The Plot Discovered

Ere yet our laws as well as our religion be muffled up in mysteries, as a CHRISTIAN I protest against this worse than Pagan darkness!

… and by information the public will may be formed.

Coleridge, The Plot Discovered (Lects1795), 285, 312.

In late November 1795, before the publication of Conciones, Coleridge delivered a ‘Lecture on the Two Bills’ in Bristol. The two bills in question were framed as a response to an attack on the king in early November and to general civic unrest. The first was Lord Grenville’s ‘Act for the Safety and Preservation of His Majesty’s Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Attempts’. The second was Pitt’s ‘Act for the More Effectually Preventing Seditious Meetings and Assemblies’. The two acts were calculated to regulate both published writing and collective public speaking criticizing the government and supporting reform. As Coleridge put it, ‘[t]he first of these Bills is an attempt to assassinate the Liberty of the Press: the second, to smother the Liberty of Speech’.⁸⁷ The Plot Discovered was published by December 10, over a week before the acts were finally passed, and a week after Conciones was published. This meant that The Plot Discovered was usually reviewed with Conciones, which itself ended with a reference to the two acts.⁸⁸ Both texts demonstrate the tensions and contradictions involved in the revision of public speech into published print. But such similarities aside, The Plot Discovered’s staunchly anti-government stance, with a particular legal target as opposed to the war in general, distinguishes it from Conciones in ways which add significantly to an understanding of Coleridge’s early positions on the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity.

Religion and ministerial speech had been represented in Conciones as perpetuating power through the devices of obscurity, and Coleridge transfers this theme in The Plot Discovered to legal language and its consequences, using the two acts as a synecdoche for all legal and institutional linguistic obscurity. He introduces the text with a motto which derides the ‘mitred mufti’ who attempt to convince the general population that they are naturally subordinate to those above them. One of the main instruments for generating this humiliating belief is the obscurity of laws, which renders them inaccessible to the common reader. The Plot Discovered, we are told, is a ‘protest’,⁸⁹ and the ‘Christianity’ to which Coleridge refers here is that which he claimed had been corrupted by the history of political and religious obscurity in his Lectures on Revealed Religion.⁹⁰ Here, Coleridge’s is a levelling Christianity which would make all men priests, investing them with the authority, confidence, and ability to read the scriptures – and now, by extension, the law, if not the indeterminate but unquestionable constitution.⁹¹

The two bills, however, had been written down, and it was their language which Coleridge sought to analyze and represent in The Plot Discovered.⁹² Pitt and Grenville had, in Coleridge’s words, ‘dared shew themselves to the light’ and it was his task to examine them carefully.⁹³ With the publication of the texts, what was exposed to the light of enquiry was precisely the obscurity of oppressive legal language. ‘The existing laws of Treason’, Coleridge writes ironically, ‘were too clear, too unequivocal’ for the oppressive government to exploit at the expense of the people, and did not allow judges enough latitude of interpretation to overwhelm the influence of ‘English Juries’.⁹⁴ Indeed, one of the major consequences of the enactment of the bills, he warns, will be the transformation of Britain into a despotic state. One of the ‘four things, which being combined constitute Despotism’, Coleridge claims, is ‘[w]hen the punishments of state-offenders are determined and heavy, but what constitutes state-offences left indefinite, that is, dependent on the will of the minister, or the interpretation of the Judge’.⁹⁵ Legal indeterminacy, in other words, is only questionable by initiates in the hermeneutic hierarchy who have the authority to question it. The present bills have ‘crawled into light’ (from a dunghill, no less) only to emphasize their own darkness.⁹⁶

Coleridge moves on quite quickly – there are no introductory caveats about reception here – to engage in a minute analysis of the bills and to reveal the hidden intent behind misleading statements. His analysis of obscurity as an oppressive legal or ministerial tactic had, as Victoria Myers has shown in her discussion of The Plot Discovered, a significant history in the Enlightenment. Paine’s attack on indeterminate laws, Myers argues, was an echo of Locke, who

linked ‘obscurity’ and ‘ambiguity’ with motives of ‘ambition’ and party interest; conversely, he connected ‘plain and direct’ language with political honesty. He saw equivocation, affected obscurity, and departing from conventional meanings as signs of political corruption.⁹⁷

Likewise, Coleridge attacks the obscurity of the bills as an attempt to increase power through indeterminacy: a vague law could be employed in vague ways, and therein lay its danger. But Coleridge was aware that once clarity became positively valued it could be appropriated as a style, and become an inverted instrument of obscurity. Thus in his reading of the second bill Coleridge states ‘[a]t my first glance over it, it recalled to me by force of contrast the stern simplicity and perspicuous briefness of the Athenian laws. But our minister’s meaning generally bears an inverse proportion to the multitude of his words’.⁹⁸ The light of clarity and simplicity, it turns out, can function as a cover for darkness.

The most important problem Coleridge had with the new laws was that the restriction of the press would constitute a change in the identity of the British government. Essentially, he argued, the force of public opinion forced the government to govern with (not over) the people.⁹⁹ Invoking the use of the term ‘information’ which implies the active in-formation of the recipient, Coleridge argues that

[t]he Liberty of the Press, (a power resident in the people) gives us an influential sovereignty. By books necessary information may be dispersed; and by information the public will may be formed…. By the almost winged communication of the Press, the whole nation becomes one grand Senate, fervent yet untumultuous.¹⁰⁰

Information here serves more than a moral, parochial purpose of improving the public mind. Rather, it serves as an essential element in the constitution of Britain, as a check on government power and as a means of generating national identity. To destroy the press was therefore to destroy the dissemination of facts and the formation of the public, figured by Coleridge (invoking language usually reserved for the passions) as the transfer of electricity: ‘[b]y the operation of Lord Grenville’s Bill, the Press is made useless. Every town is insulated: the vast conductors are destroyed by which the electric fluid of truth was conveyed from man to man, and nation to nation’.¹⁰¹ To stop this communication was to initiate despotism, as it effectively cancelled out the influence of the people on the government.

In a manner which contradicted his anxieties concerning the dangers of information in the Moral and Political Lecture and Conciones ad Populum, however, Coleridge here invoked the optimistic concept of a self-regulating truth which would inevitably produce virtue through information. Victoria Myers argues plausibly in ‘The Other Fraud’ that Coleridge appealed to an ideal of ‘univocal’ language as a language of justice, one which would be clear to all and would not admit of a corrupt indeterminacy. This is, indeed, an ideal central to the radical rhetoric of clarity, and founded in a utopian optimism about the connection between truth and clarity promoted from Longinus to Locke. But it was one which came to be questioned by radicals throughout the 1790s, as they played out the end of the Enlightenment and effected a qualification of ideals concerning human progress and perfectibility. Myers suggests that Coleridge argues in The Plot Discovered not only against, but also for, equivocation, as a means of maintaining ‘the freedom of political speech. Here Coleridge fundamentally departed from the theoretical dependency upon Locke which both sides claimed. He approved the existing treason laws because they admitted a disjuncture between meanings and intentions’.¹⁰² This double-edged aspect of obscurity was well known to radicals, as I have suggested above, and the argument here associated with Coleridge is central to various accounts of trial defences of supposedly seditious texts, from the trials of 1794 to William Hone’s trials in 1819.

Myers goes on to argue that this positive use of indeterminacy or obscurity is ultimately obviated by Coleridge’s perception of the necessity to somehow limit language. Thus ‘Coleridge needed to place some limit on use of equivocation; otherwise, he would warrant a complete relativism or indeterminacy of language, which… threatens to return society to a Hobbesian state of nature’.¹⁰³ Myers is, of course, right to point out that Coleridge and other radicals who advocated a form of radical obscurity still maintained an ideal, at least when they were at their most optimistic, of finding an objective, static language. In fact, any language would do, as long as all readers and audiences were bound to respond in the same way. But Coleridge’s early insight was that this goal could not be achieved only by perfecting language: the people also had to have their capacities to receive or interpret language perfected by a supplementary authority. Coleridge, like other somewhat utopian radicals, simply believed that this unity of interpretation was possible, whether that authority came from the structure of truth or the nature of God, and that the limits of interpretation or equivocation would appear spontaneously in the course of progressive agreement in free public discourse.

Myers does not make this essential point, and ends up confusing Coleridge’s plan to perfect the people with a plan to perfect language. But she does point out one of the consequences of Coleridge’s belief that a fragmented audience resulted in fragmented interpretations, and in his desire to promote equivocation as a means of ultimately arriving at a form of agreement equivalent to truth. In The Plot Discovered, she argues, ‘Coleridge depicted a moment of indeterminacy, of becoming, of change in relation and valence, and thereby captured the move of history itself. This fruitful indeterminacy allows the coexistence of many diverse voices, and hence encourages tolerance as a modus vivendi’.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, Coleridge articulated just such a democratic openness to positive interpretation just one week earlier, in another addition to the ‘Introductory Address’ of Conciones:

we may be certain, whether we be Christians or Infidels, Aristocrats or Republicans, that our minds are in a state unsusceptible of Knowledge, when we feel an eagerness to detect the Falsehood of an Adversary’s reasonings, not a sincere wish to discover if there be Truth in them.¹⁰⁵

The interaction between the reader and the obscure text, or the informing communicator and the recipient, is, in the end, the foundation of positive, active understanding. It is not merely clarity that is a sign of virtue. Rather, the communicator’s regulation of the audience reflects a process of self-regulation essential to maintaining the necessary foundation for positive communication.