A Moral and Political Lecture

He, who has dark purposes to serve, must use dark means - Light would discover, reason would expose him: He must endeavour to shut out both - or if this prove impracticable, make them appear frightful by giving them frightful Names: For farther than Names the Vulgar enquire not.

Coleridge, A Moral and Political Lecture (Lects 1795, 9).

Coleridge’s first important public lecture was delivered in late January or early February and written up (according to Coleridge) in one late-night sitting shortly thereafter.²⁵ Published in early February, the printed text of A Moral and Political Lecture was figured as a production under constraint: ‘[t]he first lecture I was obliged to publish,’ he wrote to the radical essayist and poet George Dyer, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’.²⁶ In the light of Coleridge’s later published attempts to bury this and other early works under the charge of an ineffective obscurity or ostrich oblivion,²⁷ this early use of publication to clarify his views appears rather ironic. Although Coleridge was lecturing in order to raise funds for the pantisocracy scheme, his primary political goal was to channel the violent energies unleashed on both sides of the Channel as a consequence of the 1789 revolution and the ensuing Terror and uncertainties – and to direct these energies towards peaceful reform in Britain.

The primary means of achieving this reform was radical information (as the correction of error and the revelation of state secrets and Church mysteries) via the rhetoric of clarity.²⁸ Thus Coleridge writes that ‘[c]onvinced of the justice of our principles, let neither scorn nor oppression prevent us from disseminating them. By the gradual deposition of time, error has been piled upon error and prejudice on prejudice, till few men are tall enough to look over them’.²⁹ For Coleridge, the solution to reform was to inform the people or to elevate them to an ideal and along a historically determined hierarchy of power figured as an ascent to a point of view high enough to grasp the whole. Crucially, this early division of the people into a hierarchy on the basis of historical contingency foreshadows Coleridge’s later division of the people, in the Lay Sermons and other later works, along the vertical lines of a principle of Burkean heredity, when he would write ‘in the abstruse and lofty terms appropriate to his sense of an audience of hereditary leaders’.³⁰ As David Vallins has remarked: ‘the numerous ascending sequences of classes or stages of being… populate [Coleridge’s] writing from the 1790s to the 1830s’.³¹

Coleridge’s valuation of the figures of clarity and obscurity in the ‘Moral and Political Lecture’ reveals the complex form of his commitment to radical values. When he discusses positive means of informing the people and promoting political change he reproduces the loaded images of the ‘Light of Philosophy’ and describes its proponents as ‘Illuminators’. ‘The annals of the French Revolution’, he warns, ‘have recorded in Letters of Blood, that the Knowledge of the Few cannot counteract the Ignorance of the Many; that the Light of Philosophy, when it is confined to a small Minority, points out the Possessors as the Victims, rather than the Illuminators, of the Multitude’.³² Darkness typically represents forces inimical to change such as ignorance, but, more importantly, Coleridge signifies his commitment to pacific change by associating ignorance and normatively negative darkness with violence, and with each other: ‘[t]he Groans of the Oppressors make fearful yet pleasant music to the ear of him, whose mind is darkness’.³³ The negative implications of violent light and blazing forces, positively employed in their most provocative writings by Price and Paine, are consistently transvalued in Coleridge’s radical writing to incorporate a politically self-conscious and peaceful meaning which metarhetorically circumscribes the possibility of their dangerous influence on his recipients. The revolution in France, Coleridge warns, had many terrible consequences for the people of France and Europe, but he holds out some hope yet that this may be a mere delay of illumination: ‘Freedom herself heard the Crash aghast – yet shall she not have heard it unbenefited, if haply the Horrors of that Day shall have made other nations timely wise – if a great people from hence become adequately illuminated for a Revolution bloodless’.³⁴

This delay of illumination was necessary because, Coleridge claimed, the people first had to be prepared to receive their information rightly, and this preparation required an understanding by recipients of the forms of reception and their consequences. Consequently it was the duty of the reformer to implement strategies of containment and regulation prior to the dissemination of revolutionary information. But (paradoxically enough) this had to be done during politically motivated, radical lectures. Thus Coleridge states early in his rousing lecture that the ‘zealous Advocates for Freedom’ must

endeavour, not so much to excite the torpid, as to regulate the feelings of the ardent: and above all, to evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed Principles, that so we may not be the unstable Patriots of Passion or Accident, or hurried away by names of which we have not sifted the meaning, and by tenets of which we have not examined the consequences.³⁵

As I have shown in my discussion of the Reflections controversy, speech about the regulation of speech threatens to become interchangeable with unregulated speech, and we shall see to what extent Coleridge managed to avoid - or succumb - to this internal contradiction.

After introducing his subject with his already obligatory caveats about the dangers of misunderstanding, Coleridge proceeds to provide a typology of the divided classes of the ‘Friends of Liberty’, or, invoking Godwin’s Caleb Williams, ‘our present Oppositionists to “Things as they are”’.³⁶ This typology is essentially an attempt to give shape or form to the people by dividing them along a hermeneutical hierarchy in which greater authority is equivalent to greater interpretative penetration. The first class of what Coleridge carefully calls the ‘professed Friends of Liberty’ are those immediately swayed by momentary, unconsidered information because their behaviour is not grounded in a stable system of intellectual labour and political exercise. They are ‘Men, who [are] unaccustomed to the labor of thorough Investigation and not particularly oppressed by the Burthen of State’.³⁷ Such unprincipled people are given to indiscriminate inversion and consequently bear representation by contradictory symbolism: ‘[o]n the report of French Victories they blaze into Republicanism, at a tale of French Excesses they darken into Aristocrats’.³⁸ This association of information and reception with work is an important element of Romantic obscurity, in which thought is a form of exertion which is inherently valuable, taxing, and difficult. It provides the basis for the use of figures concerning thought, learning and reading as forms of exercise, from climbing stairs to undertaking a journey.

While the inconsistencies of this first class are represented as having at least one positive function,³⁹ the second class is ‘Wilder’, dangerously passive and malleable. Coleridge identifies as their positive instincts a Paineite ‘natural Sense’ which causes them to ‘despise the Priest’: ‘they listen only to the inflammatory harangues of some mad-headed Enthusiast, and imbibe from them Poison, not Food, Rage not Liberty’.⁴⁰ This typical representation of the audience as a receptacle of passion is qualified by the medical figuration of illumination as a cure and its absence as a disease. The men of this class are not wrong for being passionate, but for being unable to regulate their passion because they are ‘[u]nillumined by Philosophy’.⁴¹ The social class of this political class is clearly meant to be that of the poor and uneducated, and since they are represented as passive ‘Materials’ the responsibility for their obscurity rests with the state. The manipulative ‘Minister’ who exploits them is associated with the ‘Satan of Old’ and figured by an obscurity which conflates intellectual and the moral meaning: ‘[h]e, who has dark purposes to serve, must use dark means – Light would discover, reason would expose him: He must endeavour to shut out both’.⁴² The darkness of the Minister and his dark materials is interchangeable and communicable: individuals in this class have a ‘mind in darkness’ which is simultaneously ignorant and violent. Only positive information has the power to transform and regulate the energies of chaos and inconsistency: ‘[t]he purifying alchemy of Education may transmute the fierceness of an ignorant man into virtuous energy’.⁴³ Coleridge explicitly restricted his audience to those who were meant to inform the people, informing those meant to inform, and it is this which makes so much of his rhetoric endlessly introductory and metarhetorical.

The third class of Friends includes upwardly-mobile and envious, spiteful members of the middle and the upper-middle classes. Such men ‘possess not the wavering character of the first description, nor the ferocity last delineated. They pursue the interests of Freedom steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views’.⁴⁴ Coleridge’s critique essentially strives to strike a middle ground between absolute anti-establishmentarian levelling and the conservative perpetuation of aristocratic power. He attempts to demonstrate that distinctions of title and ostentation are less important than ‘the more real distinction of master and servant, of rich man and of poor’.⁴⁵ To attempt to change the system for the purpose of resolving one’s anxieties about one’s own status is, by implication, merely a means of replicating the structures which produce and sustain the misguided importance of titles.

Significantly, the manner in which Coleridge introduces the discussion of the fourth class betrays a sense of his own detachment from it as the communicator of the Moral and Political Lecture, as their informer, informing his audience in the same manner in which he intended them to inform their own audience. Immediately after he finishes the long passage quoted above, Coleridge writes:

[b]ut of the propriety and utility of holding up the distant mark of attainable perfection, we shall enter more fully towards the close of this address; we turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested Patriots.⁴⁶

The editors of the Collected Coleridge version of the lecture insert a footnote after ‘this address’ claiming that this was ‘[a] promise not fulfilled’, and they cite as their evidence the deletion of this promise in the Conciones ad Populum. But the description of the ‘Patriots’ and the division of identities throughout the lecture does fulfil this promise. In other words, Coleridge did not wait till the end of his address to meet his promise; rather he proceeded to it immediately. This obfuscation was necessary in order to make his ploy effective, for as the communicator in this case Coleridge was effectively the master to his readerly servants, himself a ‘distant mark of attainable perfection’ in the art of information. To say to a recipient that he possesses a ‘mark of attainable perfection’ in relation to his servant is a simple matter, but to straightforwardly engage in an attempt to convince the reading master that there are others (i.e. Coleridge) who possess such marks of perfection in relation to him is more difficult. The teacher, by presuming to teach, assumes an inevitable authority over his pupil. The paradox of the implicit superiority of the metarhetorical communicator over the ostensibly equal recipient would play a crucial role in the development of Coleridge’s obscurity throughout his career.

The ideal ‘Patriots’ described in the following passage are masters of mediation and the reconciliation of extremes, and they are represented though positive and peaceful revolutionary symbolism. ‘Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process’, writes Coleridge:

they never hurry and they never pause; theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other; as they advance, the scene still opens upon them, and they press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them.⁴⁷

Clarity is transferred from one object to another: the Patriot simultaneously enlightens others and the world. This is effected through the imposition of exercise or readerly labour ‘by strengthening the intellect’.⁴⁸ Patriots educate the people in order to mitigate the tendency inherent in reform and dissent to degenerate into uncontainable, and counterproductive, violence.

A second and equally important aspect of the Patriots is that they achieve personal enlightenment through the exercise of controlled, patient self-transformation: ‘[t]hese are the men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self interest, by the long continued cultivation of … moral taste’.⁴⁹ As usual, in Coleridge this form of intellectually directed emotional enlightenment results in a form of elevation, ostensibly to the status of Patriot, and, importantly, to a state of perfect vision: ‘[h]e whose mind is habitually imprest with [soul ennobling views]’, he writes, ‘soars above the present state of humanity, and may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the most high’. Echoing the ascent to the sun in ‘Religious Musings’, he continues: ‘[r]egarding every event even as he that ordains it, evil vanishes from before him, and he views with the naked eye the eternal form of universal beauty’.⁵⁰ At this point in his thought, or at the very least at this moment in his speech, Coleridge’s optimism about the necessary and the contingent boundaries of human intellect and the potential for positive transformation of the human had reached its apogee, as the eye of man is elevated to the eye of God.

An anonymous review of the Moral and Political Lecture in the dissenting Critical Review addresses one of the problems of metarhetorical attempts to regulate rhetoric according to the dictates of clarity: the problem, that is, of the clarity-rhetorician’s own tendency for obscurity. In spite of [his] endorsement of clarity, the reviewer calls attention to the fact that Coleridge’s style is ‘rather defective in point of precision’. Likewise, Coleridge fails to state ‘in a form sufficiently scientific and determinate, those principles to which, as he expresses it, he now proceeds as the most important point’. Finally, the reviewer mentions Coleridge’s failure to come to his point: ‘[w]e confess we were looking for something further, and little thought that we were actually come to the Finis’.⁵¹ The simultaneous and insightful invocation, in one of the first reviews of his career as a public figure, of Coleridge’s tendencies towards obscurity and the delay of regressive introduction, strikes an ominous note.