DENIS DONOGHUE
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is what one projects, on the strength of that imagining. A race is a people–
in-waiting, exemplifying the condition of being possible, a long "perhaps."
Or it marks what once was, an immemorial folk that has left evidences of
itself in legends and landscape but cannot otherwise be produced for
inspection. We think of a race as a tribe or breed, descended from putative
common ancestors; but we say that it has not-"or not yet"-taken to
itself the relatively stable character of a society. Or perhaps it has been
ejected from historical or territorial existence, like the Jews in Leopold
Bloom's sense of them. I'm referring to the passage in the "Cyclops" chap–
ter of
Ulysses
where John Wyse Nolan asks Bloom: "But do you know
what a nation means?" "A nation is the same people living in the same
place," Bloom answers. "What is your nation if I may ask?" the Citizen
intervenes to say. "Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland." Mter a
paragraph of Joyce's linguistic finery, Bloom adverts to another attribute
of his inherited life. "And I belong to a race, too...that is hated and per–
secuted. . . .At this very moment...sold by auction in Morocco like slaves
or cattle." He has drunk too much to allow him to explicate the difference
between Jews as a race and Irish men and women as a nation, but his use
of the words is acceptable so far as it goes.
Arnold derived his typology of races from scholars of ethnology, lin–
guistics, and the historical study of the Celtic languages. He did not know
the languages, so he was indebted to O'Curry, Zeuss, O 'Donovan, and
other scholars for his access, however limited, to Celtic literature. But he
was charmed by the little he knew, and gratified to think of the Celtic
languages as distinctive so long as he could take pleasure in their being
dead. He referred to "the practical inconvenience of perpetuating the
speaking of Welsh" and maintained that "the fusion of all the inhabitants
of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole, the
breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of separate
provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of
things irresistibly tends." He did not hesitate, apparently, over the
metaphor of "swallowing up." He regarded the genius of the Celtic race
as beautiful, but fatally defective in its inability to engage with the real
conditions of life. For his main argument, he endorsed a claim of Henri
Martin's, that the Celts were "always ready to react against the despotism
of fact." They were imaginative, sentimental, vivid, in every respect
Nature's children, but they were incapable of acting upon the real world;
they lacked the power of composition and therefore the social and polit–
ical capacity. It followed that the only reasonable thing for "the Celtic
members of this empire" to do in 1865 was to bring their nationalist
desires to an end and join with English people in creating a better polity
in Britain, "a new type, more intelligent, more gracious, and more
