To Deasy's badgering interrogation about the proudest saying
of an Englishman, Stephen reasonably supposes it may be "That
on his empire...the sun never sets." Deasy blurts out,
"Ba!...That's not English. A French Celt said that." This
is absurd. The saying long predates the British empire, but it
was said of that empire for a very long time, and very
proudly. Deasy may be thinking of a contemporary "French Celt"
who used the phrase ironically to refer to the British empire,
but that would not make it any less "the pride of the
English."
Thornton remarks that "This has been said, in one form or
another, of every great empire since that of Alexander the
Great." Gifford identifies specific writers: "The germ of the
sun-never-sets image is in Herodotus (Xerxes brags about the
glory of the Persian Empire). Subsequent reworkings of the
phrase can be found in Capt. John Smith, Sir Walter Scott,
Friedrich von Schiller, and Daniel Webster, none of them
'French Celts'." Slote observes that "The phrase 'The sun
never sets on the British Empire' is commonly attributed to a
Scottish—not French—Celt, Christopher North (pen-name of John
Wilson, Scottish writer and journalist, 1785-1854). A variant
phrase is also attributed to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor
(1500-58, r.1519-58), a Habsburg and not a French Celt,
although perhaps he is being confused with Charles V, the
Wise, King of France (1337-80, r.1364-80)."
Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner cite two more highly plausible
sources: "The first to express this sentiment apropos the
British empire was George Macartney (British diplomat and
statesman, 1737-1806) in 1773: 'this vast empire on which
the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet
ascertained' (quoted by Thomas Bartlett, 'Ireland, Empire, and
Union', p. 72). Stephen's phrasing is very close to
Macartney's. But, since Macartney was not a French Celt, Deasy
is probably referring to the London-based journalist and
humourist Max O'Rell (pen-name of Léon Paul Blouët,
1847-1903), who was originally from Brittany and thus was a
French Celt. From his book Jonathan and His Continent
(1889): 'An Englishman was one day boasting to a French man of
the immensity of the British Empire. "Yes, sir," he exclaimed
to finish up with, "the sun never sets on the English
possessions." "I am not surprised at that," replied the
Frenchman; "the sun is obliged to keep an eye on the rascals"'
(p. 1; Anne Marie D'Arcy, 'Dindsenchas', pp. 300-02)."
Even if Deasy is speaking of the ironic remark in Jonathan
and His Continent, that fact would not preclude Joyce's
also knowing the previous history of the trope, including the
British appropriation of it dating back to George Macartney.
Macartney, descended from a Scottish-Irish family, was a
colonial administrator who saw immense new territories added
to Britain's empire after the Seven Years War and the
concluding Treaty of Paris in 1763. For him, and for the
people who made him an earl in appreciation for his imperial
services, the saying was certainly "the proudest word you will
ever hear from an Englishman's mouth."
In Cyclops Joyce indicates awareness of what may be
the earliest known articulation of the trope, older even than
Herodotus. One of his parodies describes Queen Victoria as "a
victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for they knew
and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down
thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop."
Thornton was the first to observe that this language precisely
echoes the biblical Psalms: "The Mighty God, even the Lord,
hath spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the
sun unto the going down thereof" (50:1). The saying is
repeated with only slight variation—substituting "of the same"
for "thereof"—in Psalm 113:3 and Malachi 1:11.
