In Defence of Anger

Author: Laura Riding

Source: Laura Riding and Robert Graves (edited by Mark Jacobs), 2001, Essays from ‘Epilogue’, 1935-1937. Manchester: Carcanet.

Anger is a much abused emotion – in the two senses of ‘abused’: people make ill use of anger, and in Christian morality it is classified with the disreputable emotions. Jewish morality allowed it always in God and in human beings when the provocation was an offence to piety; it allowed anger in God, and in the righteous. Christ was behaving Jewishly when he grew angry in the synagogue with the Pharisees because they objected to his healing the man with the withered hand on a Sabbath day. This was the early Christ; the late, the Christian Christ would have waited for the man to come to him and healed him quietly and modestly, not provoking controversy.

Anger according to Christian definition is an immodest display of righteousness. It is, certainly, a strong criticism, as wrongful, of something someone else has said or done or failed to do or say. In Christian morality categorically adverse criticism is avoided. A wrongful deed is made a ticket of entrance to a future of better deeds: everyone must have his chance – and more chance and more chance. For anger, forgiveness must be substituted, because (the Christian assumption is) one would prefer forgiveness to anger, since critical denunciation is so discouraging. Thus, the Christian distinction between right and wrong is weakened by the tenderness with which wrong is treated with the result that Christian reproof, resting largely on suave, unangry insinuations, is, in its indirectness, more unpalatable and more offensive to the dignity of the criticized person than direct anger would be. Christian notions of right are themselves suave insinuations of what is right, rather than direct assertions.

Anger is a precious emotion. It is perhaps the only critical emotion. By anger I do not mean the fury of hate. I mean that spontaneous rejection of something which is an act of solemn, not vindictive, dissociation from it. Anger does not include hate or deeds of vengeance. It is, strictly, an instinctive withdrawal from an association, dictated by an absolute disagreement with some element in it; critical accuracy forces one to break the association, painfully – anger includes pain, but not hate. Anger is mental pain physically articulated.

Anger does not last, as pain does not last (at least mental pain). Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate. It is precious because it is momentary: it is a momentary act of dissociation which makes a basic review of an association possible – compels a basic review. Anger has, properly, a constructive sequel of clarification. It represents surprise at the appearance of some unsuspected element in an association, an element which was not consciously acquiesced in. The whole association is momentarily at stake because, to the angry person, it is less valuable than the principle on which he consents to it. The kind of association in which anger occurs may vary: it may be a close relationship, or an association through assumed membership in the same social or professional body, or one based on an axiomatic assumption of membership in humanity, or on a courteous assumption of membership in a liberally inclusive order of intelligence and decency. But anger can only occur where some association exists, whether implied or specific. Its occurrence precipitates a re-evaluation of the association; it is precious because it makes the association severely immediate, bringing it out of the kindly past or the lazy future and setting it on the work-table of the present.

To foreswear anger, and with it, necessarily, the right of protest, is to sacrifice one’s critical sensibilities to an ideal of genial vagueness with other people – in which there can be no real pleasure, only a feeling of temporary security from irritation. For it is impossible to people who possess critical sensibilities to remain long insensible to something in which offence inheres; and no association can be free of the possibility of offence. Associations are living, variable experiences. The capacity for anger is proof of one’s own aliveness in them and responsiveness to their variations. One can only be beyond anger when an association has been closed, or has never really existed. To refuse to be angry with someone about something which does in principle arouse anger means that one disacknowledges relation with the person, from disrespect. To forswear anger is to forswear respect, to abandon all expectation of critically satisfactory association with people. Unangry disrespect may be the correct attitude to some people; but a wholesale renunciation of anger implies a disrespect to one’s own power to evoke association of a critically satisfactory kind.

With some anger, dissociation is its effect as well as its action, there is no return to a reassembled association. If anger concludes an association, then the association has been a mistake, having existed only to demonstrate its impossibility. And the anger felt is hypothetical and private – what one would have felt if the association had been real. True anger is an incident of communication. It occurs publicly, retaining the presence of the person concerned within reach of reassociation. Nor is anger easily aroused in circumstances where its expression must be private, where there is no habit of intercourse in which it can figure as a mutual interlude. One is, for example, only hypothetically angry with those who commit offences against others, if one has no personal contact with the offending and offended persons. One judges, but one does not feel. The judgement is consciously applied to the situation from without, as to history; it is not unexpectedly and immediately provoked in one. We may dramatize the situation for ourselves in a hypothetical and private anger, but our public expression will be a historical statement; so-and-so has committed this or that offence against so-and-so. We cannot declare, in anger: ‘What you do is wrong!’ The gesture of anger must look toward a possible next step of repair. Anger which occurs in utter private instantly recalls itself, for it cannot exist without a belief in its constructive effectualness.

For this reason it is very difficult to feel angry with injustice proceeding from some political source, from some person of official authority with whom one has no personal relation. Anger in such a case would be ineffectual; one could only feel it privately, fancifully, soothing oneself with a picture of what one would feel like if the situation were personal? and one’s feeling of anger, therefore, a power in it. What one would feel in a case of official injustice would be something closer to war than to anger: a sense of outraged privacy, not of outraged affinity. War, like anger, must believe in its effectualness in order to exist. The emotion of war must look toward a possible next step of destruction of the interfering force. One would, probably, feel impersonally calm, as many people on trial in a court of law manage to feel impersonally calm, in the persuasion that they are facing injustice rather than justice: they feel that what is going on does not really concern them, and, having no physical power against the interference, flatter themselves into a mood of irony which names the interference a contemptible irrelevance.

Moralistic counsels against rebelliousness and anger are essentially recommendations of the ironic mood: to regard provocations as trivialities and be superior to them. But to the person who has been subjected to violent interference the attitude of superiority means death, for his desire is to be left alone in living privacy; the only decent recommendations would be to urge him to have the courage to be unhappy. And to the person whose anger has been tempted the attitude of superiority also means death, for his desire is to communicate with people in living associations worthy of intellectual respect. It is extraordinary how much suicide has been recommended to us in graceful moralistic guise. Let us, by all means, kill ourselves if we grow tired of ourselves; but not because others have grown tired of us – certainly not if it is our anger that wearies them. Our anger is a measure of our hardiness, and their capacity to endure it is a measure of theirs. When people nervously shrink from it in others, it is perhaps a sign that they are tired of themselves. The discussion of anger may, in fact, properly include the recommendation of suicide – but not to the angry.

Anger combines judgement and emotion in a single impulse. It is significant that in a code of moral decorum where allowances are made for impulses of nearly every variety of unreasonableness, the one impulse which is inspired by judgement should be disallowed. Even hate is held excusable, and purchases a morbid sympathy – because it is incoherent, unreasonable and exaggerated, and therefore, like madness or illness, something that one can ignore and be concerned with at convenience or caprice. Anger cannot be ignored; it challenges the whole surrounding situation and demands intelligent positive attention. It is logical and precise, being moved by the genius of exactitude, not of fanaticism. And it is extremely coherent – anger which is incoherent is not true anger, but a mixture of several emotions. To show anger about something, therefore, arouses immediate hostility. One is seen to be exercising judgement at close personal range; and Christian decorum, which pervades the modern world, frowns upon all judgement but a perpetually futurized Last Judgement.

One may, the rule goes, give free rein to one’s delight with something but not to the presumed opposite of delight, anger. But, in truth, this permissible delight – our common formalities of approval, whether of books or pictures or deeds or food – is no opposite of anger. Examine it in its most strenuous expression – in, say, any ordinary literary paper. What are its conclusions? That something has been well done, or that something shows great talent, or that something is intellectually or emotionally exciting: but never that the something approved of must be closely, precisely, responsibly and permanently included in our conscious order of things. The customary delight of approval assumes no sustained conscious order, no existing critical government in which everything and all are intimately connected. On the contrary: we are assumed to be joined in a tentative, accidental and comfortably distant way that imposes on us only occasional mild attention to others and the activities of others. We are, conventionally, freed from any obligation of approval so strong as to constitute a strong link, or any obligation of disapproval so strong as to constitute a strong act of severance. There is no provision either for anger or literal approval in our so-called critical formalities – which are only gestures of figurative appreciation. Our conventional delight represents no exercise of judgement; it is no critical finding-right, as anger is a critical finding-wrong. It is finding, rather, than something annuls the critical sensibilities and diverts the mind from the responsibility of judgement. It is a finding-comfortable, and its opposite is indifference, not anger: the ignoring of that which it is not comfortable to contemplate. Anything that challenges the critical sensibilities to pledge themselves either to intimate acceptance or rejection falls, by our habitual standards of criticism, outside the bounds of normal seriousness. It is found erratic from a critical? point of view because tiresome from a social point of view; social impatience is, paradoxically the material out of which critical patience is formed.

The common remark of the person whose critical criterion is social comfort, to the person who places anger before social comfort, is: ‘Why mind what other people do or say? Why not be indifferent to provocation, above it?’ The key-word in this spurious appeal to one’s dignity is ‘mind’. Can one genuinely not mind – force one’s mind to ignore – something which has for one the quality of a personal offence, acquiescence in which would be equivalent to acquiescence in a lie about oneself, or about one’s values? One can only ignore the provocation if one does not take oneself or one’s values seriously. The common-sense appeal to one’s dignity is a spurious appeal because it appeals to a spurious dignity. One’s dignity, it implies, is safer if one if one does not take oneself seriously, because in doing so one risks looking the fool. But true dignity can survive such risks. True anger does not, in fact, run a person into such risks, since it occurs on a level governed by critical, not conventional, values – inelastic formulae of social toleration. On this level it is possible to describe as a fool someone who appeals for social toleration of something not authorized in its narrowly genial catalogue of indulgences – something which is either too earnest an affirmation or too earnest a refutation. But on the critical level on which anger has effect there can be no appeal for toleration of earnestness. Earnestness is a required condition both for those who act and those who witness on this level. The descriptive terms for the effect of anger here – and it is here alone that it can have a describable effect – can refer only to the degree of agreement or disagreement it evokes. One can say that one disagrees entirely with a person in his anger, but one cannot call him foolish. For in giving attention to anger one is concerned, like the angry person himself, with the values at issue and not at all with the laws of dramatic (by which I mean social) appropriateness. It would be more logical to advise the person whose criticism is made up of these laws to ignore anger, since it takes him to a level where he can only stumble in critical blindness, than to advise the critically sensitive person to ignore provocations to anger.

With anger dignity shifts from the social to the critical level: it is vested in the values at issue. The social dignity one has in one’s relations with people is real only if it corresponds with an internal character of earnestness, only if it is the incidental manifestation of that major dignity by which we have the courage to form, on our own responsibility, critical decisions, and have definite critical reactions. Dignity is a matter of self-confidence – the trust we are able to place in our own reactions and decisions. To make dignity the ground for avoiding occasions in which our reactions and decisions must assume explicitness is to make it, by turns, the comedian’s arrogance or the comedian’s humility. Social, or dramatic dignity, should be a token that in a given crucial occasion we can be relied on to behave coherently, to form decisions about goodness or rightness and have reactions about badness or wrongness. We all live together, surely, make a world together, surely, in fundamental earnestness, not in comedy? Is the air of dignity with which we act socially a comic invention, or the result of our being, each of us, ready to face responsibly the difficult occasions when they arise? I think it is the latter, but that we are so anxious to save our energy for the difficult occasions that we treat every occasion at first, cautiously, as an easy one, and thus affect a laziness which, because it becomes a general habit, is a dangerous temptation to general inertia.

Life consists essentially of the difficult occasions. The easy occasions which compose the inessential routine of life are a temporal padding; whatever dignity surrounds them is an aura deriving from the dignity inherent in the difficult occasions. By difficult occasions I mean those in which we rely on judgement rather than on social habit, those in which we must behave originally and which are the integers of our consciousness, as the easy occasions are mere fractions. Social habit emphasizes and extracts the minor aspects of a situation; its rule is the evasion of idle emotional and intellectual stress, with the ideal object of saving emotional and intellectual energy for the destined difficult occasions. The facility of social technique is likely to deceive us: we are inclined to use our expertness in it for the entire evasion of the difficult occasions. But it is for these occasions that we live, and social habit has, properly, the object of protecting them from vulgarization in accidental reactions and decisions, not of forestalling them utterly.

Judgement on its positive side is the act of finding something good in particular according to values based on a principle which is one’s knowledge of what is true in general. We develop such a principle, such knowledge, by faithful attention to and respect for our consciousness, which represents our given obligation and right of comprehensive familiarity with the world we live in. We develop the critical values implicit in the principle by faithful attention to and respect for the difficult occasions of life: they supply us with instances of comprehensive force, whose particularity we can generalize, from our knowledge of what is true in general, as good, or bad. And if one finds something good, one can also find it right, and if bad, also wrong – in so far as it concerns oneself. But a thing must be found good, or bad, before it can be found right, or wrong. We must approve or disapprove of it critically before we can approve or disapprove of it personally; otherwise personal approval or disapproval is a caprice which may well involve us in indefensible positions – positions in which we are at the mercy of others, since our own caprice invites theirs. The name of this good-and-right finding which is a combination of critical and personal approval is satisfaction. We are on safe ground in expressing satisfaction because those who may be moved to dispute it must, if they wish to make their disagreement articulate, participate in the difficult – that is to say, comprehensive – occasions of judgement to the same degree as ourselves. An intimacy of concern must be established; there is no possibility of attack from without. It is only mysterious opposition, motivated by a concern unknown to us, which is dangerous. Our own clarity of mind (and true satisfaction can exist only in clarity of mind) exacts relevant clarity from those who would disagree with us.

I have thus described the nature of satisfaction and its invulnerability from idle attack because anger is of the same order as satisfaction; and one of the strongest grounds against anger is the danger of personalistic attack it exposes us to, in being a personalistic manifestation. Emotion is personalistic; emotion invites emotion; the emotion of others, when in conflict with our own, can be dangerous to us. But anger is an emotion only in the name of that act of judgement which is a finding-bad-and-wrong. It is personal only as satisfaction is personal – by a personal intensification of an original concern. And it is an emotion, rather than an act of negation: this is why anger is momentary and has an immediate sequence, a re-evaluation of the spoiled situation in positive terms. Anger, like satisfaction, occurs on safe critical ground. It occurs in clarity, and the response of disagreement must have an intimacy of concern with its object of the same clear degree as anger if it is to have effect as a response. Anger cannot fear the mysterious, privately generated object response because it is itself produced in the open air of judgement.

One takes precautions, needs them only if one is oneself doing something dangerous, arbitrarily emotional. Someone, in response to our anger, inflicts a personal wound on us, it can have no importance and reality of an accident. To warn people against anger as something dangerous can have no more specific meaning for anger than the sentimental generalization that everything is subject to accident can have for any coherent process. An accident is an event irrelevant to the particular process we are engaged in. The only way to avert accidents is to improve the coherence of our processes – cancel irrelevancy with relevancy. We do not sacrifice any of our essential processes because we agree in the general proposition that everything is subject to accident. Anger is an essential process. It has the essentiality of judgement, and of any organized articulation of sensibilities. Those who warn us against the dangerousness of anger would do better to advise us to perfect its organization: if they are really interested in our safety. But they are probably less alarmed for the private safety of anyone than for the disturbance, by anger, of the fixed social course of events, which provides for only a limited quantity of experience. Anger does, indeed, create experience, though it does not create accident. And perhaps these warnings are useful, after all, to those who have such fear of experience that any excess of it beyond the effortlessly endured social quantity is equivalent to accident: descriptions of the dangers of anger may make them shy of anger and the angry, though the original intention has undoubtedly been to frighten anger and the angry out of society.

But has anyone the right (it may be asked) to assert on his own authority that this is good and right and that bad and wrong? We live: and with a high degree of deliberateness. We cannot but, in honour, make this deliberateness a responsible one. In living as we do by the method of consciousness, we are assuming, each, tremendous authority. We endow ourselves, each, with a royalty of life; and at our stage of consciousness we cannot with indecency shirk the royal gestures of satisfaction and anger. It would be well enough to issue counsels against anger if a large part of our population stood, by self-definition, in the relation of mental slaves to ourselves. But then we should also have to issue counsels against the exercise of judgement. And I am sure that none of us would make personal dignity, or responsibility, so scarce an attribute. None of us would call the world so poor and uncertain a place. Do we not all feel a respectful interest in one another – respectful, that is, unless specific ground is given for disrespect? If not, why it is that so much of our activity – activity of all kinds – takes serious cognizance of the reactions and decisions of others?

We are all, really, respectfully interested in one another. Other people represent to us potential events of importance – something more than sources of accident; they inspire in us expectations of satisfaction. We prescribe the nature of satisfaction as our judgement develops, but not the number of people with whom we can enjoy common satisfaction: this is ever the benignantly uncomputed number. When we are angry, which is to feel cheated of a particular satisfaction promised to our judgement by a particular situation, we are opposing to the immediate chagrin an insistence on the general possibility of satisfaction – or our emotion would be despair rather than anger. Anger is concrete hope in the midst of disappointment; without anger we should be overwhelmed by our disappointments instead of stimulated by them into assertions of the general possibility of satisfaction.

But people with a capacity for anger are undoubtedly a problem to people who do not like to be exposed to observation and judgement and yet wish to circulate freely in the world. It is significant that counsels on the theme of anger are not addressed, generally, to people who do not like their behaviour to be taken into account, but to people of critically developed sensibilities: these are asked to isolate their sensibilities, not the others their behaviour. Anger, as I have said, is a precious emotion, and should be an object of great tenderness. Aristotle somewhat felt its value, but he saw it more as a part of the healthy emotional material which should be the endowment of the average person than as an important critical faculty. ‘He therefore who feels anger on proper occasions, with proper objects, and besides in a proper manner, at proper times, and for a proper length of time, is an object of praise.’ But what of the improper occasions, of anger with improper persons? Where is to be found the counsel which urges the improper objects – namely, people of careless behaviour – to isolate themselves or their lapses from the attention of the critically sensitive.

Anger is a precious emotion, but it is also a generous one, as judgement is a generous faculty. The person who possesses the faculty of judgement possesses it exactly because his field of potential satisfaction is extensive and not niggardly: the extent necessitates judgement as a large place necessitates government, and a very small place does not. The field of anger is as extensive as the field of potential satisfaction; it is, indeed, the same field. To restrict the action of anger is to condition judgement with a miserliness of energy toward the dissatisfying; and judgement needs no such protection – anger (and those who possess the faculty of anger) needs no such protection.

They keep telling us not to waste anger. (‘Be not mortally angry with any for a venial fault. – He will make a strange combustion in the state of his soul who, at the landing of every cock-boat, sets the beacons on fire.’ – Thomas Fuller.) They might as well tell us to be careful how much we think, lest we use up our minds. No one who feels anger is angry that he has been made angry: true anger does no one any more harm than satisfaction does. No one feels anger unless the provocation is interesting, as no one experiences satisfaction with what is not interesting – not pertinent to one’s conscious experience. The provocation to anger is interesting because it raises the question of satisfaction in an urgent and immediate form. There can be no danger, ever, of wasting anger, for it is not the spending of a waning physical store but the exercise of progressively heightened mental sensibility. Every incident of anger improves, rather than impairs, its functional excellence.

They keep urging us not to excite ourselves on dull subjects. But they mean, by this, only to divert our attention from the careless or inadequate or inappropriate: they know very well that dull subjects do not excite us. The person who supplies the provocation may be in the main a dull person, but the subject of anger cannot be dull – if it were, we should feel not anger, but boredom. In so far as a person raises a subject of anger he is not a dull person. Why do they not leave us to our anger? We do not complain. And what cause have they to complain, when the result of anger is as clear a definition of what we hold good and bad, right and wrong, as if we had experienced satisfaction, and not anger?

I myself am always grateful to the anger-provoking situation, for the clarity it produces – whether it is my anger or someone else’s. My only complaint, in relation to anger, would be that there is not enough of it. It is a remarkably infrequent occurrence, considering the frequency of exhortations against anger. I love seeing a person in anger as I love hearing a person think: we do not often so honour one another. And so do we all, really, love to witness one another directly. But we conceal our curiosity in the social fiction that we are only casually interested in one another; we advertise the fiction that we may conceal our curiosity and protect it from rebuff. This is one of the reasons why plays and cinema dramas excite us: we can look directly at the characters, and in the theatre-dark let our curiosity loose without social embarrassment. And no dramatic representation can have such reality for us (given adequate verisimilitude) as a display of anger or a character shown in the act of thinking aloud. For these are more intimate, more integral self-manifestations than either distress or pleasure, hate or love, or any other pair of living occasions.

I have written in this strain on anger as one familiar with anger in herself. I do not get angry often, but sometimes; because, of the difficult occasions which compose my experience, there are many more which satisfy than which do not. This is somewhat to my credit, for the care I bestow on the difficult occasions, but in great part to the credit of those who share in them with me and with whom I reap the common fruit of satisfaction. And I am so grateful for my good luck that I am prepared to take some bad luck along with it; I am prepared to reap, sometimes, the lonely and not unhealthily bitter fruit of anger. It is good, sometimes, to feel as lonely, and vigorous in loneliness, as anger makes one feel. Anger is, I think, the only condition of loneliness which does no damage to one’s inward vigour – on the contrary, it purifies and rehabilitates it. The anger, even, of another person toward us somewhat fans our own vigour: we too are made lonely by it, since it momentarily severs association and thrown [sic. Throws us?] upon our separate resources I would rather have another person angry with me than coldly antagonistic; anger declares the bond which it breaks, while cold antagonism refers to no bond, being only the assertion of a fundamental incongruity of persons. My only reaction to cold antagonism is one of self-blame, that I have ignored the fundamental incongruity and so made its assertion necessary: as one blames oneself for having sown seeds of expectation in any ground that proves itself barren.

But I write in defence not in praise of ager; I do not wish to seem an epicure of anger. It is a pity to have cause to feel angry, but better to feel angry than affect indifference about something that one is expected to accept and cannot, in conscience, accept. Nor can anger easily degenerate into a habit of intolerance. Anger is a loyal defence of one’s convictions against a breach of loyalty by someone who might have been reasonably expected to share in them with one. It is not an arbitrary demand of loyalty. There must always be, with anger, an unexpected defection, by someone else, from a standard it was natural to regard as mutual. No one grows angry over a difference of opinion arising from idiosyncratic personal difference, though he may grow intolerant and petulant. What produces anger is a sense of betrayal and of being asked to co-operate in a betrayal of some established generality of conviction.

To be habitually petulant about something is to own to private arbitrariness of conviction and to demand, tyrannically, indulgence or submission – the petulant person does not care which. Anger is self-protective rather than tyrannical. It expresses shock and a resolution not to let the defection of another person from a common ground of conviction influence oneself toward defection. It preserves the critical basis of association from sentimentalism. If a person is constantly returned to solitary guardianship of his convictions, he cannot become petulantly aggressive about them unless he changes them from convictions, which are values sensitive to universal impressions, to opinions, which are private dogmas closed to universal impressions. For anger, and one’s convictions, to undergo such a drastic degeneration, one must have gradually grown so uncommunicative in one’s convictions that idiosyncrasy and petulance are their only public characteristics. If this has happened, that is, the fault is with intellectual arrogance and personal vanity, not with loyalty to conviction and its emotional concomitant, anger. I am here concerned with anger, not with petulance, the emotional by-product of idiosyncrasy – or with any other counterfeit anger.

I do not think it is difficult to distinguish between petulance and anger. The confusion, if it occurs, must derive from a disrespect to anger which has affected the integrity of our vocabulary. If someone glorifies petulance into anger, he is ridiculous; and our respect for anger should prevent us from associating it with the ridiculous. True anger is never ridiculous. We cannot say of a person that he has let himself get too angry: there are no degrees in anger, as there are no degrees in judgement. One is either exercising the faculty of judgement or of anger, or one is not. Anger is noble and whole-hearted, as judgement is noble and whole-minded. We should greet its appearance in ourselves as a sign that thought has made its way into our very bones. Indeed, I should be inclined to make the bones, rather than the heart, the seat of anger. Is this not what we have meant, and laboured, to be: all-of-a-piece beings? That which distresses the mind should make the very bones – our mutest parts – protest? Since what rejoices the mind gives the bones peace, this is surely not too much cooperation to expect from them.

Francis Quarles, from whose Enchiridion the head-piece to these homiletic studies is taken, says of anger: ‘Naturall anger glances in the breasts of wise men, but rests in the bosome of fooles: in them, it is infirmity; in these, a sinne: there is a naturall anger; and there is a spirtuall anger; the common object of that, is the person; of this, his vice.’ But there are not two angers. For that anger which is an infirmity and not a power to detect the wrong quickly, with the feelings, is no anger at all; it is a hasty, disorderly emotion of any kind except anger. What Quarles here says of natural anger applies to lust, cruelty, enthusiasm, pity or any other accidental emotion. But anger is never accidental; it is quick, but not hasty. It can occur only where there is an order in the feelings inspired by an order in the mind. Our feelings supply our minds with information about what is, and out of this information our minds make a knowledge of what should be. Or minds then educate our feelings, giving them the only kind of knowledge which is emotionally intelligible: a knowledge of what should not be. It is by this knowledge that anger acts.

Minds move in a leisurely way: to know what is true and be sensible of the good, the right, requires leisure and patience. Therefore, minds are not expertly equipped for the detection of the bad, the wrong. A principle of truth has a constant and complete occupation of the mind and leaves no room for a principle of falsity – which cannot exist, except by emotional invention, and then only for the immediate emergency. A knowledge of what should not be can have no constant existence: truth can make no other provision for falsity than the denial of it when it appears, by the detection of its badness and wrongness. The bad, the wrong, must be detected with speed and impatience, since to ignore them is to tolerate them and condition the true with the false. For this kind of detection we must rely on our feelings, on the spontaneous evocation of a principle of falsity in imitation of a principle of truth – on the faculty of anger.

The mind is continuous; the good, the right, details of the true, are continuous subjects. The feelings are discontinuous; the bad, the wrong, details of the false, are discontinuous subjects, a principle of falsity must be discontinuous. Nothing can really shock the mind; it moves with an almost complacent rhythm between contemplation of what is and realization of what should be. And yet, because life is not a closed situation, because between these two poles of event (what is and what should be) there are occurrences to which neither our sense of facts nor our apprehension of ultimates can allow reality – things which are mere impossibilities: because of the necessary experimentalism of life, we must remain susceptible to incongruous experience and be able to dispose of it in some way consistent with our mental rhythm of reality. We must be able to belittle (with our humour) or see it as otherwise than it seems (with our love) or utterly deny (with our anger) that which falls upon our minds with destructive strangeness, and against which we have no other defences than our feelings. Anger deal with that which is most incorrigibly strange: it is our most critical weapon of defence against the impossible.

I see no reason for calling anger a ‘spiritual’ weapon. By ‘spiritual’ we generally mean, and in the passage quoted Quarles means, a weapon wielded only abstractly. True, anger delivers no blows. (Vengeance is not the result of anger, rather of humiliated pride – the angry person is offended in his judgement, not in his personal vanity.) Its method is not one of attack, only of self-severance from the provocation. Yet anger is a concrete and natural gesture; it is no mere speculation, but something we do. In anger we assume a posture which has the critical effect of ‘No!’ One cannot rest at ‘No!’ ‘No!’ has only a momentary reality – the next moment it vanishes in the positive rhythm of the mind. But in vanishing it makes the reality of the provocation vanish along with it; and while it lasts, moreover, it is as absolute as thought in its power to legislate for the person who feels it. Anger is, in fact, a terrible faculty – thanks be to the good sense of our bodies for it. But may we not be caused to have overmuch of it. For the body has a natural wildness, even in its good sense: no doubt we shall be saddened when we remember, later, the cruel parts that we had, of living necessity, to play.