Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism

Abstract

Whether he traced historic truths with zeal,Whether he traced historic truths with zeal,For the state's guidance or the public weal;Or fancy, disciplined by curious art,Informed his pen; or wisdom of his heart;Or judgements, sanctioned in the patriotic mindBy reverence for the rights of all mankind:Wide were his aims, yet in no human breastCould private feelings meet in holier rest.[From William Wordsworth's public epitaph on Robert Southey]The language of politics is, by its very nature, both imprecise and artificial. Its meaning is shaped, not so much by linguistic conventions, but by the very political processes of which language constitutes the essential currency. One can, therefore, only understand the nuances of a given political vocabulary when one relocates it within those historical and political frameworks that it both animated and circumscribed. Once political language is viewed as central to the political process, one can begin to appreciate the extent to which even the basic vocabulary of politics must itself be plastic. One might indeed go further and suggest that the dynamism of a given political system is reflected in organic transformations in the political language it employs. These transformations are most apparent in the radically different meanings that are imputed to terms such as “legitimate” and “constitutional,” on the one hand, or “liberty” and “equality,” on the other. The process of political evolution can be traced as clearly in the development of political vocabulary as it can in the reform of political institutions. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of the principal impacts of the French Revolution in Britain lay in its stimulating a renewed struggle over the language of politics.4 Nowhere was that struggle more apparent than in the transformed language of patriotism that emerged from the debates of the 1790s.