu[ate]… the intellect to clear, distinct, and adequate conceptions concerning all things that are the possible objects of our clear conception, yea, even in consequence of their obscurity’.⁴⁶ Pure rational labour is something towards which we ought to strive daily, in order to remain grounded in those truths which are the foundation of our moral and intellectual being – even if we can never attain a complete and systematic understanding of that foundation. For Coleridge, in the persona of The Friend, the only means by which we can guard ourselves against the dangers of intellectual and emotional manipulation through obscurity, the only way in which we can gain access to those truths which it is The Friend’s duty to communicate, is by constantly exercising our minds and training our thoughts upon that which is inherently obscure, and therefore inherently difficult – like the works of The Friend himself.

This imputed function of metaphysics is perhaps best articulated in Coleridge’s claim ‘that men may be made better, not only in consequence, but by and in the process, of instruction’.⁴⁷ He does not ‘require the attention of [his] reader to become [his] fellow-labourer’⁴⁸ merely in order to bring the reader to some comfortable, complete end of contemplation. The value of The Friend is not in its destination, as it were, but in the joint journey of reading and writing.⁴⁹ ‘[A]ll confused conceptions render us restless’,⁵⁰ we are told, and for Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity it is precisely this restlessness which is a necessary condition of our proper engagement with the world. The remedy to this restlessness which ‘dogs’ us is habituation to clarity, but this habituation is always a process, and never fully or finally achieved.⁵¹

This restlessness dogs readers of the book-Friend like the ‘frightful fiend’ that dogs the Ancient Mariner. The constant and explicit burden of an interchangeably divine and demonic, indeterminate authorial authority is thus represented by Christensen not as that which undermines authority in The Friend, but that which gives it its power. Given the assumption that The Friend obscures the function of obscurity through reflexive reflections upon it, The Friend’s deferral and endless self-observation (‘the turn inward toward a transcendent entity continuously withheld’⁵²), the authority of The Friend arises as a ‘cheat… dispersed throughout the prose until the dialectic itself seems suspicious, cagily rhetorical. What we read in the Friend is the intrinsically excellent verging on the completely sufficient style’.⁵³ The essence of this ‘cheat’ is Christensen’s revelation that the ‘moral and metaphysical burden borne by the Friend’s obscure prose is that in the sublime style sublimity becomes a style, a tool at hand for anyone deft to put it to use and fabricate a divinity, whether or not there subsists the proper ground to sustain Him’.⁵⁴

This would undoubtedly be the ‘cheat’ and pivot of the engine if it were true that The Friend unproblematically invoked ‘sublimity’ as a style he meant to achieve. But Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity is always an endless, reactionary questioning of the divine and demonic origins of the authority of obscurity. To consider obscurity merely as an effect or a ‘style’ of the sublime is to make The Friend’s aggressive focus on obscurity appear uniquely Coleridgean when it was in fact a commonplace in the history of the discourse of obscurity. The real ‘cheat’ here is the sustained authority of the discourse of the sublime, which makes the critical representation of obscurity as a mere instrument or style appear to be a radical revelation of a Coleridgean secret. Without an understanding of the history of obscurity, that is, Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity is likely to appear at once more unique and superficial than it in fact is. Thus Christensen claims that his ‘avowal of a deliberately obscure style is striking and apparently peculiar to Coleridge’.⁵⁵

But Christensen’s representation of The Friend’s metaphysics or presumption of ‘philosophy’ as that which appears only as a reference to its own function, rather than as the sustained and systematic or methodical philosophy it purports to be, is nonetheless accurate. Invoking the favourite Coleridgean figure of the chiasmus, Christensen remarks in his own climax that:

[i]t is in the interest of philosophy to fear the sophist, to raise the specter of “open and unremitting war,” and to mark its own allies with the hypnotic brilliance of a glittering eye, for the light of that eye obscures the powerful mechanics of method and that vision of a bloody defensive struggle justifies centuries of inkshed… philosophy appears as the power to make a figure of the sophists; the power, that is, to identify their inversions, to contain their disruption, and even to confer an instructive value on their subversion by means of the superior virtue of method’s friendly chiasmus.⁵⁶

The project of The Friend is all about philosophy, but then again it is not quite philosophy, perhaps in a way similar to that in which the terms in the (largely and famously plagiarized) philosophical chapters of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria are not unproblematically Coleridge’s philosophy but instead, potentially at least, a ‘purloined, sham authority’.⁵⁷ As Paul Hamilton has also argued (and as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter), there is a similar nothingness in the eternally delayed promise that mirrors the abortive, fictional letter that introduces the mere embryo of a promised philosophy of the imagination in the infamous thirteenth chapter of the Biographia. The metaphysical foundation of obscurity appears instead as something referred to and invoked more in accordance with the ‘stairway’ structure of the book-Friend, as usual leading either to nowhere or to nothing, or, in other words, to no end at all, endlessly turning back on itself in proliferating preparations meant to strengthen the reader – to read The Friend again.

There is therefore something deeply misleading about the claims of Coleridge over-sympathisers like Thomas McFarland, who has claimed that ‘for Coleridge philosophy was not an activity directed towards the clarification of propositions, but towards system’ and that for Coleridge ‘system’ is equivalent to ‘completion’.⁵⁸ Instead, I would argue, for Coleridge ‘philosophy’ functions as a rhetorical reference to ‘system’ but it is, by virtue of its reflexivity, endlessly and recursively self-referential, deeply circumscribed by the Romantic obscurity of the delay of completion. As Jeffrey Hipolito remarks of the end of the reflexive metaphysics in the ‘Essays on Method’, in which ‘the articulation of absolute principles is important primarily for the act of forming them’:

[t]he response the thoughtful reader undergoes upon arrival at the “Essays” is that the theory of moral and metaphysical interpretation that they sketch applies most immediately to the book the reader has just finished. The Friend is inherently self-reflexive, sending the reader back to its beginning in order to read the first acquired meanings of such terms as “principles,” “law,” and the rest, in light of the latest - and to do so through the use of the theory of method in which they appear.⁵⁹

The negativity implicit in the spectre of a dogging metaphysics and dogged metaphysical labour is bound up with the value to be gained from confronting its obscurity, or rather, confronting one’s inability, like Coleridge’s failure to articulate a consistent and systematic metaphysics in the project of The Friend, to confront it fully.

As usual, Coleridge chooses nonetheless to represent his metaphysical system either as something supplementally achieved, or something that will or can be achieved after a delay. This necessary function of Romantic obscurity is figuratively realised in the crucial statement about ignorance proceeding through obscurity to knowledge.⁶⁰ Other statements defer resolution not only to the future, but also to other works, which allows an issue or a problem to be dismissed without even acknowledging the failure to address it. Such, for example, is the function of Coleridge’s claim at the beginning of his fifteenth, and still introductory, essay, where we see his preparations proliferating outside the text of the Friends, but not outside the project of The Friend as a whole:

I am fully aware, that what I am writing and have written (in these latter Essays at least) will expose me to the censure of some, as bewildering myself and readers with Metaphysics; to the ridicule of others as a school-boy declaimer on old and worn-out truisms or exploded fancies; and to the objection of most as obscure. The last real or supposed defect has already received an answer both in the preceding Numbers, and in page 34 of the Appendix to the Author’s First Lay-Sermon, entitled THE STATESMAN’S MANUAL.⁶¹

This is perhaps Coleridge’s most defiant act of deferral and irresolution in the project of The Friend, and the direct intertextual reference nicely demonstrates the manner in which the work of 1809-1818 may be considered one project.

In any case, the explicit deflection to the Statesman’s Manual does not mean that Coleridge had not dealt at length or in depth with obscurity throughout the book-Friend itself, of course. The real manifestation of that sustained discussion is not in the reflexive metaphysical exegeses which Coleridge refers to but never completes, but rather in the assumption of a practical, strategic engagement with the problem of obscurity. I have already indicated how this is dealt with in the ‘stairway’ of dangers, and in the constant invocation of the practical political consequences of the rhetorical battle over the figures of clarity and obscurity. The problems of resolving the paradox of obscurity can be seen in Coleridge’s constant invocation of the practical political consequences of hermeneutical obscurity, in its indeterminate and interchangeably divine or demonic origin, and its unpredictable effect in the event of reception by the reader.⁶² The economics of exchange and the cooperation of labour in Romantic obscurity reflect this important element of an earlier tradition in the middle ages, ‘a hermeneutic of obscurity in which no one agent is solely responsible for the mediation of meaning or failure of this’.⁶³ As Mehtonen notes, this hermeneutical shift was a particularly Romantic one, coming at the end of the middle ages, and is remarked upon insightfully by Winfried Menninghaus in her book In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard: ‘[w]ith the end of the rhetorical paradigm and the emergence of the hermeneutical paradigm, however, one claim above all is made upon literature: to be infinitely meaningful’.⁶⁴ This argument for the emergence of the hermeneutic as a replacement for rhetoric is central to Mehtonen’s argument in Obscure Language, Unclear Literature, where he claims that the Romantics abandoned any reference ‘to the continuum of age-old theories and practices of obscurity’.⁶⁵

But arguments like this take Romantic reflexivity at face value, and generally ignore the primary importance that obscurity played in the project of The Friend (indeed, the passage on obscurity cited above from the Statesman’s Manual invokes obscurity in relation to Heracleitus and Plato). In fact, the rhetorical tradition, and especially what I have called the rhetoric of obscurity, remained crucial to Romantic concepts of information which were heavily politicised in relation to Romantic anxieties concerning the dangers of misinformation. Romantic organicism and the reflexive coherence of the work of art do not function as rejections of the rhetoric of obscurity in favour of a Romantic hermeneutic. Rather, they are metarhetorical structures or strategies designed to contain the information of the indeterminate ‘public’, and they are fraught with anxieties about uncontrollable, transvaluable, invertible proliferations of interpretation. Romantic obscurity is informed by the rhetorical tradition obscura, but it is politicised by the Reflections controversy, the metarhetorical conflict between and ultimate conflation of the new rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. The safe engagement with either positive or negative obscurity was a joint effort of shared responsibility, but in the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity this responsibility is interchangeable, shifting back and forth uncertainly between communicator and recipient. Perhaps the most fitting avowal of positive obscurity occurs at the end of the Biographia with a darkness that recalls The Friend’s twilight:

[t]his has been my Object, and this alone can be my Defence – and O! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude! the unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of Scorners, by shewing that the Scheme of Christianity, as taught in the Liturgy and Homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human Reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness. It is Night, sacred Night!⁶⁶