Laus Iracundiæ (Praise of Anger)

by Robert L. Dabney (1869)

It was once our fortune to hear a famous divine deliver a famous discourse to parents upon the Christian discipline of children. One point which was put with great emphasis was, that if the rod must needs be employed, that instrument of education must be used only in cold blood. Parents were eloquently cautioned not to chastise until the last trace of their emotion was suppressed, and until the task could be done with philosophic deliberation. In arguing this precept, the reverend father grew impassioned. He urged that chastisement administered in any other temper was degraded from a sacred act of authority to a mere brute contest between the passion and obstinacy of two children, of whom the grown-up child was the more worthy of stripes.

Dr. Samuel Johnson is said to have exclaimed: “I do love a good hater.” This representative type of the John Bull was taught by his sturdy good sense to pierce the hypocrisy of your model gentleman, who always speaks of those who have injured or opposed him with perfect composure. The literary dictator saw, from his knowledge of human nature, that when one is crossed it is his instinct to be angry; so that the apparent absence of that emotion is more naturally to be ascribed to deceit than sanctity. Hence the bluff, hearty man, who makes no concealment of his antipathies, and who is wont to ease his soul by some volleys of good, sound, candid hard names, is much more likely a man of truthful and honest impulses than he who assumes to be above the sense of injuries. We can imagine the old gentleman in his burly way defending his naughty opinion against the pious horror of some male or female Miss Nancy. “My dear Miss, is not wrong the opposite of right: and is not injury the reverse of beneficence? By the same impulse by which the well-constituted mind responds to truth and right with approbation, and to beneficence with gratitude, must it meet error or vice with reprobation, and injury with resentment. These contrasted emotions are but the two poles which respectively attract and repel the same magnet, the human heart. If the pole of repulsion be but feebly shunned, we shall expect the pole of attraction to be languidly sought. Hatred tranquilly worded, is no more to be confided in than love coldly uttered. By the same reason that one professes to be able to regard his enemy without resentment, we suspect him of being capable of treating his friend without affection. Your languid hater must ever be a languid lover. Give me then, by all means, a good, honest hater. Remember, my dear Miss, that it was not anger simply which the Prince of Peace himself condemned, but being angry without a cause. To be angry when there is cause, is as inevitable nature as being grateful for kindness. He therefore who affects to be above anger, makes me suspect that he is in fact beneath love; that his virtue is, not supernatural, but hypocritical. He who is angry may be unjust: he who is incapable of it must be ungrateful. Better the generous foe than the snaky friend.”

“That is very finely put,” remarked a judicious friend afterwards (himself a successful parent); “but I beg leave to except that the intuitive good sense of the child is likely to remind him of this question: ‘If my transgression is so flagrant as to deserve this severe punishment, how comes it that it seems to arouse no moral indignation?’ The offending urchin does not need to study books on psychology to be aware that emotion is as normal to the human soul as perception and judgment; and that when moral objects are apprehended, the feeling is as natural, as unavoidable, and as legitimate, as the intellectual perception of the quality of the act. His boy-faculties, quickened by the birch’s inspiration, will be very likely to reason that ‘if papa makes my back burn thus with the switch, where I did not make his heart burn at all with disapprobation, the transaction is scarcely equal justice.’ In fact,” added my friend, “the flame of a warm (but not cruel and blind) moral indignation is the appointed, the natural, the necessary testimony of the parent against the evil of the culprit’s act: testimony as impressive as that of the stripes, and so reasonable, that if it be withheld, the other will not be credited. The sufferer will attribute his pain, not to a generous sense of justice, but to a cold, selfish love of power. Has not our reverend father just confirmed all this by his own example? Witness the impassioned zeal with which he has just laid on the lash of his tongue upon us adult children, for our parental sins in this thing! I shall then, when my young hopefuls cross my authority, beg leave to follow the preacher’s example against his theory. Otherwise, if I practised strictly on his theory, I should expect to be much more successful in making my children sneaks than in making them saints.”

For our part, we were compelled to think the lay-sermon thus far the juster of the two. We could not analyse and reason about it, like the dialecticians; but somehow, our common-sense (that convenient faculty for us non-logical folk) reminded us, that when we were youngsters, if we felt that we had sinned against our father, we naturally expected that he would be angry for it. We should have been excessively mystified at the idea of being beaten when we had done nothing to provoke him. We all found that a good rousing display of indignation with the whipping, a certain honest energy and emphasis in the strokes (emphasis so perspicuous to our apprehension), and a few sound Saxon epithets along with them, substituted and superseded the necessity of a great many stripes. The result of all which was, that we left the parental presence uniformly with a most profound and edifying conviction that we had gotten much less than we deserved, that we must have been very great sinners indeed, and that our respected parent must be the most generous and merciful of men, to punish so little, when his sense of the enormity of our conduct (and who so good a judge of that as he?) was manifestly so great. And we remembered also the good Mrs. M’s sons, who frequented the same old-field-school with us, whose mother was a member of the “female-praying-circle,” and of a “maternal association;” who named her boys after eminent foreign missionaries, and who had her house stocked with the Puritan literature (of those sweet souls who were too amiable to be angry with a real sinner, or to fight the foreign enemies of their country, or to kill anybody but their own brethren, and then only for the atrocious impertinence of taking care of the negroes whom they, the dear saints, had stolen from Africa). We were informed that Mrs. M. never administered the scriptural ordinance of the rod, until after a season of fasting and solitary meditation (performed, of course, by the culprit). We speculated much upon the question, whether the involuntary ascetic was musing most upon the aggravations of his sin, or upon the maternal economy of bread and butter in the method. She then, we were told, proceeded, after other religious preparation, to the infliction, with an angelic sweetness and nonchalance, and, as the urchins with the missionary names ruefully testified, with a “gift of continuance” duly proportioned to the solemnity and length of the preliminaries. Unluckily, the whippings were not short as the prayers were long. Now we, comparative young heathens, “Tom, Dick and Harry,” when we heard all this, and learned that the young gentlemen of the saintly names were to be our comrades, were at first impressed with a most wholesome respect, and felt that it would be incumbent on us to put on our Sunday manners, if not our Sunday clothes, to consort with them. But a short acquaintance sufficed to undeceive us. The M.s soon showed themselves the leading reprobates of the school; sly fellows withal, who could only be made tolerable to the rest of us during play time by an occasional sound thrashing. We are no philosophers; but somehow we have ever since been satisfied with the ways of our dear old father, who never had any Yankee-Puritan literature to read on Sundays, but only his Bible and Davies’ Sermons; and who never whipped us, but when he thought he had good reason to be angry, and accordingly was angry.

But since those days we are, alas! not so young as we then were; and we have had occasion to learn a good deal concerning the play of adult children in State, in Church, and in war. And we have noticed that your nonchalant gentleman was never the man to effect anything marked in the propagation of sound opinion, the reform of abuses, or the direction of commonwealths. The men who have moved others were men who had not only opinions, but emotions of their own. The native-born king of men, the ἀναξ ἀνδρῶν, is always a fellow with a good bouncing temper of his own, who can buffet his adversary not only with hard arguments, but upon occasion with a few honest hard names. Look over the list of the world’s great teachers and reformers, and you shall find that your Paul, your Athanasius (who, more than any other man, saved the Church from Arianism), your Augustine, your Luther, your Calvin, your Knox, your Chatham, your Henry, your Chalmers, were men of the ingenium perfervidum. They had not only clear heads, but strong wills, both energized by a great susceptibility to passion. They don’t handle their adversaries with gloves: not they! When they argue that these opponents are very naughty fellows, they also feel towards them as towards very naughty fellows. They seem to have thought, with the great Swiss divine, Vinet, that “the reprobation of evil and sin cannot be comprehended if we appear to be unmoved by them; that we are not to be, and cannot be, on terms of politeness with sin; and that truth consists in feeling as well as in thought; that love of the loveable is truth; hatred of the hateful is truth, and if need be, wrath itself also.” They did not expect to succeed in persuading their contemporaries that certain adversaries were very bad men, while they themselves professed to feel towards them as very pretty gentlemen. They did not assume an affectation of good temper towards them, which gave the lie to their own logic against them. They were exceedingly prone to “call a spade a spade.” Their sound instincts made them remember, that the men whom they sought to move were creatures of feeling and sympathy even more than of reasoning; and hence they permitted them to catch the contagion of their own honest passion, while they sought to enlighten them by their intellects. Thus we always see them glowing with a genuine fire of indignation, as well as shining with clear wisdom. Their rays are like the solar, at once luminous and hot. Hear Paul against Elymas the sorcerer: “O full of all subtlety and mischief, thou child of the devil.” Hear Athanasius berate the heresiarch as a beast of prey in human shape. Hear Calvin denounce a sophism in theology or exposition as a commentum putidum, or a specimen of audacia diabolica. See old Knox preaching against the monks, until, as the Scotch annalist says, he seemed “like to dang the pulpit intil blads, and flee out of it.” There is force in invective, provided it is prompted by an unquestionable and sincere wrath. It shows a man in earnest. The world is very like old Dr. Samuel Johnson: it dearly loves a good hater.

Now, our modern American Miss Nancy will say “O fie” upon all this. She will remind us how inappropriate passion is in him who labors for the elimination of truth; because, as the philosophers tell us, passion and prejudice blind the reason. Be assured, dear Miss, that it is at least as often the fact that passion quickens the reason. Ask the lawyers where they get their most telling points; how they are able to eviscerate a case in all its intricacies; by what beams of light they are assisted to illustrate the adversary’s false plea. If they are candid they will tell you, that the best mint for the coining of their counters is the seething brain of an angry client; whose keen self-interest, aroused by a boiling indignation, makes him as wide awake to all points as Yankee nature itself. Why is it, our dear Miss, that the birch is so useful a stimulant to the juvenile intellect? Is it not because fear (a passion) sometimes lends wings to the wits as well as the heels? Why is it that Miss Nancy experiences such an unwonted exaltation of spirit, such a quickening of the faculties, such a flow of words, at the respectful approach of her admirers of our despised sex? We beg leave to insinuate that there is a little emotion in question here. But this passion obviously renders the dear creature quite another being, and (as she, at least, will not deny) a much nobler being than she was the same morning when dawdling in curl-papers among her own sex. So it appears, that if passion can blind the eyes of the mind, it can also sharpen them. If it misleads, it also quickens. And it should also be remembered that indolence, sluggishness, indifference, heedlessness, obstruct and circumscribe the action of the reason, at least as much as prejudice perverts it.

It is much the fashion to abuse the great men of the Reformation age, for what is called their intolerance and bitterness towards adversaries. Our moderns affect a great advance upon their manners, and are quite intolerant of their intolerance, and fierce in condemnation of their fierceness. The only thing which seems to be bad enough to excite the ire of these nonchalant gentlemen, is the ancient zeal for the truth; the only fault which is so outrageous in their eyes as to be beyond the pale of even their courtesy (and it must be something monstrous indeed which these models of charity cannot tolerate) is the fault of being thoroughly in earnest. They insist that whatever other errors are assailed, it shall be done with perfect measure, equanimity, and politeness. No “hard names” must be called, no matter how “hard” the deeds which are characterized. This the civilisation of a superfine age demands! Hence, in the English Church, you shall hear the Evangelicals mildly and courteously intimating to the public, that their very estimable and valued brethren, the Ritualists, are going towards that Rome which they deem Antichrist. In the State, the Conservatives are seen suggesting, with the greatest possible suavity and respect, that the John Bright party is preparing for England another reign of terror, in which the throne, the religion, the liberties, and the constitution of the country, are to be whelmed in a sea of blood. Now this is all very nice, of course, and “excessively genteel,” when contrasted with those rude old champions of a former age, a Knox, a Latimer, a Pym, who rescued Christianity and liberty from their foes, and bequeathed the precious inheritance to us. But these very chary and polished polemics may be sure that they will never conquer any error; that such as they will never arouse any people to save their jeopardized rights. If the premises and arguments of the Evangelicals are true, then your Ritualist is a mischievous and treacherous enemy to the dearest interests he is sworn and salaried to subserve; he is seeking to betray the Church whose bread he eats to her prescriptive enemy. But after all this, your genteel Evangelical proceeds to treat the person against whom he has brought so severe an indictment, as a marvellously proper gentleman! If the neat political essayist of the London Quarterly, or the Pall Mall Gazette, means what he says, then the English Radical of the school of Messieurs Mill and Bright (par nobile fratrum, Quaker and Infidel) is but a masked Marat or Danton, who should be hunted by a universal storm of execration into an obscurity where his madness and malice would be harmless. But Mr. Radical is his “very honorable friend,” to whom he ventures to make, with most respectful consideration, the suggestion that his schemes involve the little inconveniences of revolution, anarchy, repudiation, and bloodshed. Such innocent little piping will never effect the work of the trumpet blast, which rouses a slumbering nation and shakes the mask off its assailants. The age needs men like Knox; and we fear, is very like to perish for want of them. The times demand “good haters.”