The Decline of the New Rhetoric of Clarity

The collectively problematic nature of the principle of the radical rhetoric of clarity, that clarity functioned as a sign of virtue and veracity, is evident in the radical reaction to Burke’s claim in the Reflections that ‘eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom’.¹¹⁰ The optimism characteristic of Longinus’ and Quintilian’s problematic claims for a connection between clarity and truth was registered in the new rhetoric by Hugh Blair, in his anxiously naïve assertion that ‘[o]ne thing is certain… that without possessing the virtuous affections in a strong degree, no man can attain eminence in the sublime parts of eloquence. He must feel what the good man feels, if he expects greatly to move or interest to mankind’.¹¹¹ Likewise, Blair later claims that ‘[s]tyle has always some reference to an author’s manner of thinking. It is a picture of the ideas which rise in his mind’.¹¹² Invoking classical accounts of rhetoric as inspiration or possession, this is something more than mere mimesis: as Boulton observes, in the new rhetoric of clarity ‘style is not only a means of conveying ideas, it is at the same time an incarnation of their validity and reasonableness’.¹¹³ To speak clearly is not merely to be elevated to the level of the clear divinity: it is to be divine. Clarity is simultaneously the evidence of its own truth and the embodied appearance of virtue.

Priestley, however, like Quintilian, is more careful than Blair and other optimists in his formulation of this principle. In a discussion of the need to move one’s audience, the reader’s sympathy with the author, he claims, may be encouraged by giving the impression of sincerity: ‘we are, in all cases, more disposed to give our assent to any proposition, if we perceive that the person who contends for it is really in earnest, and believes it himself’.¹¹⁴ Priestley later deftly turned Burke’s pessimistic statement concerning the virtues of clarity back upon itself, and printed Burke’s own warning on the title page of his Letters to Burke. Wollstonecraft also appropriated Burke’s phrase in a discussion of the simplicity necessary in constitutions: ‘as it is possible for a man to be eloquent without being either wise or virtuous, it is but a common prudence in the framers of a constitution, to provide some sort of check to the evil’.¹¹⁵ But in texts which made a metarhetorical claim to the virtues of their own clarity, such warnings served as much to undermine their own reflective rhetoric as they did the rhetoric of the Reflections.

In other words, although these cautionary statements seem to indicate a sensitivity to the potential for insincerity even in the rhetoric of clarity, they are, in fact, merely an extension of the critique of the rhetoric of obscurity, and are never effectively self-critical. Ultimately, this common pattern in the rhetoric of clarity reflects an unfounded optimism contradicted by the crucial metarhetorical insight that clarity is as artificial as obscurity.¹¹⁶ Priestley’s use of Burke’s phrase was certainly effective in the context, but he does not heed Longinus’s own self-defeating warning about the metarhetoric of Isocrates. A rhetoric which questions rhetoric is itself questionable. The unasked question is: how can a reader know that a writer is sincere, when the rhetoric of clarity can be appropriated through study and practice? This gap in the rhetoric of clarity reflects a deeper failure in the radical reaction to Burke, to which I have already alluded to in my discussion of Thelwall. That is, the writers I have considered here often made use of exactly the same rhetorical and figurative devices they criticised in the language of their opponents. Even if such examples were portrayed as ironic, parodic responses to Burke’s rhetorical excesses, they were nonetheless calculated to play on something other than the reader’s reason, or dispassionate understanding. Wollstonecraft’s critique of the rhetorical failure of the National Assembly reflects this failure of circumspection in radical writers in Britain, and it was a failure which generated an unresolved anxiety crucial to the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity. Obscurity and clarity, ultimately, were more closely allied than any one dared to admit, and any effective rhetoric was, necessarily, deployed in the indeterminacy of a twilight that could always be either the dusk or the dawn.

Another common pattern in the rhetoric of clarity is the sharp and ethically burdened distinction that is often drawn between poetry and prose. For Blair and Priestley, as for many others, poetry was the original language of primitive humanity, both produced by and productive of passionate excitement. Thus in the various radical responses to Burke, his worst moments of rhetorical excess, indeterminacy, and obscurity are characterized quite negatively as ‘poetic’. As Howell notes of Blair’s typical definition of the poetic, ‘[h]is definition seems to allow a critic no choice but to class as poetry a passionate and imaginative discourse like Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and to say that the absence of regular numbers in Burke’s treatise can be explained as an allowable exception’.¹¹⁷ The prose of the ‘philosopher’ (here opposed to the metaphysician, and representing something more like a natural scientist), free from the confusing and ornamental embellishments of passion, is the real instrument of clarity in communication, and especially of the propagation of the political and scientific principles associated with reason and enlightenment. The decline of the rhetoric of clarity, and indeed of the utopian scientism of the new rhetoric, is thus pathetically reflected in the fact that ‘for a while, especially in the years 1797-8, the word “philosopher” becomes a term of abuse’.¹¹⁸ Reason and passion, or prose and poetry, are not exactly set up in opposition to each other - time and again the necessity of moving or entertaining readers on a pre-reflective level is invoked in statements on successful rhetoric - but their relationship is nonetheless deeply ambiguous. The poetic is closer to the inspiration of Inner Light than it is to the light of reason communicated by the language of nature. The consequences of this problematic normative distinction between prose and poetry, which is of course in a sense is as old as Plato but which became essential in the revolutionary debates in Britain in the years just prior to the rise of Romanticism, are too comprehensive to admit of study here, but certainly demand further investigation.

A third relevant pattern in the rhetoric of clarity is the representation of revolution as a time of creation (rather heretically) analogous to the Genesis creation narrative. Priestley’s figure of the sun dispersing a mist and of a change in the new ‘aera’ from darkness to light clearly evokes the figure of God’s original illuminating injunction. Light, or the Logos, or reason, communicates order to a chaotic darkness, and the figures of the ‘dark ages’ and the consequent ‘Enlightenment’ participate at the very least by implication in this traditional representation of change. The trope of creation is invoked explicitly by Thelwall in his representation of the fulfilment of a proper constitution: ‘when it is so attracted, and when all the parts shall firmly and peacefully cohere, and, thus brought under the influence of the true laws of nature… to one common centre of truth, the seven days work of creation is complete’.¹¹⁹ For Paine, this representation of revolution was even more significant, insofar as he saw all religious writing and institutionalization as a disruption of nature, as the means for the dissemination not of light, but of darkness. And since the revolution in America represents the beginning of a world, we ‘have no occasion to roam for information in the obscure field of antiquity’¹²⁰ to discover the natural, original rights of man: primitivism, in other words, is immanent. Revolution is not represented as the return to an origin, for it is entirely new: there ‘is a morning of reason rising upon man on the subject of Government, that has not appeared before’.¹²¹ As for many other optimistic radicals, for Paine the American and French revolutions were unlike any that had come before, insofar as they actually created new modes of relationship between citizens and governments, and citizens and other citizens. They gave the inviolable foundation of order where all had previously been chaos.

The foundation for this powerful transvaluation of the imagery of clarity and obscurity fundamental to the Western theological and philosophical traditions was doomed, however, to crumble, not only under the weight of uncontrollable developments across the channel, but also under the weight of insupportable internal contradictions. The careful acceptance of recondite passions into the armoury of clear rhetoric, the philosophically informed awareness of the arbitrary nature of sophisticated language, and the introduction into rhetoric of associationist psychology, with all of the consequent theoretical problems for communication, weakened the rhetoric of clarity from the very beginning. Furthermore, an optimistic and ultimately unsuccessful dependence on the sincerity of metarhetorical writing in or about a clear style produced a major and unresolved distinction between the theory and practice of clarity. As a result, the development of an ambiguous opposition between poetry and prose, or passion and philosophy, served only to highlight the points at which clarity and obscurity seemed, paradoxically, to merge. In the end, through the hasty and intemperate transvaluation of the creation myth, the rhetoricians of clarity had set the stage for later representations of the consequences of the revolution as a fall from innocence, reinscribing in a secular fashion the humiliations of ‘the wild traditions of original sin’¹²² from which Mary Wollstonecraft, and many others, had hoped they could be freed. This historical collapse of the new radical rhetoric of clarity into a qualified rhetoric of obscurity, this emergence of a politically, philosophically, and theologically fallen language, is the foundation of Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity, in which the positivity and the negativity of both clarity and obscurity was always questionable.