William Godwin and the ars rhetorica.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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THERE IS A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A NATION'S POLITICAL institutions and the value it places on oratory. Some form of this maxim would have appeared a commonplace remark (and a locus of argument) throughout the eighteenth century, and within the context of political debate the attempt to divorce oratory from a political or religious institution would have seemed unusual. The classical education of Englishmen who were prepared for "the senate, the bar, or the pulpit" encouraged them to view great oratory, among the other arts, as indivisible from "free" institutions; among the ancient Romans, they judged, the demise of oratory resulted from the rise of luxury and the degradation of senatorial virtue. (1) In eighteenth-century England, where the democratic element of the Commons supposedly balanced the oligarchic and monarchic elements of Lords and King, the connection between oratory and free institutions was played upon for the sake of ideological support and liberally exploited by Whigs for the purpose of political criticism. At the same time, however, and often in reaction to this exploitation, eloquence was viewed as dangerous to free institutions because of its ability to rouse the passions and put them under the control of a talented speaker. (2) Fear of rhetoric went hand in hand with fear of complete subjection to the democratic element and of the tyranny that would inevitably result.

From one point of view, therefore, it should seem strange (and eventually did seem strange) that William Godwin, long a partisan of parliamentary reform, would not seek it through the democratic venue of public speaking, or at least approve of others' doing so. (3) From another point of view, it makes sense, however, that when in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) he ended up proposing the viability of a society without formal government, he should also discard public speaking with the institutions which it would serve, in order to relocate the scene of significant communication in the private conversation. (4) Godwin's view of the ars rhetorica harbors a further complication, moreover. (5) For while in 1793 he declared conversation the medium of gradual reform, he also assiduously pursued his plan of enlightenment in the public sphere of print journalism, the venue open to private citizens who could use it to influence public decisions. This is an important choice, since he had earlier treated the press virtually as a constitutional institution, as an extension of the House of Commons' function of representing public opinion. To Godwin, not only the press, but the jury too had earlier constituted an important venue of public opinion, and it was not only not private, it was both traditionally a venue of authoritative public speaking and an institution deciding upon the imposition of force. To be sure, the value Godwin placed on press and jury in the 1780S reflects his involvement with the Foxite Whigs. The society without government he envisions in Political Justice, however, would integrate the press into its new plan of education and would long preserve the jury, to hear cases of violence against neighbors and property, before disappearing in the final triumphant merging of private judgment and the public good.

This continuation of earlier views into later formulations is symptomatic of the very rhetorical problem Godwin had continually to address: how to convince his audience that reform, even radical change, was possible. For, granted that in 1793 Godwin envisioned the ultimate demise of parliamentary government and of the entire legal edifice, yet if he wanted to effect this end gradually (and gradualness is a major component of his thought) what would he allow to carry over from the old institutions, and how could the old, rather than simply disappear, actually become something new? This question is intimately related also to his view of the art of rhetoric, because it was originally in and for the institutions of legislative assemblies and law courts that such an art was declared and described and (along with pulpit oratory) formed into the stock of education in the eighteenth century. Rhetoric was defined by its civic function, which premised service to the whole community, dedication to preserving institutions, and obligation to place praise and blame responsibly, and (appropriate to its non-specialist participants) by its mode of probable proof. Yet changes had already taken place in the art of rhetoric--most importantly (on the one hand) its demand for stricter, more scientific standards of proof and (on the other hand) its increasing domination by polite literature (belies lettres) with its vision of a private community of sentiment--both of which changes tended to displace the civic function of rhetoric. (6) Godwin participated in both these changes, the first by means of his interest in Lockean and French philosophy, the second by means of his involvement in conversational groups such as the circle around Joseph Johnson. Thus, we may ask whether, in turning from institutions where oratory, as the art of public speaking, was important, to the new "institutions" of press and private conversation, Godwin was abandoning the civic function of rhetoric or retaining it--and if he was retaining it, did he preserve some of the characteristics of oratory in his conception of the rhetoric appropriate to press and conversation?

To pursue these questions, I would like to dwell on moments of transition in Godwin's views between 1785 and 1793. Godwin's explicit concerns with transition, as well as his fluctuations at those crucial junctures, make his political works of specific importance to English romanticism, whose coincidence with a historical moment of transitions (of many kinds) plays a large part in defining it as a period. (7) Discussion of romantic literature, moreover, has reiteratively returned to considerations of rhetoric, broadly defined, to make claims about such characteristic transitions. (8) At least since Jon Klancher's study of print journalism, literary scholarship has begun to redefine these shifts in terms of the art of rhetoric in its political incarnation. Klancher's double thesis that writers/speakers constructing a middle class reading audience deserted classical rhetoric in favor of a dialogic participatory community, while writers/speakers constructing a counter-distinguished radical audience preserved the authoritative classical relation raises questions about the precise configuration and implications of Godwin's transitions. (9)

Godwin's early journalism imitates the standards and strategies of classical oratory, much as Foxite Whigs continued to do, in order to advocate a program of reform, but An Enquiry concerning Political Justice ends with promoting the dialogic mode Klancher associates with the middle class rhetorical community, a mode which in some hands could bolster a program of contentment, often by reference to a standard of ethics written by sentiment. Although one might argue that Godwin simply accepted the prevailing ideology of his class, his ambiguous relation to sentiment and the ambiguity of sentiment itself suggests otherwise. (10) To a great extent, he continues the project he had begun in the 1780s under the influence of the Foxite Whigs, namely adapting classical principles of political persuasion to analysis of political acts; this was helped along (one might argue) by the reinforcing influence of the French "republic of letters" with its exploitation of the Rousseauvian recasting of classical rhetoric. Any attempt at a detailed treatment of these several relations, however, requires a prelusive treatment of Godwin's more direct relation to classical rhetoric, and that is the intention of this essay. What emerges from such a treatment is the conviction that Godwin absorbed classical oratory into the dialogic mode to make it appropriate to an anarchic system, a system in which decision-making under the authoritative headship of government would be replaced by local community and ad hoc discussion. (11) The ambiguities spawned by his distinct adaptation of classical ideas raise the possibility that Godwin, both more radical than the Whigs and less authoritarian than the revolutionaries in France, reached his unconventional, though logical, linkage between anarchy and oratory precisely because of his concern with transition from and continuity with existing institutions and attitudes.

This essay will focus on Godwin's 1785 party journalism for The Political Herald and Review and the 1793 edition of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice. There is, of course, a certain disparity between these two efforts, inasmuch as his party essays, commissioned by the journal, are admittedly Godwin's most partisan political writings of the 1780s (all of which are partisan to some extent), whereas Political Justice derives from no explicitly party agenda. Yet in so far as the theoretical relations between oratory and governing institution are concerned, the Political Herald essays share much with the various reflections to be found in Godwin's other political pamphlets of the decade. By employing these reflections more polemically, however, the essays make the oratory-institution relations more intensely apparent. Their application of the premises of classical rhetoric to party tasks, moreover, is useful for the sake of illustrating the position to which Godwin is at this time willing to lend mind and hand. The relevant observations in Political Justice may be viewed as Godwin's reflections not only on the theoretical question of oratory's relation to institution but also on his own earlier performance within that relation. Though neither a repudiation of his party journalism nor a justification of it, a comparison of Political Justice with the earlier work makes his revisionary moments, and his reversionary moments, more apparent. At least three alternative positions with regard to government might be discerned in Godwin's work through 1793: acceptance of existing institutions but with hope for reforms, as when Godwin advocates measures making parliament a more representative body; acceptance of some institutions as provisional, for example when he characterizes kingship as a temporary necessity; and transformation of the concept of the institution, as Godwin (I argue) does when he elevates opposition into an institution or, finally, makes conversation replace the mode of government. Side by side with Godwin's shifts among these views, there occur shifts in his concept of the rhetoric appropriate for serving the civic function of institutions, including oppositional polemic, philosophical discourse, and rational audience-sensitive conversation. When Godwin integrates his concept of conversation with his concept of reform, moreover, he conceives a discursive community which subsumes conflictual practices within collaborative practices to form a new concept of institution.

Lest it be missed in the complex unraveling of texts that follows, it is important to state explicitly what rationale makes the link between institution and oratory important, a rationale which Godwin apparently rejects by the end of Political Justice 1793, yet to some extent preserves in his revolutionary plan. That is, that an institution offers some sort of guarantee for speaking: it defines publicly-sanctioned purpose and direction, generalizing the concept of public good and involving the members of the community directly or by their representative(s) in specifying that idea; moreover, at least by the minimal means of custom, but eventually by means of recorded precedent, it preserves decisions of the members beyond the moment and authorizes subsequent deliberations and deliberating in a certain manner. (12) Thus, it marks the latitude of speech in such a way as to encourage faith in the arrival at justice: defining justice precisely as following that mode and process and style of speech which enables the recognition of arrival. (13) In consequence, although oratory always threatens to exceed the bounds of truth described by the rules of the institution, while it remains within the institution it tacitly admits the authority of decisions taken collectively and serves at least useful ends linked to real conditions: it becomes authorized. Conversely, for oratory to seek truth outside an institution in some higher ground is to introduce skepticism about the institution--unless the institution can be described as mediating that ground. The fact that Godwin rejected public speaking to crowds because the situation was inhospitable to reason, while he intended to weld individuals into a mutually-monitoring community, argues that he wanted to validate some practices that could be universally recognized as rational deliberative discourse without government mediation. I suggest that Godwin wished to turn conversation itself into a mediating institution, by giving it civic purpose and erecting it into a new customary order.

Published in The Political Herald and Review between August 1785 and December 1786, Godwin's Letters of Mucius assume the interdependence of inherited political institutions and speaking for the public good, but also evidence a conflict, between the learned and persuasive functions, which threatens to drive institution and oratory apart. Godwin's choice of the pseudonym "Mucius" records prima facie acceptance of the ancient civic function of oratory. As Martin Fitzpatrick suggests, in this Whig phase of his career Godwin may have intended only to evoke "a tradition of virtuous patriotism which he himself was anxious to uphold," for the name belonged to several generations of statesmen descending from the virtually legendary Gaius Mucius, nicknamed Scaevola (left-handed), who sacrificed his right hand in a bold and successful intimidation of an early enemy of Rome. (14) The importance of "Mucius" derives, however, not only generally from...

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