Coleridge’s Obscure Publicity

The polemicist must be, to use the older word, a rhetorician; a newer word is a publicist.

Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 91.

…and flatters the Many by creating them, under the title of THE PUBLIC, into a supreme and inappelable Tribunal of intellectual Excellence.

Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 229.

I feel the heaviness of my subject considered as a public Lecture – the tædium felt by my hearers cannot be greater than my sympathy with it – It is unpleasant to travel over a road while it… is making; but I trust that hereafter we shall have a smooth way in consequence.

Coleridge, Lectures 1809-1819 On Literature, 30.

Although Coleridge arguably began his public career as a poet in 1794 with The Fall of Robespierre (co-authored with Robert Southey) and his ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ in the Morning Chronicle, the beginning of his status as a significant public figure is marked by his early radical public lectures and sermons, the publication of his associated pamphlets, and the brief existence of his self-edited periodical The Watchman.¹ Unlike his later journalism, these early speeches and writings were not published anonymously or pseudonymously, and so they also mark the construction of Coleridge as a public figure of and for obscurity. Paul Magnuson has argued for the importance of this era and genre of activity in Coleridge’s self-amputated corpus, claiming that his ‘reputation as a West Country radical rested on his lectures in Bristol in 1795, The Watchman of 1796, and his associations with the Morning Post’.² This was the first public ‘reputation’ Coleridge had, and to understand Coleridge’s obscurity we must locate its origin not in the later, post-apostatical work through which he remade himself into the isolated and conservative Sage of Highgate, but rather in his controversial, public, metarhetorical appropriation of the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity in the 1790s. This focus on Coleridge’s work in relation to the contradictions of the new rhetoric involves the imbrication of classical traditions of gentlemanly education with 1790s British politics of information and social, political, and governmental forms of communication. Thus John Nabholtz has argued in the introduction to his essay on ‘Romantic Prose and Classical Rhetoric’: ‘I focus specifically on [Coleridge’s] social and political writings, because it was for subjects of public discourse and debate that the rhetorical tradition was originally evolved; furthermore, it was on such subjects that the influence of the tradition was most enduring, as the parliamentary speeches of Burke, Pitt, and Fox attest’.³ In this chapter, therefore, I will consider the development of Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity in relation to his consideration of the social and intellectual function of the press, the dissemination of clear information and obscure passion, the proliferation of Dissenting and radical texts, and the (mostly radical) forms of public performance associated alternatively with the rhetoric of public misinformation or public enlightenment.

As I have shown in my first two chapters, the mid-1790s public context into which Coleridge entered involved a rhetorical war informed by a complex web of social, political, and intellectual debates related to the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity in the Reflections controversy. The growing influence of eighteenth-century advances in print technology and the concomitant emergence of ‘public opinion’, which became an object of radical and ministerial anxiety as much as it became an object of control, contributed to a sense of urgency about the influence of political rhetoric and other forms of public information. As Hannah Barker has demonstrated in Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England, ‘the public’ was considered to be under the direct influence of ‘the press’, and this passive, receptive public was feared for an aggression which could be brought about by superior influence. The reading or receiving public’s lack of self-control was related to a change in its constitution: ‘[b]y the late 1770s newspapers had assumed a powerful position in English society’, Barker observes, and ‘the public’ or ‘the people’ were ‘that section of the population outside the ruling elite’.⁴ Clifford Siskin relates this rise of the people’s importance in relation to the press to ‘population growth’ in the eighteenth century and claims that ‘[o]nly during the last two decades did [the literacy rate] clearly rise, beginning with the founding of the Evangelical Sunday-school movement in 1780’.⁵ The spread of newspapers coincided with the spread of increasing literacy, and when they could not be read alone in silence, the papers were often read out loud in the context of coffee houses and taverns.⁶ And the freedom to publish parliamentary debates allowed newspapers to make ‘the official business of both houses publicly accessible, and encouraged wider notions of accountability and openness in government’.⁷

This translated into an institutional anxiety concerning the public reception of the news. The government was therefore

most concerned about newspapers because they communicated “news”: contemporary events involving the government, including parliamentary activities – which could not be transcribed verbatim. To control information the government not only made newspapers expensive but by bribery and secret subsidies purchased propaganda vehicles.⁸

But in spite of these governing anxieties, the growing accessibility of and demand for information concerning current events, political or otherwise, generated a new form of malleable, indeterminate national identity, and a ‘growing awareness of events outside one’s own locality in the eighteenth century [was] linked to the development of a British “national consciousness”’.⁹ The government’s fears concerning the emergence of this figuratively shadowy, dangerous, and unformed ‘people’ during a time of revolutionary anxiety fittingly reflects the power of obscurity in representations of the revolution: ‘[t]he imagery of the phenomenon of the Revolution itself merged the powerful natural force… with the indistinguishable, vague, indeterminate shape of the sovereign people’.¹⁰

The fragmentation of the public audience from an enlightenment ideal of educated, intellectual identity into one of difference and indeterminacy was therefore inflected with considerations of power, change and stability. On a practical level, debates about education were debates about the means of expanding minds and ensuring predictable results from teaching, and at the same time about altering and containing the identity (and indeed the class-identity) of those taught. Comparatively abstract or philosophical discussion of the necessary limits of human knowledge and consciousness was often directed towards the public as a means of intimidation, where those in the philosophical know cautioned readers to mind the gap between what they could and what they could not know. Though Lowth had claimed with astonishing but commonplace naïvetée in 1758 that ‘[g]reater knowledge should reasonably be attended with more perfect obedience’, the days of establishment optimism were at an end.¹¹ The rhetoric of obscurity, that is, appeared in the 1790s as a reaction to the spread of disobedience and involved not only a qualification but a reversal of such views regarding the formative power of information. Coleridge’s desire to control such an unstable and essential entity as ‘the public’ through the rhetorical (and ultimately the legal) control of information was of the utmost importance both for those who wished to maintain an old, and for those who wished to create a new, form of stability. The birth of the people from the dark womb of indefinite education threatened to presage the revolutionary birth of a new and unstable nation.

This decline of Enlightenment optimism mirrors the decline in radical optimism in the mid-1790s. This change came about in only a few years: though Coleridge and Wordsworth almost overlapped their time at Cambridge, ‘Wordsworth’s Cambridge had joined with liberals and dissenters throughout the country in welcoming the Revolution, whereas Coleridge’s Cambridge was divided by the argument as to what the Revolution had achieved, and whether it represented an ideal of social and political change’.¹² Coleridge himself was heavily involved in the revolutionary hopes and activities of his fellow students and an admirer of William Frend, to whose influence Peter Kitson attributes Coleridge’s becoming ‘radicalised’ at Cambridge.¹³ Frend was the author of the controversial Peace and Union pamphlet (for which he was persecuted by University officials), in which he claimed in opposition to the obscurity of indefinite delay: ‘[t]he proper time to correct any abuse, and remedy any grievance, is the instant, they are known’.¹⁴ But it was Frend’s persecution by the unruly mob, a sure sign of the imperfection of the people, which may have had a more longstanding effect on Coleridge. Referring to an attack on Frend’s home, Nicholas Roe remarks that ‘Frend’s loss [of his translation of some books of bible] in the riots of 1791 doubtless gave impetus to his strictures on mob violence in Peace and Union, an attitude which Coleridge also shared in his political lectures’.¹⁵ If Coleridge was ‘radicalised’ by Frend, it was from the beginning a qualified radicalism informed by the dangers of unrestrained rhetoric and the dangers of an indeterminate ‘people’. Jon Klancher nicely sums up the political significance of the adoption of either a rhetoric of clarity or obscurity in relation to ‘Coleridge’s politics of discourse [in which] signs and styles come to us already loaded with meaning, before any possible investment’: ‘[t]he Anglo-Gallican style, for instance, could no more serve a Coleridgean project than the “obscure” style could serve a radical rhetorician’s’.¹⁶ Furthermore, the practicalities of immediate, inspired writing were qualified by a sense of caution in relation to the law: ‘[s]upport for France was now potentially treason, and as the forces of reaction gathered so Coleridge found that his beliefs and ideas needed careful expression, and a guarded sense of audience’.¹⁷

The perceived failure of the French Revolution (and of the creation of a new Britain through reform at home) mirrors the private failure of friendship between Southey and Coleridge which led to the end of their Pantisocracy scheme, or what John Morrow has called their ‘flirtation with radical reform and anarcho-communism’.¹⁸ Coleridge’s early lectures were designed partly as a way to fund his and his young friend Robert Southey’s dream of creating a utopian commune on the banks of the Susquehanna where they (and the other members of the group) could share information and labour, and the location of the lectures in and around Bristol was due in part Southey’s presence there prior to Coleridge’s arrival.¹⁹ The plan itself was formed at a curious time for revolutionary optimism; as Kenneth Johnston has remarked, Coleridge and Southey met and hatched their plan ‘when the Reign of Terror ended in July of 1794 (symbolically with the death of Robespierre, and legally by government decree)’.²⁰ Largely because of Coleridge’s infamous instability and Southey’s developing personal conflicts concerning his own career, the plan was abandoned in the midst of Coleridge’s series of lectures and pamphlets in 1795. This circumstance is a good symbol of the manner in which the imperfection of the people or the public was related by Coleridge to the imperfection of the personal. If one could not expect perfect communication with one’s friends, in other words, the dangers of public communication could only be worse. And if even a small utopian community in a ‘new’ land proved impossible to construct, it is not surprising that even at the heights of his optimism Coleridge appears to be, even in his earliest writings, a late-comer to the rhetoric of clarity. Anxieties about the instability of the receiving public reached their peak at the same time as the rhetoric of clarity began to show signs of decline in the mid-1790s, and it is fitting that Coleridge’s first engagement in public rhetoric came at the same time as the decline of his own Pantisocratic hopes.²¹

In addition to tracking the problem of Romantic information outlined in my last chapter, throughout my discussion of Coleridge’s early public work I will engage primarily with three topics central to the genesis of his Romantic obscurity from its problematic engagement with the conflicting and conflating rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. Firstly, I will chart his deployment of the figures of clarity and obscurity in relation to these competing rhetorics. As David Vallins has remarked, ‘Coleridge’s writings of the 1790s often refer to the “optimistic” philosophies of Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin, yet do not include any detailed discussion of their relative merits on the differences between their theories’.²² Though Vallins immediately proceeds to represent these references as a ‘syncretic method’, my claim is rather that they reflect Coleridge’s metarhetorical identification with the rhetoric of obscurity, and not anything approaching a coherent philosophy or method, syncretic or otherwise. They function as rhetorical signals that the communicator is a philosopher, but they don’t communicate a philosophy. Coleridge’s famous ability to position himself in between or on both sides of traditional oppositions is driven by this ‘method’ of metarhetorical self-identification, and is replicated in his often contradictory application of a traditional valuation and a radical transvaluation to the same figure.²³ Thus ‘[r]ather than being academic, Coleridge’s interest in prose is in many cases rhetorical, combining a critique of empiricist ideas with a rejection of the language used to express them, and suggesting that fragmentation and an absence of informing thought is the dominant character of modern consciousness in France and Britain.’²⁴ His unique and complex participation in the battle over political, intellectual and religious rhetorical and poetical figures reflects his changing beliefs about obscurity in relation to ‘Romantic information’ and the public.

Secondly, I will discuss Coleridge’s changing conception of his recipients’ capacities for reception in his early pamphleteering period. Coleridge’s early practical experience with public information, I argue, began with a relatively optimistic attempt to consider all individuals as essentially identical (and therefore at least potentially equal), but was led through disappointment to a belief that no comprehensive concept of an identical audience is possible because there is no comprehensive, undifferentiated audience. With the desire to control the interpretation and therefore the influence of any text on the receiving public, the explicit identification and preparation of the audience was essential for safe and successful communication.

Thirdly, I will consider the related change in Coleridge’s strategies for simultaneously (and therefore paradoxically) informing and representing his audience. For example, Coleridge became increasingly anxious about the careful introduction of texts, making increasing use of what came to be typically Coleridgean caveats and introductions concerning obscurity (which ultimately received its fullest treatment in the project of The Friend, as I will show in my next chapter). In addition, Coleridge became increasingly convinced that a straightforward description of the text’s structure, audience, and goals was not enough. He had to prepare his public in more fundamental ways for the communication of his ideas, communicating to his audience not only the techniques, but through mental labour or exercise communicating also the stamina for thinking well. And since information was conceived as an exchange of labour, the character and activity of the author also required explicit articulation through reflexive rhetorical self-reference. But since a preparation could itself require a preparation, and the circle of reflexivity or metarhetoric proved impossible to break, the paradoxical necessity for simultaneous introduction and preparation became, in effect, a slippery slope of infinitely regressive qualification.