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benevolent gentleman put into his hands, exclaimed,  If I should believe
this, it is impossible for me to remain a rebel . Behold the means which
beneficent providence has appointed to make good men and good
citizens!
(Dewar 1812:139)
Commenting that there were  two inveterate prejudices in the Irish
peasant s mind, that against the Saxon language, and that against the
creed of the Protestant , Mason, secretary of the Irish Society, found a
simple solution:  by employing the Scriptures in the much loved native
tongue, you neutralise the second prejudice with the first (Mason 1829:5).
This process was facilitated by the fact that for the peasant  nothing could
persuade him that heresy can be uttered in his native tongue (ibid.: 15).
McQuige summed up this whole question when he asserted:  I have never
known a truly learned Irishman, who was also a believer in revelation,
and yet an enemy to the state (McQuige 1818:9). This set of beliefs,
assertions, prescriptions and efforts to cajole amount to an almost
Gramscian attempt to form an hegemony in order to produce a goodly,
ordered, civil and Protestant society. Revelation rather than revolution
was to offer an answer to the problems posed by the bitter history of
Ireland. It was an idea which would later catch on with a significant part
of the late-century revivalist movement, as we shall see.
GAN TEANGA, GAN TÍR: NO LANGUAGE, NO NATION
The first of the language revivals, beginning in the late eighteenth century
and petering out in the early decades of the nineteenth, was principally
124 Forging the nation
stimulated by antiquarians interested in tracing Ireland s past. It took place
against the background of an ever-increasing move by the population at
large to the use of English. The second revival movement, dating from the
1830s to the late 1840s, was again led initially by scholarly interest. The
works of Petrie, the Irish Archaeological Society (1840) and the Irish
Ordnance Survey were all major examples of such scholarship. The third
revival, initiated in the 1880s and consolidated principally by the Gaelic
League, gathered pace until the gaining of the Saorstát in 1921. Like the
first, the second and third revivals were situated in contexts of historical
division, culminating in the risings of 1798, 1848 and 1916 respectively.
Unlike the first, however, the latter two were distinct in that they came to
be used as weapons in the nationalist cause. Related to, but distinct from,
political nationalism, cultural nationalism became a crucial site of debate
concerning the future state of the nation. We will consider this process in
this section.
Cultural nationalism was a European phenomenon with a philosophical
basis, and was grounded in the belief that language was the key to human
history. Philosophers, as well as students of language, looked to language
as the most accurate means of understanding the past. This was
particularly true in Germany amongst those of the post-Kantian tradition.
Herder had argued that language was the historical repository of human
genius:  what else, after all, is the entire structure of language but
a.manner of growth of his spirit, a history of his discoveries (Herder
1966:132). He continues:
every stem word, with its family rightly placed and soundly evolved
would be a chart of the progress of the human spirit, a history of its
development, and a complete dictionary of that kind would be a most
remarkable sample of the inventive skill of the human soul.
(ibid.)
Schlegel, writing in the same vein, described  language in general
as being the storehouse of tradition where it lives on from nation to
nation, and as being the clue of material and spiritual connexion which
joins century to century the common memory of the human race.
(Schlegel 1847:407)
If this was true of language in general, would it not also be true of
languages in particular? If language was the living record of human
history, would it not then also follow that languages would be the histories
of their users? This was the step, of which we have noted the origins
earlier, that was to be decisive in engendering the philosophical and
political movement of cultural nationalism. And it was to have enormous
effects in terms of both revolution and reaction. Cultural nationalists in
the nineteenth century, in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy,
Forging the nation 125
Switzerland and Ireland, to name but a few, appeared with dictionaries or
language tracts in one hand, and rifles or declarations of independence in
the other.
Fichte s Addresses to the German Nation (1808) is a paradigm of the
cultural nationalist case, not least in the optimistic invocation contained in
his address to a nation which did not as yet exist politically. For Fichte and
others in this tradition, the key to nationality was above all the speaking of
a common language:  we give the name of people to men whose organs of
speech are influenced by the same external conditions, who live together,
and who develop their language in continuous communication with each
other (Fichte 1968:49). What this logically entailed was the irreducible
nature of the link between the use of a distinct language and the
independence of a specific nation:  it is beyond doubt that, wherever a
separate language is found, there a separate nation exists, which has the
right to take charge of its independent affairs and to govern itself (ibid.:
184). Such a view was enormously influential in nineteenth-century
Europe, and beyond, principally as a means of justification for national
liberation movements in their struggles against imperial occupation.
Humboldt, writing later, specified the definition of nation as  that of a
body of men who form language in a particular way , a belief shared by
the Italian nationalist Mazzini (Humboldt 1988:153). This led to the
belief, which we have noted earlier in our examination of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, that language was not simply a
guarantor of nationality but the repository of national identity.  From
every language , argues Humboldt,  we can infer backwards to the
national character (ibid.: 154). What this constitutes is in effect the
modern, and often still current, definition of the nation:
But the individualities to be found in the same nation fall within the
national uniformity, which again distinguishes each particular turn of
thought from those that resemble it in another people. From this
uniformity, and that of the special stimulus peculiar to every language,
the character of that language arises. Every language receives a specific
individuality through that of the nation, and has on the latter a uniformly
determining reverse effect. The national character is indeed sustained, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]