The transcendental liberator: O’Connell in “Aeolus” 

U 7.320-4: As 'twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio, unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight 

In the Gilbert and Linati schemas for Ulysses, the “Aeolus” or newspaper chapter has rhetoric as its art/science, and famously contains examples of countless rhetorical devices. The men in the newspaper office discuss the grandiloquence of a speech by “Dan Dawson” quoted in that morning’s paper. Sam Slote has shown that to the cliché-ridden version in our earliest surviving draft, the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce added even more nationalist rhetoric from a 1909 speech by Mr David Sheehy, MP that had been reported and quoted in the Freeman’s Journal. Slote also quotes antecedents of original verbiage with the warning that those examples were “just that, examples to illustrate prevalence and not necessarily Joyce’s exact sources”. One of his examples is “transcendent glow”, which occurred in an 1899 issue of The Cosmopolitan, but Joyce’s phrase was “the transcendent translucent glow” with its strange juxtaposition of two adjectives. There seems to be only one instance of the combination of transcendent and translucent in a speech at Tara by Daniel O’Connell. In the fullest version that I could find online the speech ends with the Liberator commenting on the location:

I delight at having this day presided over such an assemblage on Tara Hill (cheers). Those shouts that burst from you were enough to recall to life the Kings and Chiefs of Ireland. I almost fancy that the spirit of the mighty dead are hovering over us — that the ancient Kings and Chiefs of Ireland are from yonder clouds listening to us. Oh, what a joyous and cheering sound is conveyed in the chirrup for Old Ireland! It is the most beautiful — the most fertile — the most abundant — the most productive country on the face of the earth. It is a lovely land, indented with noble harbours — intersected with transcendant translucent streams — divided by mighty estuaries. Its harbours are open at every hour for every tide, and are sheltered from every storm that can blow from any quarter of Heaven. Oh, yes, it is a lovely land and where is the coward that would not dare to die for it! Yes, our country exhibits the extreme of civilization, and our majestic movement is already the admiration of the civilized world. No other country could produce such an amount of physical force, coupled with so much decorum and propriety of conduct. Many thousands of persons assembled together, and, though they have force sufficient to carry any battle that ever was fought, they separate with the tranquillity of schoolboys breaking up in the afternoon. I wish you could read my heart, to see how deeply the love of Ireland is engraven upon it, and let the people of Ireland, who stood by me so long, stand by me a little longer, and Ireland shall be a nation again.

For obvious stylistic reasons O’Connell seems to be the only author who combined these adjectives, apart from Joyce who applies them not to streams but to the altogether more glorious glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight. But the version of the ending of O’Connell’s speech quoted here is only one of many, and the baroque passage with the two adjectives occurs in only two of the versions I have been able to find.

         The speech in favour of the repeal of the Act of Union at a monster meeting on the Hill of Tara on 15 August 1843 was one of the most important of the Liberator’s career, before an audience of a million people (according to some accounts) and it is quoted or reprinted in many different versions. In nineteenth-century anthologies of political oratory, such as Leopold Wagner’s Modern Political Orations of 1896 or Practical Public Speaking: A Text-Book for Colleges and Secondary Schools edited in 1899 by Solomon Henry Clark and F. M. Blanchard, the Tara speech ends with a much shorter and less hyperbolic version of the last three sentences quoted above, and it does not contain the two adjectives.

As far as I can tell, the version containing the two words appears only in two books that were available to Joyce. The first can be found in the fifth volume (of seven) of an International University Reading Course ... a distinctive and independent library of reference, published by the International University Society. This is an alphabetically arranged anthology that begins with three excerpts from Abelard and ends with four from John Wycliffe. Because of this alphabetic arrangement, O’Connell’s speech appears between “Property as a Disadvantage” by Cardinal Newman and “The Growth of Conscience” by the Egyptologist W. M. Flinders Petrie. And it ends prematurely, minus the last three sentences, with “any quarter of Heaven”.

The full version, which I quoted above, occurs on pp. 72 and 73 of A Tour of Ireland by James Johnson, the youngest son of a farmer in Derry who became “physician extraordinary” to the British king. In what would be his last book, he returned to an Ireland that was going through difficult times, as he writes in his introduction

It has seldom been the lot of a traveller to stand, as I did, on the sacred hill of Tara, surrounded by three hundred and fifty thousand ‘wild Irishmen’, harangued by the most eloquent ‘Conspirators’ that ever addressed an inflammable populace, — without seeing a broken head, or hearing an angry expression! (iv).

The fourth section of the book is devoted to Tara and its monster meeting. Johnson describes the multitude that came to hear the Liberator, he briefly gives the main points of O’Connell’s speech and then he cites the long conclusion quoted above. The preface to the book is dated March 1844, and Johnson cannot have been quoting the speech from memory, so we may assume that he must have been drawing on reports in the newspapers of the day. In fact, John Simpson has found the exact wording of Johnson’s quote in the Limerick Reporter of 18 August 1843, p. 2 col. 2.

We cannot be sure where Joyce found O’Connell’s words, but they surely had the required kind of romantic resonance that must have been general in Ireland at the time. More than sixty years later, David Sheehy’s speech was written up under the title “Our lovely land”, echoing O’Connell: “Oh, yes, it is a lovely land, and where is the coward that would not dare to die for it!” One thing is certain: the clichés of nationalist prose will never die.

Geert Lernout