Edmund Burke
Obscurity is Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of Any Thing Else.
Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, new rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley, 1982), 658. 89
The Romantic sublime can always stand for a failure of vision. Indeed, its very basis in optical theory and empirical philosophy makes it a means of writing power as failure and vice versa.
John Whale, ‘Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art’, in Beyond Romanticism, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York, 1992), 226.
Although Olivia Smith has claimed that the word ‘obscurity’ was among the words that became more common in eighteenth-century political and rhetorical discourse after the publication of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution,90 it was in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful that Burke first thematised the concept of obscurity in relation to rhetoric. While the Enquiry is decidedly non-political in the direct, interventionist sense of the Reflections, it is only by reading the Reflections and Burke’s other contributions to the 1790s revolution debate alongside the Enquiry that we can see the depth to which his work is informed, in form and content, by the new rhetorical importance of obscurity as a positive concept. Understandably, given its title and the development in the twentieth century of an enormous interest in the concept of the sublime, Burke’s strange youthful speculations are normally read in the light of investigations into the nature of the sublime, and obscurity remains unthematised, relegated to the margins of the master discourse of sublimity. The importance of the development of obscurity as a positive concept is always in such discussions somewhat supplemental to the discourse of the sublime, as it is in Furniss’s formulation: ‘[f]ormulations of the sublime typically celebrate the energetic, the obscure, the disruptive, the unlimited, the powerful, and the terrible as a new set of positive aesthetic terms’.91 But obscurity, contrary to Blake’s hostile claim, is neither subordinate to nor merely a function of the sublime or anything else. In the rhetoric of obscurity, obscurity is in fact the source and the necessary condition for the possibility of sublimity. Thus it is in a discussion of ‘Burke’s adaptation of the Longinian Sublime’ that John Hamilton, whose primary subject is obscurity rather than sublimity, shows how ‘Burke argues that, because it affects the passions, the poetic Sublime results from the obscure power of abstract words, rather than from clear, mimetic images’.92
The Longinian association of rhetorical power with the excitement of the passions was appropriated by Burke in the Enquiry in a protoscientific and physiological form representative of new rhetorical eighteenth-century ‘psychological’ investigations. A ‘natural’ physiological foundation was meant to secure the universality both of his theory and the human ‘reason’ upon which it was based, and which he (rather contradictorily) derided. The Enquiry provided a modern framework for the rhetoric of obscurity through Burke’s promotion of the direct manipulation of the passions through the suspension of ‘reason’ or the critical faculty. The primary function of poetry and rhetoric is therefore to communicate passions through physiological processes which precede judgment. God, Burke claims,
whenever [he] intended that we should be affected with any thing, he did not confide the execution of his design to the languid and precarious operation of our reason; but he endued it with powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will, which seizing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them.93
The communication and control of the reception of passion through sympathy ‘which is one of the strongest links of society’94 is therefore a political power grounded in an awareness of the limitations of knowledge: ‘whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power… we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him’.95 As Lucy Newlyn has observed, Burke’s sublime is founded on a form of obscurity which leads only to humiliation: ‘Burke is interested in obscurity as a source of terror, which the mind controls by aesthetic distancing, but to which it ultimately succumbs, under the oppressive sense of its own littleness’.96 Knowledge, in other words, is conflated with perception, and obscure imagery is in this sense a means of evoking an impression of our limited epistemological relation with the world. This perhaps gives a certain twist to the oft-quoted assertion that ‘[a] clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea’97: if we can form a determinate idea of a subject, our knowledge is (at least) co-extensive with its being, and therefore still bound by the fallen limitations of human knowledge. A little idea is a human idea.
This is familiar territory in Burke scholarship, of course, but in this context it is obscurity as the foundation of the sublime, not an analysis of the significance of the sublime in itself, which is central. Reading the Enquiry for a rhetoric rather than an aesthetic of obscurity or sublimity highlights the public, political, and social importance of obscurity as opposed to the heavily subsidised, internalised, and disciplinarily philosophised discourse of the sublime. Such a reading can point towards a better understanding of what Paul Trolander is hinting at when he says (somewhat reductively) that ‘the reaction Burke initiated [with the publication of the Reflections] was political, not philosophical’.98 In Burke there is no sense of participation in, or elevation to, or assumption of the divine, no ‘third moment’ (pace Kant) in which the reader or the recipient feels a sense of sufficiency in self-reflection and the resolution of a crisis. The power over the passions represented by elevation, underwritten on a scientific level by an account of direct physiological manipulation, is thereby transformed by Burke from a means of raising an audience to the level of its internal potential (pace Longinus) into an instrument not only of social unity, but also of social domination.
One of Burke’s primary devices for a psychologistic account of obscurity is quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in particular those passages involving the figures of Satan, God, and Death. In ‘Questionable Shape’, Lucy Newlyn demonstrates the political associations invoked by Miltonic indeterminacy in relation to monarchical rule and the belief that ‘mystification is the secret of power’.99 But while obscurity bears an important relation to power and mystification (or non-rational influence) throughout Burke’s analysis, it is unclear at first in the Enquiry whether obscurity is a product of sublimity or is productive of it. This interchangeability or indiscriminate origin of mystery is crucial for the way it sustains an ambiguity about the divine or demonic origins of mystification, and hence an ambiguity about the ethical foundations of mystery. This is evident in Burke’s analyses of the power of indeterminacy in Milton’s depictions of Satan and of God. The depiction of Satan is described by Burke, significantly, on the level of the imagery of obscurity alone, as a ‘noble picture’ of ‘images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms’.100 As Tom Furniss has remarked on Burke’s reference here to Milton’s lines on Satan, ‘Burke is using this passage to illustrate the way sublime obscurity pre-empts rational enquiry’.101 In Burke’s rhetoric of obscurity, such figures exert on the mind a power of their own: by them ‘the mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud [sic] of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded [sic] and confused’. But at the same time the image is constructed ‘with a dignity… suitable to the subject’, not the subject or idea with a dignity suitable to the image.102 The sublimity of Satan, that is, both produces and is produced by obscure images.
Milton’s description of God demonstrates the same function of obscurity from a perspective which reconciles a potential contradiction internal not so much to the rhetoric, but rather to the ‘Burkean aesthetic of indeterminacy’.103 As a figure of benevolent omnipotence, and as the source of life and creation, God is most often associated not with chaotic obscurity, but with creative light. Furthermore, in the context of a Western tradition in which light is associated with knowledge and the logos, God’s omniscience seems to demand his representation as a source of light rather than a source of darkness. But our (human) relative ignorance, perverted by our fallen state, necessarily renders our conception of God indistinct: turning Plato on his head, as it were, the sun becomes, paradoxically, by its power over us, a shadow. Burke’s dictum that ‘darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light’104 takes this observation to another level altogether. Milton, according to Burke, was not merely aware of the power of darkness to produce sublime ideas, but was in fact
so entirely possessed with the power of a well managed darkness, that, in describing the appearance of the Deity, amidst that profusion of magnificent images, which the grandeur of his subject provokes him to pour out on every side, he is far from forgetting the obscurity which surrounds the most incomprehensible of beings.105
God, consequently, is surrounded by ‘the majesty of darkness’, and Milton succeeds in communicating this obscurity by himself participating in its possession.106
But when the figures of clarity and obscurity are united in God, a special figurative synthesis is necessary. The ‘light and glory which flows from the divine presence’ under this tension becomes ‘a light which by its very excess is converted into darkness, “Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear”’.107 In protoscientific psylosophical fashion, Burke explains the physiological analogue of this Miltonic effect: ‘[e]xtreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in effect exactly to resemble darkness…. Thus are two ideas as opposite as can be imagined reconciled in the extremes of both’.108 In this fascinating resolution, the sublimity of the idea demands a paradoxical formulation for the interchangeability of obscurity and clarity invoked in other ways by Longinus, Quintilian and Lowth, and later by Hugh Blair.109 In other words, invoking this crucial Miltonic image and inverting obscurity into a potential sign of the highest order of clarity, Burke perpetuated the problematic interchangeability of the divine and the demonic origin of both clarity and obscurity in rhetorical and metarhetorical discourse.
In his consideration of the primary source of the power of sublimity, Burke turns away from imagery itself to a consideration of language and its relation to epistemology. ‘The proper manner of conveying the affections of the mind from one to another, is by words’.110 But the function of the imagery of obscurity in words has, in spite of the myriad representations of its power, only a subordinate effect to what is the real power of poetry: ‘in general the effects of poetry, are by no means to be attributed to the images it raises’.111 This power of words is based on Burke’s concept of language as productive, more often than not, of no determinate image whatsoever, and of the passions as ‘considerably operated upon without presenting any image at all’.112 Words are in two ways rendered distinct from the things to which they refer: first, because they stand in an arbitrary relation (in Lockean fashion) to the things they represent, and second, because association determines meaning in accordance with custom rather than direct experience. Thus the meaning of words is not found in any determinate mental representations of the objects to which they refer.
The effect of this is that words represent only indeterminate ideas in almost every case, and certainly in all cases in which there is no natural object before us to stimulate immediate perception. Even words representing real essences, we are told, can be mixed up with others.113 Eventually, this destabilizing effect becomes indistinguishable from a ‘natural’ association between a word and a thing, for ‘there are associations made at that early season, which we find it very hard afterwards to distinguish from natural effects’.114 Cultural associations are thus closer to meaning proper and are, in fact, the things to which words refer.
Since the word and the thing or idea it represents are thus separated, the obscurity or indeterminacy of language renders ideas indeterminate, and hence potentially sublime. The following passage demonstrates this shift toward the primacy of obscurity in the epistemology of the Enquiry:
[n]ow, as there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of words, which being peculiarly devoted to passionate subjects, and always used by those who are under the influence of any passion; they touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject matter.115
The power of words is in the passion evoked, not in an understanding of the idea described: language is therefore one of the conditions for the possibility of the sublime. It is because of the inherent obscurity or productive indeterminacy of words that the ideas of indeterminate objects are ‘not presentable but by language… if they may be properly called ideas which present no distinct image to the mind’.116 Put simply, if God were to reveal himself to us visually, he would lose his sublimity, even if he appeared ringed with clouds, or as a blinding light, because as an image he would have a determinate presence. After a while, one can imagine, we would see God as the cloud itself, and lose the sense of indeterminacy necessary for the sublime.117 Thus the Enquiry comes to the as it were radical (though unarticulated) conclusion that it is the obscurity of language which produces the sublime, not the sublime which produces the obscurity of language.
In its positive valuation of the concept of obscurity, the rhetoric of obscurity generates the possibility for a positive valuation of the figures of obscurity. This possibility represents a deep ambivalence towards the ideals of complete knowledge and communication which were essential to mainstream Enlightenment thought and to much of the new rhetoric itself. But, as I have shown, the positive valuation of certain aspects of obscurity can exist along with a positive valuation of clarity and a veneration of the scholar’s penetration of the mists of time. Through a strongly Enlightenment-oriented reading of such texts, the rhetoric of obscurity thus hides itself, as it were, under cover of light. Consequently, the positive meaning of obscurity is absent from Johnson’s dictionary, and even for us it is almost always assigned merely negative content. Reading for obscurity in the central texts of mid-eighteenth-century rhetoric and aesthetics, however, reveals a deep commitment to the positivity of obscurity, and one which often supersedes other, more traditional, considerations.118 In this sense, the Enquiry perpetuates the dilemma which Longinus ascribes to Isocrates: any text which reveals to its audience the instruments by which the power of language may be put to use, leaves open the possibility that it may be put to a use unprescribed by the author.
These early ‘psylosophical’ reflections on the rhetoric of obscurity inform Burke’s participation in the revolution debate in Britain from the Reflections in 1790 until his death in 1797. Burke’s most significant contributions to the rhetoric of obscurity in this later period were his resolute politicisation of a positive, conservative obscurity and his representation of the temporality of obscurity in relation to political prophecy. In Burke’s various works in this period (and radical reactions to his work), obscurity thus played a crucial role in the language of politics and politicised philosophies of language in the revolution debate, and ‘despite the occasional character of many of [Burke’s] writings, neither he nor his audience would have perceived any radical discontinuity between the political subject-matter and the literary form of his writings’.119 In this debate, the rhetoric of obscurity is a rhetoric in action, a performative metarhetoric formed in reaction to rhetorical opposition and designed to have an influence over the performances of the indeterminate ‘people’.
The influence of precedent in the unwritten British constitution and the importance of obscurity for the perpetuation of inherited power were considered by Burke to be essential for the conservation of traditional power and the perpetuation of economic and political stability in Britain. His almost nihilistic support for the trappings of obscurity as a means of resigning the populace to the rule of government was therefore expressed in relation to the positive use of illusion and secrecy. For example, in the Reflections Burke laments the fact that ‘[a]ll the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal… are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’.120 The grandeur and luxury which he claimed made inherited hierarchy acceptable to a relatively powerless populace was to be stripped by the diffusion of new, unprecedented knowledge, which would serve the double function of undermining both authority and precedent. The ‘light’ of revolutionary knowledge is therefore in this context a negative, and obscurity a positive, Miltonic figure of Godlike power like that discussed in the Enquiry. This positive valuation of the obscurity of ignorance is justified by the claim that ‘our minds (it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled, under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom’.121 This ‘weak unthinking pride’ is a basic condition of human existence, or at least of those excluded from that education which brings strength through intellectual labour, and causes one to inspire humility in others, rather than to be humbled oneself. Consequently, the promise of ‘light’ for the constitutionally unenlightened is figured as a dangerous violation not only of precedent, but of natural order: ‘[n]ot being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a share, they [the makers of the British constitution] acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind’.122 In order to preserve their order from destructive revolutionary light, according to Burke, those in authority must maintain their power through veils, and they must create an order which is inaccessible to those who are, by consequence of birth and education, benighted.
It is not only the ignorance of the populace, however, which requires the perpetuation of an obscured authority under an obscured guise. Their passions, or enthusiasm, too, require restraint, as Burke did not wish to see the passions invoked by the French Revolution communicated to Britain. In his ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, which was ostensibly a defence of the Reflections from Francoise-Louis-Thibault de Menonville’s intuition that ‘matters might become worse if violent men used Burke’s words as an excuse to push matters further’,[123 Burke therefore endorsed the instruments of obscurity as a means for subduing lesser passions. Responding to de Menonville’s attack on his style, he defended the infamously enthusiastic Reflections by characterizing it as a work of reason which ought ‘to be hazarded, though it may be perverted by craft and sophistry’.124 Revolutionaries and their radical sympathisers present a danger precisely because the usual effect of obscurity fails with them: ‘[j]udicature, which above all things should awe them, is their creature and their instrument’.125 Overcome by their passions and seeking to communicate their threatening feelings throughout Europe, such agitators require from their superiors the imposition of a powerful restraint. For Burke, this imposition is merely a peculiar example of an underlying social truth: ‘[s]ociety cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere…. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters’.126
Burke’s response to this threat was to invert and transvalue it into a destructive anti-sunlight or energy which obscured the fact that forms of obscurity are necessary for sustaining social order. Thus, for example, France is represented as having ‘sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust’, the revolutionaries ‘have purposely covered all that they ought industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog’, and they hypocritically delight ‘in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent’.127 In Brissot’s innovative French, ‘[t]hings are never called by their common names’,128 and this exploitation of linguistic indeterminacy becomes a sign of ‘false philosophy and false rhetorick, both however calculated to captivate and influence the vulgar mind, and to excite sedition’.129 Burke’s awareness of the destructive potential of obscure rhetorical energy led him to modify his endorsement of rhetoric as an instrument of control. If the free-floating signifiers of passion were let loose upon a society in which passion was venerated above reason – if, that is, discourse was grounded on an appeal to the demonic - all hell, almost literally, was liable to break loose.
Burke’s support for ‘reason’ in his ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ represents more than a momentary attempt at self-defence, but rather the beginning of an attempt to ground political language in a base more stable than that of the passions. In a context where he mentioned (provocatively) that even Charles Fox may have been ‘dazzled’ by ‘a new scheme of liberty’,130 we can make sense of Burke’s desire for imposing a restraint on impassioned language. Even though the privileged audience to which he appealed in many of his letters of the period (some of which were never intended for publication) had ‘a large stake in the stability of the antient order of things’,131 that audience was nonetheless under threat from misused words. Once again in reference to the bedazzled Fox, Burke wrote disingenuously: ‘we are not to be imposed on by forms of language. We must act on the substance of Things’.132 To do so was to nominally replace a language of mobile, open meaning with one of stability and relatively secure closure.
Burke’s representation of a stabilising temporality in the rhetoric of obscurity bore a significant relation to prophecy. The obscurity of the past was the foundation of present stability. It served not only to ‘veil’ the violence and corruption on which the present order was founded, but also established a precedent to which individuals could refer, and which they could imitate, in order to secure social stability. This ‘judicious obscurity’ was part of the ‘great use of Government… as a restraint’,133 and had the distinction of participating in a divine order: ‘[w]e, the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer’.134 This invocation of divine action or inaction as the source of political solutions is certainly out of place in the context, in one sense, but the representation of humanity as being in a benighted state in the present is consistent with Burke’s earlier reference to constitutional actions based in a humbled sense of the common people’s ignorance. The statesman, with a more comprehensive prospect of the present, stands therefore as a guide to his subjects, grounding his predictions for the future on the continuance of a tradition which unveils, to an extent, the mist that encompasses what is yet to come. The obscurity of tradition, which gives it force and stability, is the condition for revelation.
The remarkable energy and the sense of an unprecedented creation characteristic of the French Revolution, for Burke a sort of inversion of the fiat lux, however, fundamentally altered the statesman’s relation to temporality. The result of the revolutionary ‘energy’ which gives its proponents strength was that, as a consequence of ‘their arrogance, their mutinous spirit, their habits of defying every thing human and divine, no engagement would hold with them for three months’.135 Not only does this Protean state vitiate any claim to historical precedent (the ‘newness’ of the French Revolution being a claim common to both its supporters and its detractors), but it also renders a clear representation of the present impossible, for ‘the language, like every thing else in [France], has undergone a revolution’.136 Consequently, the present is indeterminate, as it rests on no stable foundation, and, finally, there is no basis for any secure avenue of political or economic prognostication. The statesman, in the aftermath of the revolution, is thus reduced to an unremitting obscurity in his relation to temporality, and, sharing in the ignorance of his people, is thoroughly humbled, and can wait only for divine intervention. The future, like Death, is become ‘dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and’, ironically, ‘sublime to the last degree’.137
In the last two years of his life Burke maintained his desire to effect political change even as he endured the humiliation of being ignored by or abused in parliament. His (infamously) pensioned solitude offered him unique possibilities for rhetorical performance. In order to defend his views on the war with France, he figured himself as an obscure or solitary man, but the inebriate excess of his rhetoric increased and conditioned all of his later work. As a man beyond the years of direct participation, he could figure himself as a harmless advisor. Both self-representations were rendered in a rhetoric of obscurity which plays on the multifaceted sense of obscurity, combining at once a sense of insignificance or humility (for obscurity in relation to a person the OED has ‘not illustrious or famous; humble’) and the power to safely humiliate (for the obscurity ‘of a place’ the OED has ‘remote from observation; hidden, secret’). In his ‘Letter to William Elliot’, as he exhorts the young man to engage in politics, Burke asserts that ‘even in solitude, something may be done for society. The meditations of the closet have infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies’.138 From this dark corner he felt that he could arouse sufficient passions in individuals ‘to the aid and to the controul of authority’.139
Rather than being statements concerning his actual power or influence, these invocations of obscurity are in fact calculated postures adopted by Burke in relation to particular situations. In his ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’, Burke complains disingenuously: ‘[w]hy will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction?’ as though the two were equivalent.140 Pursuing the figurative path of retreat even as he disseminates his opinion in order to influence his correspondents (and whomever else might come across his deliberately semi-public political letters), he continues to affect harmlessness: ‘[i]t was long known that the instant my engagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of all calamities [the death of his son] had for ever condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat’.141 He figures himself in this incarnation as a harmless and defeated old man (even his age is figured as an ‘obscure twilight’142). This unique self-referential extension of the rhetoric of obscurity, in its untrustworthy ambivalence and opportunism, reflects Burke’s sustained commitment to the use of rhetorical figures in the attempt to influence others through his own studied eloquence.
In these final years Burke chose to expand rather than to contract his penchant for figurative excess, making no attempt to hide the artfulness of his metaphors: ‘out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man’.143 Such vehement outpourings of artificial wrath could not have been more calculated to bring ridicule upon Burke’s own head, rather than anger upon the heads of his opponents. Equally ill-conceived were Burke’s expostulations on the King, especially in an obviously partisan reference to a verbose Royal Declaration:
[i]t is in a style, which neither the pen of the writer of October, nor such a poor crow-quill as mine can ever hope to equal. I am happy to enrich my letter with this fragment of nervous and manly eloquence, which if it had not emanated from the awful authority of a throne, if it were not recorded amongst the most valuable monuments of history, and consecrated in the archives of States, would be worthy as a private composition to live for ever in the memory of men.144
Given the careful power of many of Burke’s earlier speeches and writings, one is reminded here not only of Longinus’ warning concerning the injudicious use of hyperbole, but also his famous representation of the aging Homer as a sinking sun.145 In any case, Burke remained to the end of his life committed to the rhetoric of obscurity, even to excess.
One element of this indulgence in metaphor was Burke’s representation of the French Revolution as a return to a sort of pre-Creation or hellish state of indeterminate chaos. Such figures have a political connotation relating to the temporality of obscurity, in which a present failure to act in accordance with precedent is produces the indeterminacy of the future. In the famous passage on the ‘revolution harpies of France,’ Burke represented them as ‘sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates “all monstrous, all prodigious things”’.146 The anarchic ‘rebels to God’ manage to block God’s creative light through their ability to ‘raise a smouldering smoke that obscures him from their eyes’.147 If peace is to be found with such a country, ‘it must be in that state of disorder, confusion, discord, anarchy and insurrection’.148 This indeterminate political state invokes the interchangeability of the divine and the demonic insofar as it infects all of Europe, and even Britain, which is in ‘this same chaos, where light and darkness are struggling together’.149 In the more direct language of politics, this chaos is based on a determinate principle: ‘[i]n this new world of Policy, wherein nothing is done upon any preceding example… everything therefore must lead to consequences… uncertain and obscure’.150
Burke was convinced that the radical originality of the French Revolution and its unpredictable revolutionary energy obscured the future and thereby crippled the productivity of the statesman. Much of this despair remained with him in his final writings, and he often despaired of enlightening ‘the dark prolific womb of Futurity’.151 But his late belief in the unity of wisdom and passion offered some qualified hope for effective action. Recalling Ecclesiastes 7:7, he wrote in what was once again a form of posturing and self-defence: ‘[o]ppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools. Their cry is the voice of sacred misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified phrensy of prophecy and inspiration’.152 His representations of his ability to perform this essential object of the statesman, however, did not all partake of the obscure figuration of prophecy. In the ‘Third Letter on a Regicide Peace’, an unfinished pastiche composed in the last few months of his life, Burke wrote, in reference to his opponents:
[a]s to the future, that party is content to leave it, covered in a night of the most palpable obscurity…. This defect, to my power, I mean to supply; that if any persons should still continue to think an attempt at foresight is any part of the duty of a Statesman, I may contribute my trifle to the materials of his speculation.153
There is, perhaps, some irony in the fact that Burke, one of the primary proponents of the rhetoric of obscurity, and one of the primary targets of those radicals who styled themselves as ‘enlightening’ Europe, should produce in one of his final works a passage exhibiting the basic characteristics of the 1790s new rhetoric of clarity which emerged in opposition to his own work. Irony aside, however, its portentous admission of the interchangeability of the rhetoric of clarity and obscurity, and of the tendency for a reflexive rhetoric about rhetoric to oscillate between these sometimes indeterminate options, mirrored the simultaneous decline and inversion of the radical rhetoric of clarity into a rhetoric of qualified obscurity.