Conciones ad Populum, Or Addresses to the People

In the disclosal of Opinion, it is our duty to consider the character of those, to whom we address ourselves, their situations, and probable degree of knowledge. We should be bold in the avowal of political Truth among those only whose minds are susceptible of reasoning: and never to the multitude, who ignorant and needy must necessarily act from the impulse of inflamed Passions.

[I]n the Dictionary of aristocratic Prejudice, Illumination and Sedition are classed as synonimes.

Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum (Lects 1795, 51, 52).

Coleridge’s pamphlet Conciones ad Populum was published on December 3, 1795, and advertised as ‘Two Addresses to the People. The first on the Characters of Professed Friends of Freedom – the Second, on the present War’.⁵² The first ‘Address’ is ‘an expansion of A Moral and Political Lecture’, and the second (based on either the second or the third of Coleridge’s January-February Bristol lectures) argues strongly against Britain’s participation in the war in Europe.⁵³ In the following section I will analyze Coleridge’s revisions of A Moral and Political Lecture, and the manner in which he redeployed the figures of obscurity as a reflection of his political and moral position. The Conciones is an early example of how Coleridge’s revisionary anxieties were motivated by his awareness of the rhetorical problem of reception related to the indeterminate capacities or identities of his intended (and unintended) audiences. It is no coincidence that his second rhetorical publication is a carefully edited version of his first, and that it indulges in the multiplication of reflexive introductions related to the contradictions inherent in Coleridge’s developing philosophies of rhetoric and information in relation to obscurity.

The title of Conciones demonstrates its aggressive approach to the transvaluation of its opponents’ rhetoric. The title is a play on the ecclesiastical ‘concio ad clerum… a Latin sermon preached on certain occasions’.⁵⁴ The transformation of ‘clerum’ to ‘populum’ announces Coleridge’s determination to speak to a relatively democratic audience, and carries with it a radical condemnation of religious mystery, hierarchy and obfuscation. The presentation in English of a form of sermon normally delivered in Latin contributes to this ironic transformation. Direct communication with the populace, Coleridge argues, rather than the restricted audience of the clergy, was the only effective and principled way of fighting the war, and fighting the dangerous potential of the people to be swayed by passion. ‘Truth should be spoken at all times’, Coleridge wrote in his preface to Conciones, ‘but more especially at those times, when to speak Truth is dangerous’, perhaps echoing Frend’s statement about the need for the immediate correction of abuses in Peace and Union.⁵⁵ In order to speak the truth effectively, Coleridge implied, it must be clearly and immediately directed to those who most need it.

The preface is followed by Coleridge’s tongue-in-cheek ‘A Letter from Liberty to Her Dear Friend Famine’. The letter’s function in the wealth of introductory material in Conciones is not made explicit by Coleridge, but its humour serves two important functions for the text to follow. First, it announces (as though the title, preface, and epigraph were not enough) Coleridge’s relation to the two most important parts of the establishment, the Church and the government. In the letter’s allegory the king is deaf to Gratitude, who has been supplanted by Flattery. Religion, too, has been corrupted, and is represented as a figure of dazzling obscurity recalling the figure of obscure feminine power of Burke’s Reflections: ‘[s]he [Religion] was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and upon her Forehead was written “MYSTERY”’.⁵⁶ Coleridge argues that Liberty can no longer use normal diplomatic means to make its case, but must appeal to the threatening double-edged sword of discontent called Famine. ‘O FAMINE’, writes Liberty, ‘most eloquent Goddess! plead thou my cause. I meantime will pray fervently that Heaven may unseal the ears of its viceregents, so that they may listen to your first pleadings, while yet your voice is faint and distant, and your counsels peaceable’.⁵⁷ This final ‘while yet’ provides the second clue to the letter’s function: its exceedingly dark humour (especially in a time of ‘near-famine’⁵⁸) is meant to delay and deflect anger in Coleridge’s audience. Notably, the indirection of the fake ‘letter’ was a device Coleridge would use, though elsewhere less ironically, in all three versions of The Friend and in the Biographia. As a guarantee against dangerous influence, introductory delay was essential for a voice compelled to speak in a time of danger. To proceed immediately to the rectification of abuse was not to proceed without delay.

The letter to Famine is followed by an ‘Introductory Address’ which introduces the familiar 1790s figure of a rhetorical battle over figures. The opening Greek epigraph (which was not printed in A Moral and Political Lecture), the editors note, is untraced, and expresses an anxiety about the arbitrary deployment of the term ‘Liberty’ by those on all sides of the war and revolution debates: ‘I am always a lover of Liberty; but in those who would appropriate the Title I find too many points destructive of Liberty and hateful to her genuine advocates’.⁵⁹ Here Coleridge demonstrates his awareness of the nature of the conflict over figures between the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. Thus ‘[t]oemancipate itself from the Tyranny of Association, is the most arduous effort of the mind, particularly in Religious and Political disquisitions. The asserter of the system has associated it with the preservation of Order, and public Virtue; the oppugner Imposture, and Wars, and Rapine’.⁶⁰ Coleridge is not claiming that one can emancipate the mind from functioning in accordance with the laws of association, but rather that we have a will which allows us to discriminate between the associations with words and figures that have been established by others. Ownership of terms does not necessarily imply their proper use: there are many meanings of the term to choose from, and the positive connotations of the word can be appropriated for negative ends. It is an explicit invitation to the reader to be aware of Coleridge’s own competing appropriation of ‘Liberty’ and other terms and figures, and to judge between them. Given its metarhetorical status, however, it is also an implicit invitation to question what counts as a ‘genuine’ use of a term or figure, calling Coleridge’s own appropriations to account.⁶¹

The deployment of figures of clarity and obscurity in Coleridge’s revisionary additions to Conciones demonstrates his carefully qualified support of the French in a manner much more straightforward than that of A Moral and Political Lecture. In one addition, Coleridge figures ‘French Freedom’ as a ‘Beacon’⁶² which reveals the positive and the negative aspects of the French Revolution and its aftermath in Europe. This figure of enlightened, watchful travel is developed through the imagery of landscape in Coleridge’s critique of Robespierre: ‘I rather think, that the distant prospect, to which he was travelling, appeared to him grand and beautiful; but that he fixed his eye on it with such intense eagerness as to neglect the foulness of the road’.⁶³ The danger of this far-sighted vision is its lack of immediate circumspection, its local blindness. In order to tread carefully, Coleridge argues, one must keep one’s eye on the immediate obscurity and on the distant prospect of light: ‘[e]nthusiasm… will frequently generate sensations of an unkindly order. If we clearly perceive any one thing to be of vast and infinite importance to ourselves and all mankind, our first feelings impel us to turn with angry contempt from those, who doubt and oppose it’.⁶⁴ Robespierre’s vision of human perfection, like Milton’s vision of God, is dark with excessive light. The representation of Robespierre’s ‘dark imagination’⁶⁵ is a significant conflation of two types of obscurity (a conflation essential to the rhetoric of clarity), corrupted vision and evil, arguing that they are necessarily interrelated. This balanced view of Robespierre explains in part Jon Mee’s statement (in a discussion of Thomas Paine) that ‘criticism of Robespierre is not equivalent to a disavowal of radicalism’.⁶⁶ The distant prospect of human perfection must, conservatively enough, take account of the immediacy of human imperfection, and this means that Coleridge must paradoxically and metarhetorically be talking about preparing the audience at the same time as he is engaging in the preparation of his audience.

Coleridge’s rhetorical pattern of early optimism concerning the preparation of recipients for proper communication is figured throughout the rest of the ‘Introductory Address’ in further revisionary additions related to general illumination and the reception of information. Interestingly, Coleridge associates the identity of informers (the fourth class of ‘Friends’) with an unfallen purity: ‘[f]or it was ordained’, he writes, ‘at the foundation of the world, that there should always remain Pure Ones and uncorrupt, who should shine like Lights in Darkness, reconciling us to our own nature’.⁶⁷ These ‘Lights’ are individual illuminators of the public whose function is essential for the regulation of reception through the purification of the fallen. But this utopian optimism is immediately obviated by a very Coleridgean caveat. Communicating with the fallen, the reader is warned, is fraught with difficulties, even for the chosen Lights:

[t]hat general Illumination should precede Revolution, is a truth as obvious, as that the Vessel should be cleansed before we fill it with a pure Liquor. But the mode of diffusing it is not discoverable with equal facility. We certainly should never attempt to make Proselytes by appeals to the selfish feelings – and consequently, should plead for the Oppressed, not to them.⁶⁸

Coleridge’s optimism concerning illumination, it appears, extends only to those who stand above the general corruption of capacities for reception. To proceed from the beginning, he warns, without a careful introduction on the reception of information, as Godwin does in Political Justice, is ‘rather plausible than just or practicable’.⁶⁹ In other words, Godwin’s fixed attention on a beacon of abstraction keeps him from seeing the practical obscurity surrounding him. Between the different classes of society, Coleridge argues,

there is a gulph that may not be passed. He would appear to me to have adopted the best as well as the most benevolent mode of diffusing Truth, who uniting the zeal of the Methodist with the views of the Philosopher, should be personally among the Poor, and teach them their Duties in order that he may render them susceptible of their Rights.⁷⁰

He may be arguing in a relatively anti-Godwinian vein here, but the language of this passage echoes Godwin’s claim in Political Justice that ‘Man is in reality a passive, and not an active being’.⁷¹ In these densely packed passages, Coleridge’s ‘we’ of unfallen Lights are given the task of pleading for the fallen while they (the fallen) remain incapable of pleading properly for themselves. A certain rhetorical ‘zeal’ is necessary to effect this in the primitively unenlightened, but it must itself be regulated by cool philosophical abstraction if reception is to be kept under control. In Coleridge’s hierarchy, communicators possess an unfallen will, even if the receiving ‘people’ does not.

The final section of Conciones begins with yet another discussion of the problems of reception and the careful strategy required for its regulation. The repetition of this topic begins to seem, on a close analysis, obsessive, if not entirely compulsive. Once again the Coleridgean reception-caveat stresses to its audience that a speaker must have a clear understanding of the character and class of the audience, in both the social sense and the sense associated with the ‘Friends’ (and enemies) of liberty. The appeal to the unregulated ‘Passions’ of the unenlightened multitude in the epigraph to this section (on the disclosal of opinion) recalls the new rhetorical primitivist belief that with greater knowledge comes greater abstraction, greater understanding, and a simultaneous decrease in the power of the passions to sway the mind. The crowd, here, plays the role of the savage, interpreting via its receptivity to feeling. Consequently, even abstract truths – even the barest, clearest information – will have the effect of impassioned obscurity on the audience, corrupting any transfer of information and transforming it into a potentially misinforming energy. It is the responsibility of the speaker to speak according to the crowd’s capacity and at the same time to establish his own character: ‘the Conduct of the speaker is determined chiefly by the nature of his Audience. He therefore, who shall proclaim me seditious… must prove the majority of my hearers to be unenlightened’.⁷² It is not what is said that determines what is seditious, Coleridge argues (and in the midst of the debate concerning the introduction of the two bills on treachery and sedition, this argument is hardly superfluous); rather, it is to whom it is said. Or, more importantly, to whom it is said to be said. Here, the reflexive, metarhetorical statement concerning the intended audience of an address is meant to guarantee not a particular readership, but the author’s character.

Coleridge goes on to represent one final type of recipient for whom obscurity becomes the dominant figure. As he has argued about the lower classes, so he now argues that for aristocrats the most benighting influence on the mind is prejudice.⁷³ This fifth type of recipient, most definitely an enemy of liberty, represents the conservative rhetoric which postulated a positive, counter-Enlightenment obscurity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. Altering a quote from Job 5:14, Coleridge goes on to describe this class of audience by invoking concepts of Burkean obscurity and the power indeterminate language gains through association:

[h]e ‘meets with darkness in the day-time, and gropes in the noon-day as in night.’ Some unmeaning Term generally becomes the Watch-word, and acquires almost a mechanical power over his frame. The indistinctness of the Ideas associated with it increases its effect, as ‘objects look gigantic thro’ a mist’.⁷⁴

This final class demonstrates that the obscurity of prejudice lends power to obscure, indeterminate terms and ideas, which perpetuate themselves by causing recipients to ‘wilfully’⁷⁵ blind themselves and shut their eyes. That Coleridge did not recognise a potential self-contradiction here – he had himself claimed that illumination of the unprepared masses would result in negative consequences approaching sedition – is a mark of his own confusion concerning the right form of information in a society where the truth is dangerous for the aristocrat and for the unprepared recipient.

The following sections of ‘On the Present War’ finally extend beyond a reflexive introductory critique of preparatory introduction. They argue against the war on France through the communication of historical facts, the transvaluation of figures, and the discussion of transvaluation and the barriers to communication that lie outside reception alone. Although it is of course permeated by the metarhetorical contradictions of a rhetoric suspicious of the effects of rhetoric, its main appeal is to facts, ‘a rapid survey of the consequences of this unjust because unnecessary War’.⁷⁶ Coleridge’s text functions like the rays – or as the eye - of ‘the Sun of Enquiry’⁷⁷ exposing the horrors of scalping in the America and the deaths of ‘a MILLION of men’ in Europe’s ‘calamitous Contest’.⁷⁸ In an early example of Gilmartin’s aforementioned ‘radical rhetoric of fact’, Coleridge thus cites item after damning anti-war item as a means of informing and influencing the reader.

But there are barriers to this communication beyond the indifference or corrupted capacity of the people. There are, as one would expect, darker forces for obfuscation at work. ‘He, who wanders in the maze of POLITICAL ENQUIRY’, Coleridge asserts, ‘must tread over Corses, and at every step detect some dark Conspirator against human happiness’.⁷⁹ Although he does not identify these dark conspirators coherently, and does not announce them as a class of ‘Enemies of Liberty’, he does throughout this section delineate the functions and identities of those who oppose positive, clear information. Among these enemies are the previously mentioned ‘ARISTOCRATS’ and manipulative politicians, represented through the figure of William Pitt as a sort of apotheosis of the rhetoric of obscurity (even in comparison to Burke): ‘[b]ut our Premier’s Harangues! – Mystery concealing Meanness, as steam-clouds invelope a dunghill’.⁸⁰ Among the dark conspirators discussed by Coleridge are those spies and ministerial investigators who reveal the secrets of the friends of liberty: ‘[m]en who resemble the familiar Spirits described by Isaiah, as “dark ones, that peep and that mutter!”’.⁸¹

Perhaps the most dangerous enemy to liberty for Coleridge at this point is misguided religion, and especially the Church of England and the Catholic Church, which represent the corruption of a pure Christianity. He points out that all but one Bishop (Llandaff) voted against a motion to allow for negotiation with France, and that these men represent ‘the Religion of Mitres and Mysteries, the Religion of Pluralities and Persecution’.⁸² These ‘High-priests of Mars’⁸³ are motivated, Coleridge claims, by the pecuniary advantages they gain as representatives of an established church which collects money from the people.⁸⁴ The association of religious authority with monetary reward guarantees that the church will become an economic instrument of priestly obfuscation, using mystery and the symbols of superstitious authority to awe the people, and corrupt the ‘Light of Nature’.⁸⁵ Here, Coleridge reaches perhaps the height of his Dissenting argument, promoting ‘a Religion, of which every true Christian is the Priest’ which will extinguish ‘the torch of Superstition’.⁸⁶ Compared to the ministers of the government, the false ministers of god are an eclipse, not a shadow.

A reading of Conciones for obscurity demonstrates important complexities and contradictions in Coleridge’s early stance on information and obscurity. First, his rhetorical deployment of the figures of clarity and obscurity indicate his association with the radical rhetoric of clarity. Most writers at the time associated normatively obscure imagery with their enemies, but only in the radical rhetoric of clarity was this association conflated with other types of obscurity, such as ministerial mystery, or unclear language. Second, his conception of the capacities of the people was already ‘class’-based, interweaving concepts of individual difference motivated by prejudice and feeling and the effects of material circumstances on human nature and political identity. The implication that circumstance determines character, however, led Coleridge into troubling representations of the audience as generally passive and in need of instruction from higher, implicitly free, authorities. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the anxiety of reception (related to the perpetuation of social dangers of irrational mob behaviour and the author’s reputation in the eyes of the law rather than his friends or posterity) which motivated his revisions and proliferating introductions shows how Coleridge’s concept of his readers’ capacities was tied to the structure of his own work. Even when teaching future teachers, it seemed, Coleridge was worried that he might be misunderstood, and so began his slide down the slippery slope of introductory caveats and qualifications calculated to delay illumination. Finally, Coleridge’s concept of information regarded mere fact to be a useful tool for provoking a response from the right audience, but a problematic one given the fact that feeling could override understanding and even facts could communicate more passion than reason.