The Watchman

The fields intended for TURNIPS are far advanced in culture, many have been twice plowed, and are in fine tilth’

Coleridge, The Watchman (358), quoting from the Monthly Magazine.

The turnips of this year are generally good.

Edmund Burke, ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ (in Burke, 9.138).

The ten issues of Coleridge’s self-edited magazine The Watchman were published in the first half of 1796, shortly after the implementation of the Two Bills.¹⁰⁶ The ‘Watchman’ of the title, invoking the familiar radical and enlightenment figures of the eye and the lantern, represents both Coleridge as the editor and contributor¹⁰⁷ who investigates and enquires, and the newspaper itself, which was to function as a source of quasi-revolutionary light to be spread across the countryside. Though the genres and politics may have been mixed (in what came to be typically Coleridgean fashion), Lewis Patton relates the style of the magazine to its political project, stating that the ‘tone of The Watchman was prevailingly temperate – kept so, I think, because Coleridge believed that the knowledge of truth was best disseminated in a climate of thoughtfulness and in “cool and guarded” language’.¹⁰⁸ As I have pointed out throughout my discussions of the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity and Coleridge’s conflation of them, it is important not to confuse rhetoric with metarhetoric, and not to conclude that Coleridge’s style was temperate because he explicitly came out against intemperance. Furthermore, repeated calls for the (legal or intellectual) regulation of reception had a conservative ring: ‘[t]he progress of revolutionary doctrines in France, the outbreak of hostilities on the Continent, the threat of war between Great Britain and France, and the existence of much popular discontent at home, made the regulation of public opinion a matter of prime importance to Pitt’s Government in 1792’.¹⁰⁹ The courage of his decision to publish in this climate, and his movement towards a greater emphasis on the need to contain the reception of political speech, mark the height of his early radical commitments and the beginning of the end of his radical personal and political optimism. The failure of The Watchman was the failure of his radical identity.

In the prospectus used to advertise The Watchman to the provincial public, Coleridge repeats the views on the press which he outlined in The Plot Discovered, arguing that ‘[i]n an enslaved State the Rulers form and supply the opinions of the People’.¹¹⁰ While there may be many provincial newspapers in existence, Coleridge claims, most of these newspapers are influenced by the Treasury though the free dissemination of ‘Treasury Prints… with particular paragraphs marked out for their insertion’.¹¹¹ The only means of supporting freedom was to allow the people to ‘FORM THEIR OWN OPINIONS’, shouted Coleridge in capitals, because ‘KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’.¹¹² Freedom was contingent on the freedom of thought, not merely the freedom of information, and this required preparation of the audience: ‘[w]ithout previous illumination a change in the forms of Government will be of no avail… where Corruption and Ignorance are prevalent, the best forms of Government are but “Shadows of a Shade!”’.¹¹³

At the top of the title-page of the Prospectus Coleridge printed an adaptation from John 8.32 which became the motto of each number:

That All may know the TRUTH;

And that the TRUTH may make us FREE!!¹¹⁴

Although it is normally taken to be an emancipatory statement, the fact that the truth makes us free implies a passive relation to an indeterminate, external source of emancipation. That is, the unacknowledged problem is not related to the philosophical question ‘What is truth’, but rather the rhetorical ‘What is the appearance of truth?’ The passivity of the audience-recipient is stressed in lines like ‘[w]e actually transfer the Sovereignty to the People, when we make them susceptible of it’.¹¹⁵ Thus when Coleridge claims it is the duty of the ‘Friends of Freedom, of Reason, and of Human Nature… to supply or circulate political information’¹¹⁶ the claim is about more than the mere spread of facts (about turnips, for example), but also about forming the people for the enlightened thinking necessary to receive those facts. The government, with its control over the spread of facts to the rural population, could thereby ‘undermine their Freedom without alarming them’; and, perhaps more importantly, it could ‘overthrow their Freedom by alarming them against themselves’.¹¹⁷

While the ‘“mission statements”’ of provincial papers in this period were normally aimed at developing a ‘local market’ in order to represent ‘a particular locality as distinct from other provincial regions’,¹¹⁸ Coleridge’s goal in the introductory section of The Watchman was to present less a regional than an ideological identity which would demonstrate to readers the particular value of his ‘Miscellany’. He begins with the relation of the modern origins of the contemporary history of democratic clarity, arguing that in the aftermath of the capture of Constantinople in 1453, ‘[t]he first scanty twilight of knowledge was sufficient to shew what horrors had resulted from ignorance; and no experience had yet taught them that general illumination is incompatible with undelegated power’.¹¹⁹ This dawn of democratic diffusion was to have a disastrous effect on tyranny of many forms in Europe, which Coleridge relates in broad detail.

The historical and political targets of this arch-enlightenment narrative recall those of the more narrowly theological and historical corruption narrative in the Lectures on Revealed Religion. ‘Despotism, Aristocracy, and Priesthood’ become a ‘dark tri-unity’¹²⁰ that engages in a ‘violent’ struggle to maintain power. Coleridge then lists some of the dangers to ‘the diffusion of general information’ employed by these obscure powers: taxes, the stamp duties that restricted newspaper circulation, and various instruments for impeding the education of the poor.¹²¹ The contemporary reader, accustomed to this discussion of a history of the progressive diffusion of information and the change from light to darkness, would certainly see already as the end of this history the 1789 revolution in France, and the conservative Tory reaction to it: William Pitt fittingly appears at the end of this history as a figure of tyranny for having called newspapers ‘mere luxuries’.¹²²

The forces of light rallied against the ‘dark tri-unity’ are discussed in the ensuing but still introductory section. Discussing the Methodists ‘and other disciples of Calvinism’ as ‘counteracting’ ‘the impediments to the diffusion of Knowledge’, Coleridge performs a rather abrupt about-face and argues for the illuminating power of mystery. This argument in favour of mystery and against those who argue that ‘faith in mysteries prepares the mind for implicit obedience to tyranny’ echoes Coleridge’s unresolved and problematic effort in the superstition allegory to maintain his scientific credentials while supporting an element of orthodoxy which he and other radicals had targeted for years.¹²³ Coleridge offers in the same section a more consistent argument in favour of mystery and superstition which was to become an essential aspect of his later writing. ‘The truth seems to be,’ he writes,

that Superstition is unfavorable to civil Freedom then only, when it teaches sensuality… or when it is in alliance with power and avarice, as in the religious establishments of Europe. In all other cases, to forego, even in solitude, the high pleasures which the human mind receives from the free exertion of its faculties, through the dread of an invisible spectator or the hope of a future reward, implies so great a conquest over the tyranny of the present impulse, and so large a power of self-government, that whoever is conscious of it, will be grateful for the existence of an external government no farther than as it protects him from the attacks of others.¹²⁴

This is a dense passage which demonstrates Coleridge’s intense awareness of the need for a pointed defence of ‘Superstition’. First, he maintains his ‘radical’ critique of sensuality/atheism and of the Church of Rome (the Church of England is conspicuously absent). Second, he associates indulgence in superstition with a ‘high’ pleasure and, more importantly, intellectual freedom, which explains the ensuing attack on the ‘metaphysical systematizers’ with whom he did not want this obscure activity to be conflated. Third, he ingeniously couples the sublime ‘dread’ of an invisible God with a ‘conquest’ over the ‘tyranny’ of the sensual self, once again somewhat problematically appropriating unto himself the language of emancipatory radicalism even as his beliefs drew him further away from the details of contemporary radical beliefs regarding mystery and superstition. This power of an obviously metaphorical ‘self-government’ is transformed, Coleridge argues, into a form of liberty which resists political tyranny and, by implication, guarantees enough self-regulation to resist an unrestrained, irrational, violent explosion of passion. Enthusiasm and mystery are thus wedded and reflexive self-control is translated into control of government and a guarantee of liberty.

Coleridge goes on to advocate an optimistic concept of the value of education, investigation, and the spread of information. ‘Man begins to be free when he begins to examine’, he writes, meaning especially the examination of the poor and of the material circumstances leading to their poverty.¹²⁵ Echoing Lowth’s earlier claim about the inherent, Utopian progress of learning, Coleridge goes on to laud factories as secure places for the dissemination of information through the public reading of newspapers. ‘Which party they adopt’, he writes in a frenzy of confidence, ‘is of little comparative consequence! Men always serve the cause of freedom by thinking, even though their first reflections may lead them to oppose it’.¹²⁶ This extreme optimism makes for powerful aphorisms, and is certainly designed to maintain a certain level of enthusiasm in the reader – the ‘bare facts’ here are obviously marshalled for the purposes of generating conviction – and indicates a level of internal tension and contradiction unparalleled in Coleridge’s earlier writings. Moving quickly from an appeal to carefully nurtured and divinely guided, reflexive self-regulation to an appeal for the necessary enlightenment of the factory worker no matter what he reads, one suspects that Coleridge is running in desperation while we are reading.

Coleridge smuggles into this statement of confidence in the reception-capacities of the people a volte-face even more surprising than that regarding mystery and superstition. After lauding the sober men of the ‘manufactories’, he goes on:

[a]nd on account of these men, whose passions are frequently inflamed by drunkenness, the friends of rational and progressive Liberty may review with diminished indignation two recent acts of Parliament, which, though breaches of the Constitution… yet will not have been useless if they should render the language of political publications more cool and guarded, or even confine us for a while to the teaching of first principles, or the diffusion of that general knowledge which should be the basis or substratum of politics.¹²⁷

This certainly represents an early example of the apostasies from which Coleridge so carefully (and fruitlessly) sought to defend himself in later years. So much for his ‘Lecture on the Two Bills’ and his expanded publication of it in The Plot Discovered: his faith in the administration to regulate the indeterminate people had overtaken, at least on this point, his faith in the capacities of the people to safely receive information apart from ministerial influence. Lewis Patton argues in his introduction to The Watchman that ‘[i]t is true that [Coleridge] withheld much of his fire on such specific issues as the iniquities of the Two Acts; but so did the whole reform-party’.¹²⁸ This may be true, but an endorsement (however qualified) of the Two Bills grounded in the distrust of the people’s capacity to reason was something more like a dousing than a withholding of ‘fire’. It is true, of course, that Coleridge had argued since the beginning of A Moral and Political Lecture (in content, if not always in form) for ‘cool and guarded’ language as a means for the regulation of illumination and the displacement of violence. But this was the first time that Coleridge supported anti-constitutional government intervention as a means for that regulation, or, in other words, legal regulation as a means of intellectual regulation. To appeal to the vagaries of drunkenness – metaphorical, we suppose, as well as literal – as a justification for this view represents a striking and suspiciously disingenuous capitulation.

The remainder of the first issue of The Watchman follows the format generally used by Coleridge throughout the remaining nine issues of his ‘miscellany’ and demonstrates the nature of his commitment to a central metarhetorical dictum: ‘I declare my intention of relating facts simply and nakedly, without epithets or comments’.¹²⁹ A brief account of its contents will offer a useful example of his meandering writing and editorial practice and its relation to the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. He offers accounts of various motions in the legislature, in this case introducing his clearly anti-war stance by documenting the ministerial blockades to motions for peace and negotiation. This is followed by a debate on the Netherlands, indicating Coleridge’s interest in the wider implications of the war for Europe, and his poem ‘To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution’. Coleridge then inserts a review of Burke’s ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, sections on foreign and domestic intelligence, some sections from Southey’s Joan of Arc, a humorous ‘Copy of a Hand-Bill’ condemning Pitt’s stance on the war and his vague and vacillating rhetoric,¹³⁰ and a final section on the proceedings of the British legislature. What this variety demonstrates is Coleridge’s commitment to the value of diffusing information of various kinds throughout the countryside, and his ambitions as an editor to offer a mixture of the entertaining and the serious, the domestic and the foreign. The implication is that all forms of information, from turnips to treason, and all modes of conveying them, however disparate, are bound up with the nature of government, the state of the people, and the progress of enlightenment and reform. Information and opinion, divested as much as possible from the exhilarating but dangerous rhetoric and passion which could lead to violence, were to be Coleridge’s primary rhetorical instruments for political reform.

In the review of Burke’s ‘Letter’ in the first number of The Watchman, Coleridge complicates his metarhetorical dedication to ‘coolness’ by defending works against the false charge of being ‘mere declamation’, and he complains in a crucial critique of the affectation of clarity that ‘[w]hatever is dull and frigid is extolled as cool reasoning; and where, confessedly, nothing else is possessed, sound judgment is charitably attributed’.¹³¹ But this short defence of Burke from the attacks of ‘aristocratic’ reviews¹³² is meant merely to preface Coleridge’s own vigorous attack on him. This attack is effected through the careful use of the familiar figures of light corrupted by darkness, indicating a collapse of the moral and the stylistic significance of obscurity. ‘Alas!’ writes Coleridge, ‘we fear that this Sun of Genius is well nigh extinguished: a few bright spots linger on its orb, but scarcely larger or more numerous than the dark maculæ visible on it in the hour of its strength and effulgence’.¹³³ Burke’s obsession threatens to spread through his rhetoric, like dark rays from a dark star, to his readers. Thus Coleridge quotes an especially inebriated passage from Burke’s ‘Letter’ and follows it by articulating the metarhetorical danger of becoming indistinguishable from one’s object of attack. Coleridge thus quotes Burke back at himself just as Priestley had done in his Letters to Burke:

[i]ndeed the phrenetic extravagance of the whole of this part of the Letter, “must make every reflecting mind, and every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick”. In descanting on the excesses of the French, Mr. Burke has never chosen to examine what portion may be fairly attributed to the indignation and terror excited by the Combined Forces.¹³⁴

Then, in a brutal but typical act of negative representation, Coleridge quotes Thomas Morgan’s 1726 description of disappointed men who ‘“draw clouds of darkness all around them, put themselves into a wild confusion, and scatter their indignation (the overflowings of a disturbed fancy) at random”’.¹³⁵ At the end of the review Coleridge curses Burke to be ‘appointed under-porter to St. Peter, and be obliged to open the gate of Heaven to Brissot, Roland, Condorcet, Fayette, and Priestley’.¹³⁶ In this opening number, Coleridge may have qualified some of his views regarding obscurity and the public, but his figures of clarity and obscurity remain consistent in their application to the eminent characters of the period, a commitment to reform, and a condemnation of the war and the ministerial policies that radicals blamed in part for the bloody outcome of the French Revolution.

The eighth number of The Watchman is particularly important in the development of Coleridge’s views on the French in relation to the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. One article condemns the behaviour of the ‘French Legislators’ in the recent Wickham-Barthélmy exchange (during which the French rebuffed a hard-won approach by the British for entering into preliminary discussions concerning potential peace negotiations). Later in the same number, Coleridge prints an account of yet another veil in the coffin of Liberty, this time in the form of the recent French acts limiting basic freedoms of speech.¹³⁷ But it is not an endorsement of ministerial counterrevolutionary francophobic rhetoric designed to restrain the indeterminate people. Nor is it an attempt to distance himself from a charge of Jacobinism and prove his John-Bullism and to generate by opposition a determinate, emerging British nationalist identity. Rather, Coleridge’s criticism of French behaviour is simultaneously an endorsement of French democratic ideals. A version of this ‘third way’ approach is nicely summed up by Michael John Kooy in his article on ‘Coleridge’s Francophobia’, where Kooy mentions a ‘third’ critical view of English francophobia in the period which

helps to make sense of non-aligned figures such as Coleridge: people who saw themselves as conscientious objectors to both Jacobin ideology and French expansionism (and ended up virulent francophobes as a result) yet who had little sympathy for the vested interests of the ruling élite and little direct involvement in party politics. In other words, these were people for whom francophobia was not simply a reactionary measure… nor a special ploy to rouse nationalist feeling… but a way to organize and make credible certain key ideas about political structure, especially those concerning authority and representation.¹³⁸

Though he does not deal with Coleridge’s early public work, focusing instead on his middle years, Kooy’s argument captures Coleridge’s concerns about the function of rhetoric in the representation of revolution. Coleridge begins his article on the ‘French Legislators’ by castigating the French for having failed to promote the principles of liberty represented by the 1789 revolution. As he had done earlier with his defence of superstition and his description of the function of the fourth type of the ‘Friends of Liberty’, Coleridge argues that the best way to spread one’s ideals was to realize them and thereby offer an example to the world. That he still believed in the possibility of realizing French ideals – or at least, that he felt it was still useful to present them as attainable – is demonstrated in the following rhetorical question: ‘[t]hat which in Theory has been ridiculed, must necessarily excite imitation, if realized: for why has it been ridiculed except that the despairing children of this world think it too excellent to be practicable?’¹³⁹ There is a note of desperation in this plea, which Coleridge registers in the ensuing adaptation of a passage from Condorcet’s 1795 Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind:

[l]et us… be cautious not to despair of the human race. Let us dare to foresee in the ages that will succeed us, a knowledge and a happiness of which we can only form a vague and undetermined idea. Let us count on the perfectibility with which nature has endowed us.¹⁴⁰

The obscurity and indeterminacy of the indefinitely delayed future represented here is no accident – Condorcet and the quoting Coleridge were both acknowledging the productive indeterminacy of the future and the inability to form a determinate conception of perfection from an imperfect state. This does involve an explicit acknowledgment of the difficulty of attaining the goal of the perfection of human cognition, but it also involves a strong optimism in spite of the evidences of the Terror and the war.

Coleridge offers a final extended discussion of the benefits of spreading clear knowledge and fact for the purpose of informing the people and effecting reform through a review of a recent work by his friend, the radical scientist and physician Thomas Beddoes. The review of the ‘Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt’ predictably associates Pitt with priests and other figures of corruption, and Coleridge, summarizing Beddoes, pointedly asks ‘whether priests would bestir themselves to diffuse that knowledge… which would make priests useless or innocuous’.¹⁴¹ Like Coleridge’s later concept of the clerisy, or its modern incarnation, the BBC, the guardians of culture must maintain a discourse of the people’s imperfection in order to justify their own improving function. The point of Beddoes and the ‘Watchman’ editor is that the government restricts information and deploys the various powers of obfuscation at its disposal in order to maintain the ignorance of the people, whose ignorance the government relies upon for its hold on power. One of these methods, of course, is the spread of misinformation: thus, quoting Beddoes, Coleridge observes that ‘“four journalists will do more towards maddening the people than four hundred prudent persons, privately uttering their honest sentiments towards keeping them within the bounds of reason”’.¹⁴²

Another method of obfuscation is rhetorical ambiguity and misrepresentation, for which Pitt (at least among his opponents) was infamous. Beddoes does not hesitate to level against Pitt a criticism familiar from the controversy over Burke’s Reflections: ‘“[f]luency of elocution however does not appear to be more closely connected with wisdom than facility or elegance of composition”’.¹⁴³ Perhaps somewhat mischievously, Coleridge follows this with his own criticism of Beddoes’ obscurity, or big words: ‘[t]he style of the Essay is excellent. That is a perfect style in which we think always of the matter, and never of the manner. To this praise Dr. Beddoes would be entitled, did not his words too often send common readers to their dictionary’.¹⁴⁴ This may appear to be a strange criticism from Coleridge (who so often coined words for which a dictionary would have been useless), but it is important to note that it is generally consistent with the relatively plain language (and the apparent desire for a transparent style) characteristic of Coleridge’s asyncretic adoption of the rhetoric of clarity in his early lectures, pamphlets, and The Watchman.¹⁴⁵

Having already decided to abandon the enterprise, there was less original material from Coleridge in the tenth and final number of The Watchman than in any other, but his selections are still significant. In an excerpt from his ‘Postscript to his Defence of the Bill of Rights against Gagging Bills’ of 1795, Beddoes (and by extension perhaps Coleridge the Editor) answers the question that dogged rhetorical debate throughout the eighteenth century and came to a head in the war over rhetoric and representation in the 1790s: how can one tell the difference between an honest orator and a dishonest, manipulative one?

If after a fine flowing speech, the hearers feel black revengeful thoughts boiling in their bosom; if at what he says, they be ready to start away in order to tear, burn, and destroy, be assured the speaker only wants to set neighbour to worry neighbour, as if they were so many tygers, instead of Christians. Now whenever men turn tygers, they may devour for a while, but at last they will surely be destroyed themselves.¹⁴⁶

So, at last, it appears that the form of radicalism offered by Coleridge endorsed the people’s passivity over action, through a fear of destructive violence. It is a sign of the anxiety over the communicator’s ability to unleash the destructive power of the masses that Beddoes – and Coleridge – did not at this point consider the equally dangerous figure of the poetic, smooth-tongued orator who lulls his unsuspecting audience to sleep, and makes lambs of them.

The ‘Address to the Readers of the Watchman’ with which Coleridge concludes his doomed miscellany serves as a fitting end to a chapter on the unresolved contradictions and conflations of the rhetoric of clarity and obscurity in his early public speaking and publishing. It is in this address that Coleridge makes an infamous – and misleading – promise: ‘[h]enceforward I shall cease to cry the State of the political Atmosphere’.¹⁴⁷ The ostensible reason for this form of withdrawal from public political life was not, as it was for many other radicals, a consequence of the dangers of persecution. Or at least Coleridge would not admit his fears here, for he stated that ‘[t]he reason is short and satisfactory – the Work does not pay its expences’.¹⁴⁸ It is tempting to read this phrase metaphorically, as an admission that his readers have not paid him back with an intellectual labour equivalent to that which he himself invested, but the meaning at the time was pitifully literal, as Coleridge was floundering financially, and subscriptions for the paper were falling off, or failing to be honoured with proper payments. But there was still some fight left in him, and Coleridge defends himself against the attacks of his subscribers, some of whom apparently wanted only a miscellany of bare facts, by citing the example of the Cambridge Intelligencer. The Intelligencer had been one of the first papers to publish Coleridge’s work, and offered an example of a publication which Coleridge wanted to compare to The Watchman and which had managed to be successful. It was

a Newspaper, the style and composition of which would claim distinguished praise, even among the productions of literary leisure; while it breathes every where the severest morality, fighting fearlessly the good fight against Tyranny, yet never unfaithful to that Religion, “whose service is perfect Freedom”.¹⁴⁹

The desire to effect a mixture of literature as entertainment – significantly referred to here as ‘leisure’ – with the difficult labour of the intellect was not forgotten by Coleridge, and remained an essential element in his consideration of how to provide a productive exchange of communication with the public in later years. To provide easy work for the reader potentially involved a great investment of labour on the part of the author.

More important at this point, however, is the fact that the ‘Religion’ to which Coleridge, the Unitarian divine and radical public lecturer and pamphleteer, is referring in this quote is that of the Anglican Church: the line ‘whose service is perfect freedom’ is from the ‘Collect for Peace’ in the Book of Common Prayer.¹⁵⁰ Fittingly, Coleridge followed this association of liberty with the Church by invoking the figures of the ‘Patriot and the Philanthropist’ in his endorsement of the Monthly Magazine, which he hoped would continue to teach ‘RATIONAL LIBERTY, [and prepare] it’s [sic] readers for the enjoyment of it, strengthening the intellect by SCIENCE, and softening our affections by the GRACES’. The self-criticism with which Coleridge famously and rather vainly concludes The Watchman – ‘“O Watchman! thou hast watched in vain”’¹⁵¹ – signals a note of despair, not only over his financial worries, but also over the increasing contradictions he encountered in his attempts to reconcile the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity. ‘The Two Bills succeeded in suppressing the reform movement, and there were no more mass meetings after December 1795’,¹⁵² and The Watchman was launched at the beginning of the decline of the Reflections-inspired politics and rhetoric of clarity. Perhaps it is no surprise that Coleridge would by the end of the year retire to Nether Stowey in order to watch the world and his friends from a metarhetorically figured position of relative obscurity.

In his early political prose, Coleridge’s attempts to contain both the representation of his own character and the information of his recipients through rhetorical regulation and a related metarhetorical reflexivity became increasingly unsustainable. His attempt to maintain a Christianised, anti-sensual science involved the construction of an elaborate history which inversively represented the connections between religious, political, and scientific obscurity, but it ultimately involved him in an endorsement of mystery which obviated his attempt to endorse an uncorrupted rhetoric of clarity. Furthermore, his attempt to proclaim the possibility of human perfection was undermined by a conservative, Burkean acknowledgment of difference which established a hermeneutic hierarchy in ‘the public’, and the division of ‘the people’ into various irreconcilable types. And any vestiges of utopian optimism regarding the attainment of universal perfection were qualified by his increasing conviction that a fallen humanity could only approach perfection, not reach it, and that the delay invoked in qualifications of perfectibilitarian optimism was permanent.

The failure of The Watchman here represents decline of Coleridge’s early optimistic politics, the result of irresolvable contradictions between and internal to the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity that dominated the metarhetorical tracts of political controversy which I have previously discussed. This failure involved a metaphorical relation between economies of financial and intellectual exchange which were underwritten by a complex concept of the mutual labour involved in the transfer of information and in transformative in-formation, and convinced Coleridge not that he had failed, but that the public had failed him. The powers of superiority and entertainment lost by an author who eschewed the sublimity of obscurity for the power of clarity ultimately entailed a loss of power over the inherently indeterminate recipient, the shadowy public. Finally, the problem of questionable indeterminacy in relation to the divine or demonic origin of the author’s voice or authority remained unresolved, and the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity became, in the work of Coleridge, indistinguishable. As a consequence, clarity could no longer be metarhetorically proclaimed as an incarnation of wisdom, and attic brevity no guarantee of justice.

But the crucial insight which made this movement in Coleridge’s work ‘Romantic’ was an awareness of this indistinguishability as a problem. The simultaneous emergence of Coleridge as a public figure for obscurity and the obscurity of the ‘public’ required personal and political determination. This awareness ultimately revealed itself in the anxieties of the recursive slippery slope of reflexive metarhetorical introductions which hopelessly attempted to establish the character of the author, the reader, the text, and the text’s subject, and thereby the origins of clarity and obscurity. In the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity which emerged from the conflict of clarity and obscurity in the 1790s, the communicator’s awareness of the recipient’s inevitable subjection to manipulation required an explicit, and an explicitly mutual, engagement in intellectual labour. The communicator’s awareness of the inevitable indeterminacy of his voice required that he at once evoke and earn the right to this labour through a display of his own laboriousness in order to give his work a clear shape. The responsibility for obscurity rested with the reader, while the responsibility of obscurity settled on the author.