Following Dawson o’er hill and dale 

Just as the newspapermen enjoy mocking Dan Dawson’s grandiloquent speech printed in the morning’s paper, one can imagine that Joyce himself had tremendous fun cobbling together this cacophonous collage of cliché. Harald Beck has already written for the James Joyce Online Notes about the reputation of Charles Dawson – Dan’s prototype – for being a less-than-sublime orator. However, Beck was unable to identify any specific source to the lecture that Joyce mocks.

     The Rosenbach version of Dawson’s speech reads:

Or follow the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way to Neptune’s blue domain, ’mid mossy banks, played on by the glorious sunlight or among the shadows cast upon its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest. (f. 8)

Our lovely land (f. 9)

Or again if we climb the towering mountain peaks. (f. 9)

Peaks, … to bathe our souls, as it were (f. 10)

As it were, in the peerless panorama of bosky grove and undulating plain and luscious pastureland, steeped in the transcendent translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight … (f. 10)

That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence. (f. 10)

  If this were to be divested of clichés – ‘purling rill’, ‘blue domain’, ‘mossy banks’, ‘pensive bosom’, etc., etc., etc. – there would be nothing left. In effect, this is an example of Joyce being a ‘scissors and paste man’ (Letters 1, 297) as he gathers together all manner of overripe literary expressions into a functional simulacrum of logical progression and thematic coherence. Because these clichés are so widespread, it is likely that Joyce would have gotten them from multiple sources. The only exception is the phrase ‘overarching leafage’: I have found only three instances of this phrase that predate Ulysses, but none of these contain the other clichés Joyce uses.1  Below is a listing of clichés and stock phrases used in the Rosenbach version. The examples below are just that, examples to illustrate prevalence and are not necessarily Joyce’s exact sources.

Dawson’s creaky clichés

purling rill: ‘The whispering zephyr, and the purling rill’ (Pope, Essay on Man, I. 204).2

blue domain: ‘Triumphant o’er the blue domain / Of hoary Ocean’s briny reign’ (Henry James Pye, ‘One for his Majesty’s Birth-day’; The Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1798, vol. 68, no. 6, p. 518).

mossy banks: ‘the mossy banks and large projecting roots forming rustic seats’ (The Knickerbocker, December 1847, vol. 30, no. 6, p. 516).

glorious sunlight: ‘the glorious sunlight, bathing hill and valley with splendour’ (Dublin University Magazine, October 1845, vol. 26, no. 154, p. 394).

pensive bosom:‘That in the Muse’s pensive bosom wakes / Sweet recollections’ (William Drummond, Clontarf, p. 9). 

overarching leafage: ‘A little nook … almost hidden by overarching leafage’ (E. L. Shew, If Men Were Wise, 1894, vol. 3, p. 285).

giants of the forest: ‘the place of the ancient giants of the Forest should not be taken by more modern woods’ (Spectator, 16 June 1894, vol. 72, no. 3442, p. 822). 

towering mountain peaks: ‘turns to the green vistas of the country fields, the towering mountain peaks’ (Music: A Monthly Magazine, October 1896, vol. 10, p. 543).

bathe our souls: ‘Let us bathe our souls in the Precious Blood’ (Our Lady’s Retreat, p. 157).

peerless panorama: ‘the eye wanders over a peerless panorama of hill and dale’ (London Society, February 1887, vol. 51, no. 302, p. 167).

bosky grove: ‘The nightingales that the while / Poured forth from every bosky grove’ (Eleanor Darby, Legends of Many Lands, p. 230).

undulating plain: ‘this belt of country is a slightly undulating plan’ (The Phoenix, April 1873, vol. 3, no. 34, p. 166).

luscious pastureland: ‘To the south is the Purbeck Valley … rich with the golden corn and the luscious pasture-land’ (Evangelical Magazine, September 1884, vol. 14, no. 33, p. 394).

transcendent glow: ‘the effulgence of divine light, the transcendent glow’ (The Cosmopolitan, March 1899, vol. 26, no. 5, p. 482).

mild mysterious: ‘And lo! its mild mysterious power / Subdued the stubborn soul’ (Chester Smith Percival, Poetic Parallels, 1892, p. 149).

vista far and wide: ‘And all beyond this vista, far and wide’ (The Literary Gazette, 13 December 1834, no. 934, p. 831).

glowing orb: ‘the glowing orb on which he is stationed passes into the full effulgence of the solar glory’ (The London Spy, 1832, vol. 3, no. 29, p. 461).

shine forth: ‘the Lord can do all with the greatest ease; let him but shine forth, and it is done’ (The Tract Magazine, May 1834, vol. 1, no. 5, p. 84).

silver effulgence: ‘the calm moonlight threw its silver effulgence on a complete desert’ (Elizabeth Murray, Sixteen Years and Artist’s Life in Morocco, 1859, p. 239).

     The additions Joyce made to Dawson’s speech on the first set of galley pages come from a specific source: a speech given by David Sheehy MP – father to Joyce’s friends since childhood, Mary, Eugene, and Kathleen Sheehy – at a meeting of the North Dublin Branch of the United Irish League on 11 November 1909 and reprinted in full in the following day’s Freeman’s Journal (and, subsequently, in other papers as well). As Joyce was in Dublin at this time, staying with his family at 44 Fontenoy Street, he may well have even attended the lecture. Sheehy’s lecture is an exhortation to his compatriots ‘to see their own land and its countless attractions before seeking acquaintance with the recognised beauties of other countries’. Such unabashed, self-focused nationalistic pride would obviously prick up Joyce’s ears.

     In notebook II.i.4, evidently after having access to the text of Sheehy’s lecture, Joyce recorded a number of his expressions (all crossed in blue):

Ireland’s portfolio, serried peaks, quarrels with stony obstacles, … tumbling waters of the ocean, wellpraised prototype, few other prize regions, …, note the

These were then all added to the text on the first galley setting, the same setting in which the famous ‘Aeolus’ headings were installed.

  Before turning to how the passage reads in the final text, here is the relevant potion of Sheehy lecture, with the specific lexical borrowings in bold (Joyce’s notes follow the order of their appearance in the text):

Ireland’s portfolio has many specimens of all – the long stretch of unbroken moor brightened only by the sun and the blossom of the furze and the heather, with a distant boundary of low hills, dimly coloured; a few fleeting cloud-shadows, varying the features of the plain, with atmospheric tintings making a perspective that is the puzzle and ambition of artists to copy; or, slumbering waters, and wooded margins, green glades, soft rolling hills, a back-ground of grey mountains with serried peaks, and a sky flecked with vapour clouds whose downy whiteness is caught from the radiant sun; or the deep glen, with its tangle of shrub and wild flowers, its rushing brook murmuring its quarrels with the stony obstacles that impeded its way; the one-arched bridge covered with ivy to its broken parapet, or wild mountains, sturdy, defiant, shoulder to shoulder, in serried ranks, like an army of mighty giants, their captains’ heads plumed in mists casting great images of themselves on the broad lakes at their feet; or our cliff-bound coast, its wave-washed caves, its sanded strand, its promontories castled like sentinels keeping watch over the tumbling waters of the ocean. From dawn to dusk, whithersoever the Irish tourist goes, his eye will be arrested by pictures and landscapes which, in their variety and colouring, will match and often excel their well-praised prototypes of other countries. The people of Dublin are familiar with and proud of the beautiful scenery in which it is set. They rush to revisit the glories of the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains. Many are also acquainted with Killarney’s charms, and a few other prize regions; but I fear that a great many who know them do not, owing to familiarity with them, appreciate their excellence; or, knowing them, think that they are conversant with all the gems that glitter on the crown which circles the brow of Mother Erin. … Listen to the rustle of the reeds by the mountain lake, mark the various cadences of the waters in cascade and brook, note the scream of the wild-fowl … and you have the well-spring of our national music – its plaintiveness, its joyousness, its defiant martial grandeur. … Then go through Ireland. Bathe your soul in its beauties. Its air is sweet, its features captivating. Its air is sweet, its features captivating. The more nearly you know it, the more dearly you will love it – the more nearly you know it, the more nearly you come to God.

  Even before he culled specific phrases from Sheehy’s talk, Joyce seems to be channelling his rhetorical, let us say, exuberance. Some of the phrases Joyce lifts are themselves clichés (‘stony obstacle’ and ‘tumbling waters’), but others are original to Sheehy. The most notable of his inventions is ‘Ireland’s portfolio’, which Joyce seamlessly adds to the pre-existing cliché ‘peerless panorama’. In effect, the few original individual phrases in Dawson’s talk come from Sheehy. Below is Dawson’s speech, with the passages from (or inspired by) Sheehy highlighted in blue and the clichés not used by Sheehy in red.

Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, tho’ quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters of Neptune’s blue domain, ’mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or ’neath the shadows cast o’er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest (7.243–47).

Our lovely land (7.271).

Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks (7.295, 7.313–14).

towering high on high, to bathe our souls, as it were (7.316–17).

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 (7.320–24).

That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence (7.327–28).

  Lambert starts reading Dawson’s speech in medias res, during an elaboration of the pastoral Irish landscape, ‘Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill’. The request to ‘note’ replaces the ‘follow’ found on the Rosenbach and it lightly echoes the conclusion of Sheehy’s speech: ‘Listen to the rustle of the reeds by the mountain lake, mark the various cadences of the waters in cascade and brook, note the scream of the wild-fowl, the crash of the breaking billows, the sweet thrill of the song birds of woodland and meadow, and you have the well-spring of our national music’ (emphasis added). Indeed, Joyce noted Sheehy’s ‘note the’ in II.i.4. While the or that begins this passage had been there in the Rosenbach version, before the overt Sheehy infusions, it is a stylistic trait of Sheehy’s lecture: he uses that word as a conjunction between the various features in his catalogue of Ireland’s beauty (‘or, slumbering waters’, ‘or our cliff-bound coast’).

     Another element that had been in the text since the Rosenbach version is the snippet ‘to bathe our souls, as it were’. While this is a cliché common to religious writing, it also echoes Sheehy’s imperative to ‘Bathe your soul in its [Ireland’s] beauties’. This expression would, presumably, not have come from Sheehy when it was first written, but once the Sheehy allusions were added on the galley-proof, one could argue that it retroactively became a graft from Sheehy. Alternatively, precisely because Sheehy’s lecture was so full of cliché and Joyce was cultivating his own cliché festival, it’s not surprising that Joyce might independently arrive at an expression that matches Sheehy’s. As another example of a pre-galley Sheehyism, Sheehy refers to the mountains, not entirely with originality, as ‘mighty giants’, while Joyce had already employed the cliché ‘giants of the forest’ for Ireland’s trees. Another expression Sheehy used apropos mountains ‘serried mountain peaks’ led to Joyce changing the stock phrase ‘towering mountain peaks’ to the specific form Sheehy used.

  Sheehy’s penchant for tautology (‘vapour clouds’) finds its match in Joyce with the phrase ‘vaunted prize regions’: this combines the phrase ‘prize regions’ from Sheehy’s speech – ‘Killarney’s charms, and a few other prize regions’ – with the widespread cliché ‘vaunted regions’. Furthermore, the phrase ‘transcendent translucent glow’ combines two well-worn clichés, ‘transcendent glow’ and ‘translucent glow’, as if neither, on their own, would suffice to sufficiently limn the quality of an Irish twilight. Indeed, the phrase ‘Irish twilight’, with its echo of ‘Celtic Twilight’, suggests a critique of the quality of the prose of the Revival.

     Sheehy is quite literally evangelising Ireland’s beauties and he even ends his lecture with an intermingling of religious fervour and national pride: ‘The more nearly you know it [Ireland], the more dearly you will love it – the more nearly you know it, the more nearly you come to God’. Joyce echoes if not these words but the sentiment with his use of the phrase ‘shine forth’, an expression closely associated with preaching. And the very final word given in Dawson’s speech, ‘effulgence’ is a synonym of epiphany.

     In Sheehy’s speech, Joyce found a template for a sentimentalised Irish pastoral scene. But Sheehy’s speech remains entirely prosaic – in both senses of the word. Among Joyce’s additions are little flourishes of erstwhile poetic diction, something which Sheehy (mercifully) avoids. The most blatant example is the word o’er, which also appears in Bloom’s wee ‘poem’ (8.63). This word was added into the text in the same galley as the additions from Sheehy (JJA 18:8). As Peter Cook’s persona E. L. Wisty explains, ‘That’s where poets wander, is o’er the hill and dale. Other people wander over hill and dale. But not the poets they go o’er, o’er they go, they think it sounds better.’4 

Sam Slote