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Article Excerpt
Mark L. Barr The Common Law Illusion: Literary Justice in Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State
This paper traces Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with issues of legal interpretation late in his career and most particularly in On the Constitution of the Church and State. Having long noted the political and social ramifications of the supposedly systematic interpretation of legal precedent lying at the heart of the common law, Coleridge suggests that a group of cultural trustees, the Clerisy, could perform a quasi-judicial role to guide reading in the public sphere. Only through such leadership, he suggests, could justice be revived from its then-defunct state. However, the paper concludes by suggesting neither Coleridge nor any modern legal scholar who invokes romantic reading strategies can achieve the vaunted interpretive objectivity legal authority seems to require. Precedent is, in fact, a rhetorical illusion, a repression of revolutionary trauma experienced in and before the Romantic Period.
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In the late 1700's, the capacity and incapacity of legal institutions to produce justice was at the center of social discourse. If the sensations of the Scottish and English sedition and treason trials of 1793 and 1794 are insufficient support for this proposition, David Lieberman's catalogue of historio-graphical pronouncements on the issue is more general evidence for a consensus. In the 18th century, "The Law was elevated ... to a role more prominent than at any period" in English History, claims E.P. Thompson (1978, 144). Roy Porter adds that "the law and its execution were not just Government fiats or ruling class weapons but an intimate part of community life" (1982, 150). John Brewer suggests that "Most Englishmen experienced government and understood politics through their dealings with the law" (1980, 133, 135). Lewis Namier agrees as does J.C.D Clark, implying the importance of law and local legal tribunals in mediating the encounter between citizen and government (Namier 1929, i:54; Clark 1985).The confluence of law and politics was not merely an obvious but a compelling topic of literary concern.
Coming to political awareness during the 1780s and 1790's, Samuel Taylor Coleridge became highly interested in the nature and social role of law early in his career. His 1794 sonnet to the prominent barrister Thomas Erskine, his "Lecture on the Slave Trade" (1795), his trenchant condemnation of the 1795 "Gagging Acts" in "The Plot Discovered," and even the mil-lenarian frenzy of "Religious Musings" (1794) all evidence not merely a general concern with law, but a keen engagement with its textual, procedural and political dimensions. Focusing on the second half of Coleridge's career, this paper will suggest that his concern did not fade with time but rather increased in sophistication of analysis and scope. Part I traces Coleridge's continued interest in legal issues and how it began to find expression in his latest writings on politics. Part II suggests that Coleridge found in the legal concept of the trust a vehicle he hoped could house and preserve a cultural inheritance that could help stabilize textual interpretation; such stabilization could, he felt, produce justice through adherence to a system of precedent administered by a group of quasi-judical "Clerisy," discussed in part III. However, while part IV argues that Coleridge saw this justice as arising from a cultural belief epitomized in a kind of literary interpretation based on Shakespearean principles, partV goes on to argue that then, as now, any claim that "objective" standards of textual interpretation produce justice are illusory, a mere covering for an historical trauma that can be traced back to the Romantic period or before.
I.
In May of 1811, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a strident letter to the London Courier regarding sentences handed down to criminals in the recent County Sessions, among these the whipping of three women for various acts of petty theft: (1)
Shakespeare, who alone of all the dramatic poets possessed the power of combining the profoundest general morality with the wildest states of passion ... whose moral aphorisms are . . . sparks of fire that fly off from the iron, ...; our philosophic Shakespeare has not suffered this debasement of our common nature [the whipping of women] to ... elude the inevitable tact of his moral sense: and we cannot doubt that hereafter our Legislature, which has already shewn itself so friendly to all dispassionate and unfactious attempts to amend the penal code, will allow us to repeat, by authority, the Poet's bidding-
"Thou rascal Beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou whip that woman?" (King Lear 3:ii:139-41)
In this instance, Coleridge turns England's "philosophic Shakespeare" into a legal authority (his emphasis) to refute the legislative pronouncement embodied authority (his emphasis) to refute the legislative pronouncement embodied in current penal law. The artistic creations of this greatest English poet contain "moral aphorisms" that guide individuals to just action better than any statute or legal precedent. Moreover, these principles are "dispassionate and unfactious," standing as a potential objective corrective to the supposedly party-driven interests that guide innovation in the legal and political realm. But what may go unnoticed in this application of Shakespearean precedent is Coleridge's role as selector and interpreter of the quotation. As a dramatic utterance, the quotation's meaning is at best ambiguous, nor does Coleridge explain why a quotation from perhaps MacBeth or Julius Caesar, encouraging murder and punishment, might not be more appropriate. What Coleridge presents here as authority is not so much the moral aphorism of England's national poet as law derived through interpretive practice, where in one presented as having a special relationship to authority is given the capacity to act as sibyl or prophet, selecting and interpreting that authority in some desired fashion. In voicing doubts about the injustice enacted through current legislation, Coleridge joins Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin and even Sir William Blackstone in a concern over the failure of contemporary political and legal institutions to manifest "justice." Unlike his contemporaries, however, as he outlines more fully in On the Constitution of the Church and State ("Church and State"), Coleridge suggests that justice should arise from the interpretive aesthetic of a group of literary and cultural critics, the "clerisy." In Church and State, Coleridge erects a constitutional scheme to enable a national reading community guided by this clerisy, so that the circulation of print through that community will result in readings of literary and legal texts regulated by a shared sense of custom and value. Using the Bill for the Relief of His Majesty's Roman Catholic Subjects ("The Catholic Relief Bill") as the focus of interpretation, Church and State becomes one extended guide to the reading of that bill and its constitutional implications, thus demonstrating the clerisy's role in the process of political decision-making (here, the evaluation of proposed legislation) and showing that role to be a new manifestation of the systematic organization Coleridge sees as necessary to curtail the radical potential of free will in the act of interpretation.(2) Nor, I suggest, is this a mere historical curiosity: for here lie the seeds of a modern legal interpretive practice that had its beginnings in Coleridge's day. In the increasing predilection of legal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Knapp and Roberto Unger to invoke Romantic paradigms of literary interpretation for use in judgment, we see the replication of a Coleridgean illusion that justice can be achieved through a reading strategy which simply masks the very Jacobinical innovation it seeks to eliminate.
In Church and State, Coleridge advocates a form of social organization in which the balance between opposing and mutually regulating structures is maintained by an external organization of trustee-like figures, the clerisy. Near the start of his treatise to propound a new constitutional form, he defines how a constitution should be constructed:
A Constitution is the attribute of a state, i.e. of a body politic, having the principle of its unity within itself, whether by concentration of its forces, as a constitutional pure Monarchy, which, however, has hitherto continued to be ens rationale, unknown in history ... --or--with which we are alone concerned--by equipoise and interdependency: the lex equilibrii, the principle prescribing the means and conditions by and under which this balance is to be established and preserved, being the constitution of the state (Coleridge 1969, 10:23).
"Antagonistic powers" within the constitution itself maintain balance and preserve the English nation from the kinds of "disturbance" (i.e. revolutions and wars) that...
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