ńňđ. 3 |
In December of 1777, Charles James Fox addressed the House of Commons
in the following manner:
For the two years that a certain noble lord has presided over American affairs, the
most violent, scalping, tomahawk measures have been pursued: â“ bleeding has
been his only prescription. If a people deprived of their ancient rights are grown
tumultuous â“ bleed them! If they are attacked with a spirit of insurrection â“
bleed them! If their fever should rise into rebellion â“ bleed them, cries this state
physician! More blood! More blood! Still more blood!1
In Foxâ™s terms, tumult, insurrection, and rebellion (i.e., manifestations
of the peopleâ™s anger) have called forth a monoideistic program of the-
rapy from George IIIâ™s secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Germain.
Bleeding, here a synecdoche for military repression, is metaphorically
related to bloodletting as an anti-inflammatory remedy for fever. Expli-
citly mixing the rhetoric of revolutionary politics with that of medical
therapeutics, Fox enacts a common trope of discourse that would
achieve new urgency in the half-century following the American Declar-
ation of Independence. It was during this period â“ that is, during the
Romantic era â“ that the anger of the people assumed political legitimacy
(in addition to mere efď¬cacy), demanding from the ruling classes ideo-
logical resistance or capitulation (in addition to mere struggle or flight).
In the resulting war of words, a diagnostic view of anger prevailed, as
authors on both sides of the revolutionary question labored to establish
the nosology and pathology of public rage, as a prelude to prescribing
treatment for the disorder.2 The two emergent deď¬nitions of inflamma-
tion â“ disease or symptom â“ were deeply embedded in the contemporary
discourse of political anger. As we will see with reference to the work
of William Blake and others, Romantic-period literature bears the impress
of this conceptual-discursive situation in its dealings with anger and
revolution.
64
Inflammatory reactions 65
In his address, Fox objects to Lord Germainâ™s regimen of colonial
bloodletting, not only on the grounds of its inflexibility, but also because
it seems to encourage the disease it means to cure. None other than
Edmund Burke had made this objection in similar terms in his January
1777 âAddress to the King.â Of Lord Northâ™s oppressive policies in
response to the âgreat disorders and tumultsâ in America, Burke states,
Other methods were then recommended and followed, as infallible means of
restoring Peace and order. We looked upon them to be, what they have proved
to be, the cause of inflaming discontent into disobedience, and resistance into
revolt ⦠It seemâ™d absurd and preposterous, to hold out as the means of calming
a people, in a state of extreme inflammation and ready to take up arms, the
austere Law which a rigid Conqueror would impose ⦠3
The raging of the French Revolution would send Burke to the other side
of this debate, but here he implies that inflammation cannot be treated
effectively by bleeding ⓠthat an inflamed populace will become even more
so in reaction to the strong repression of that symptom of discontent.
Those in favor of strong controls and reprisals â“ Lords Germain and North,
George III ⓠsaw the matter quite differently. To them, the raging infl-
ammation of the American colonists was itself a disease, not a symptom,
and thus required forceful countermeasures. In a speech to Parliament
delivered in October of 1775, the king made his position clear:
Those who have too long successfully laboured to inflame my people in America
⦠now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion . . . It is now become
the part of wisdom and (in its effects) of clemency, to put a speedy end to these
disorders by the most decisive exertions. For this purpose, I have increased my
naval establishment, and greatly augmented my land forces.4
Although less explicitly than Fox or Burke, here George III assumes a
therapeutic relation to the inflammatory âdisordersâ plaguing the colonial
body politic. Thus he has prepared for âdecisive exertionsâ â“ in this case,
military interventions â“ to scotch the rebellion, which has been spread as a
kind of contagious fever among the people.
The debates which gave rise to all of these statements would be
rehearsed, with a difference, in the next several decades as the French
Revolution trumped the American one in English political consciousness.
In fact, after the 1780 Gordon Riots, the threat of popular violence had
come home; and following the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the contours of
the discussion of anger came under increasing pressure. The English
debates over revolution and reform were basically conducted in two
periods of intense activity: 1789â“96, and 1815â“19; and in the texts of these
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
66
periods, groups associated with a particular political view â“ and most
often, âthe peopleâ as a potentially insurrectionary aggregate â“ are de-
scribed as being âinflamed.â Depending on the sympathies of the author,
this inflammation calls for a particular therapeutic program. For the
counterrevolutionaries, such a condition, exacerbated and indeed pro-
duced by the âinflammatoryâ rhetoric of âJacobinâ publications and
speeches, must be suppressed. In this view, inflammation is itself a disease
which will have destructive effects on the body and its constitution if
allowed to rage freely. For republican authors on the other hand, the
peopleâ™s inflammation (that is to say, their rebellious outrage) is a re-
sponse to economic and political realities supported by the government.
From this perspective, inflammation is a symptom of a deeper disease or
debility of the constitution, and a part of the political bodyâ™s natural
defense system; thus the inflammatory action should be allowed to run its
course, to do its work.
This latter view had come to dominate actual medical practice in
the latter half of the eighteenth century. John Hunter (1728â“93) and
William Cullen (1710â“90) represent this older guard as the most import-
ant English spokesmen for the essentially restorative powers of inflamma-
tion. In this they followed the work of George Stahl (1660â“1734) who
introduced the idea, âclearly foreign to many physicians of his time . . .
That inflammation is a physiological â˜actionâ™ on the part of the forces
controlling the body, rather than a merely morbid or praeternatural
â˜passionâ™ â“ in other words a reaction rather than a disease or lesion.â5 As
Hunter claimed, âinflammation may be said in all cases to arise from a
state of parts in which they cannot remainâ (Treatise 364), and âas every
inflammation has a cause, that cause should be removed before the
resolution can take placeâ (329). At least through Hunterâ™s generation,
then, inflammation was mostly thought of in medical circles as a poten-
tially salutary action caused by some injury or disorder. Except in extreme
cases in which the inflammation was so violent that it threatened to send
the body into complete âdisorganization,â therapy should be primarily
supportive in nature, allowing the inflammatory action to perform its
healing function, while treating its cause through other methods.
But a change was building throughout the Revolutionary years,
so that after Waterloo, medical conceptions of inflammation and its
treatment had been reversed. This transaction was the result of what
medical historian Peter Niebyl has called âThe English Bloodletting
Revolution,â describing the several decades when medical theory came
to regard inflammation as itself a disease, or cause of all disorders in the
Inflammatory reactions 67
body, and medical practice adopted bloodletting as the favored treat-
ment for it.6 For example, prior to this medical ârevolution,â the standard
treatment for fever (then recognized as a primary cause of inflammation)
was Peruvian bark, or cinchona, taken orally; its active ingredient is
quinine, and thus it could often be effective. However, this was changing
in the early nineteenth century: âIn 1818, Thomas Bateman (1778â“1821),
physician to the London Fever Hospital, recounted how, as a young
physician in the late 1790s, he had employed the then fashionable
method of treating fevers, bark. Twenty years later he had abandoned
the fashion of his youth and turned to bloodletting.â7 Niebyl argues that
the Revolutionary spirit of the times and the sanguinary experiences of
physicians in the Napoleonic wars were in no small part responsible
for this reversal in medical progress. To this I would add that the
redeď¬nition of inflammation as disease, rather than symptom, seems
also to have been partially determined by the conceptual and rhetorical
patterns of the Revolution debates, particularly as they were concerned with
anger. As Revolution gave way to Terror and war, the dangers of inflaming
the populace were trumpeted ever more loudly in the British press, and
popular anger was more consistently described as destructive rage. That is,
anger-as-inflammation came to look like a disease or contagious infection,
rather than a rational, purgative symptom. The belated result was a con-
ceptual rapprochement between political and medical approaches to
inflammation in the post-Revolutionary era: bleed, suppress, eliminate.8
In his 1795 Letter to William Elliot, Burke may be remembering Foxâ™s
address to Commons, and seems to have anticipated my observations
when he remarks, âThese analogies between bodies natural and politick,
though they may some time illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of
themselves. They are but too often used under the color of a specious
philosophy. . .â9 Yet two paragraphs later, we ď¬nd him speaking of
the revolutionary spirit of Europe in the following terms: âThe medita-
tions of the closet have infected the senates with a subtle frenzy, and
inflamed armies with the brands of the furies. The cure might come from
the same source with the distemper. I would add my part to those who
would animate the people (whose hearts are yet right) to new exertions
in the old causeâ (IX:41). Notice how he combines the language of feve-
rish disease (âinfected,â âfrenzy,â âdistemper,â âcureâ) with that of ď¬re
(âinflamed,â âbrandsâ) to characterize the effects of revolutionary writers
on civilization (âsenates,â âarmies,â âthe peopleâ). Here the rhetoric of
inflammation comes so readily to hand that Burke doesnâ™t notice his
reliance on âanalogies between bodies natural and politickâ to make his
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
68
point. Furthermore, the interchangeability of the two metaphors (fever
and ď¬re) here conď¬rms the counterrevolutionary tendency to assimilate
reformist outrage to destructive disorder.10
In fact, most English reformers wanted to preserve distinctions
among several varieties of inflammation, while their opponents aimed to
collapse them all into one leveling holocaust. Thus, in the discourse of the
loyalists, anything â“ journal, speech, or event, even an abstraction â“
deemed âinflammatoryâ threatened the state with violent insurrectionary
destruction. The reformers, on the other hand, tried to assert angerâ™s
importance while disclaiming, or perhaps flirting with, popular violence
as that emotionâ™s necessary correlative. Not surprisingly then, this
debate takes the form of metaphorical manipulations. Personal anger
(experienced while reading a radical journal), popular outrage (excited
by one of John Thelwallâ™s speeches), and mob violence (including the
literal torching of buildings and crops) were all part of a rhetoric of
inflammation that also involved the metaphorical blazing of ideology.
As Richard Price writes in A Discourse of the Love of our Country (1789),
addressing all âfriends of freedom, and writers in its defence,â âBehold
the light you have struck out, after setting A M E R I C A free, reflected to
F R A N C E , and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes,
and warms and illuminates E U R O P E !â11 Like the âbeaconâ™s comet blazeâ
of Liberty that Wordsworth praises in his 1793 Descriptive Sketches,
this ď¬re burns away abstract categories, political structures, and mental
chains. It is the flame at which William Blake so assiduously kindled
his torch.
For example, in Blakeâ™s America (1794), the struggle between âAlbions
Angelsâ and the revolutionary âď¬erce Americansâ reaches its climax on
plate 14, as Albionâ™s Guardian sends a feverish âplague windâ against the
rebellious colonies (E, 55). Blake describes the scene:
Fury! rage! madness! in a wind swept through America
And the red flames of Orc that folded roaring ď¬erce around
The angry shores . . .
Then had America been lost, oâ™erwhelmâ™d by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion of the inď¬nite,
But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging ď¬re
The red ď¬res ragâ™d! the plagues recoilâ™d! Then rollâ™d they
back with fury
On Albions angels; then the pestilence began in
streaks of red
Across the limbs of Albions Guardian . . .
Inflammatory reactions 69
The plagues creep on the burning winds driven by
the flames of Orc,
And by the ď¬erce Americans rushing together in
the night. . . (E, 56â“57)
Fighting ď¬re with ď¬re, the Americans oppose the âburning windsâ with
âthe red flames of Orc,â and send those inflammatory plagues back to
England, causing âstreaks of red / Across the limbsâ of their persecutors.
Essentially, this is Blakeâ™s vision of the situation described by Fox and
Burke regarding Englandâ™s approach to the unruly American colonies: the
people are angry; call it a plague and then suppress it. But Blake shows
that conceptual strategy recoiling upon the English, by means of a
counter-inflammation, a series of purging watch-ď¬res lit by the ârushing
togetherâ of the wrathful Americans: e pluribus unum. Thus Blakeâ™s work,
like that of so many of his contemporaries, demonstrates its imaginative
involvement with the unprecedented fact â“ and even more so with its
European sequels â“ that after 1776, American anger was no longer a
disease; it was a revolution.
Even the older Wordsworth, characterizing his revolutionary sympa-
thies as he revised the Prelude, remembered his heartâ™s command thus:
âYe purging ď¬res, / Up to the loftiest towers of Pride ascend, / Fanned by
the breath of angry providence.â12 Furthermore, in 1793, he had described
another such revolutionary âphoenix-rite of regenerative immolationâ
(as Alan Liu calls it) in Descriptive Sketches.13 He ď¬rst presents âLiberty,â
looking for all the world like Blakeâ™s Rintrah who âroars and shakes his ď¬res
in the burdened airâ (E, 33), in a posture like that of the lady with her torch
in New Yorkâ™s harbor: âLiberty shall soon, indignant, raise / Red on his
hills his beaconâ™s comet blaze; / Bid from on high his lonely cannon sound,
/And on ten thousand hearths his shout rebound.â14 Surely that red,
indignant blaze also ď¬nds an echo in the flames of the âten thousand
hearthsâ of England, in which we imagine flames leaping higher in response
to Libertyâ™s call. Yet there is more ď¬re to come, from a very different
source. In the Prelude, âpurging ď¬resâ will consume the âtowers of Prideâ;
here, in Descriptive Sketches, prideâ™s anger itself sets the land aď¬re:
Yet, yet, rejoice, thoâ™ Prideâ™s perverted ire
Rouze Hellâ™s own aid, and wrap the hills in ď¬re,
Lo! from th♠innocuous flames, a lovely birth!
With its own Virtues springs another earth:
Nature, as in her prime,
Begins, and Love and Truth compose her train. . .
(481, lines 780â“85)
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
70
As in the Prelude, ď¬re is the engine of âthe mighty prospects of the timeâ
and the agent of justice (6:443), here giving rise to a world reborn. In
both poems, Wordsworth presents inflammation as a curative symptom,
âinnocuousâ and purgative of prideâ™s perversions. Whether ireâ™s ď¬re is
revolutionary (as in the Prelude, where the towers of Pride are consumed)
or counterrevolutionary (as in Descriptive Sketches, where âHellâ™s own aidâ
is roused by Prideâ™s anger), Wordsworth imagines it as a salutary stage or
crisis that brings about regeneration.
One should resist, however, taking these samples of Wordsworthâ™s
poetry as conď¬rming a taste for wrath. As a metaphor for the spread of
republicanism, inflammation was one thing; as a program for political
change, it was quite another, even in âthe radical years.â In a 1794 letter to
William Matthews, in which he discusses plans to publish a monthly
journal, Wordsworth writes,
when I observe the people should be enlightened upon the subject of politics,
I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses to the passions of men, even when
it is intended to direct those passions to a good purpose. I would put into each
manâ™s hand a lantern to guide him, and not have him set out upon his journey
depending for illumination on abortive flashes of lightning, or the coruscations
of transitory meteors.15
Like most middle-class English âJacobinsâ (including Godwin,
Coleridge, and Priestly), Wordsworth was troubled by the idea of mob
violence, and took pains to separate himself from the incendiaries of the
radical press: his projected journal the Philanthropist would not contain
appeals to the anger of the people.
For the counterrevolutionaries, the enraged mob was even more of a
worry. In their writings, as we have seen, angerâ™s ancient associations with
madness and heat conjoin in a rhetoric of inflammation as both fever
(including redness and swelling) and ď¬re (including flames and explo-
sions); both implied something potentially ungovernable and destructive.
Such negative metaphorical characterizations of anger are at least as old as
Senecaâ™s De Ira, which begins with the description of the angry man
quoted in chapter 1:
you only have to behold the aspect of those possessed by anger to know that
they are insane. For as the marks of a madman are unmistakable â“ a bold and
threatening mien, a gloomy brow, a ď¬erce expression, a hurried step, restless
hands, an altered colour, a quick and more violent breathing â“ so likewise are
the marks of the angry man; his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is
crimson with the blood that surges from the lowest depths of his heart, his lips
quiver, his teeth are clenched, his hair bristles and stands on end, his breathing is
Inflammatory reactions 71
forced and harsh, his joints crack from writhing, he groans and bellows, bursts
out into speech with scarcely intelligible words, strikes his hands together
continually and stamps the ground with his feet: his whole body is excited and
âperforms great angry threatsâ; it is an ugly and horrible picture of distorted and
swollen frenzy.16
Seneca is primarily concerned with personal anger as an irrational
disruption of Stoic constantia, or self-possession, whereas the Revolution
debates have popular outrage as their continual theme. Yet the wide
circulation of his rhetorical ď¬gurations of anger in the eighteenth century
â“ including madness, inflammation, fever, ď¬re â“ ensured that a diagnostic
attitude towards anger would predominate: where did it start? How
does it spread? What treatment is required? Most fundamentally, is it a
destructive disorder, a reactive symptom, or a salutary action with regard
to the political body?
As might be expected, answers to this last question depend on whose
anger is at issue; each side of the Revolution debate wants to diagnose
raging fevers in the other. Yet because of revolutionâ™s long association
with ď¬re (from, say, Prometheus forward), inflammation tends to be
´
strongly ascribed to those antagonistic to the anciens regimes of France
and England. Furthermore, in some cases the English radicals stretched
out their arms and embraced the flame of ď¬re, accepting inflammation as
their birthright. For example, in October 1795, Sampson Perry wrote in
the advertisement to his newly relaunched radical weekly, The Argus, âHe
who best seizes the subject which is now warming the cold heart, and
inflaming the stoick mind, will best please, will best succeed.â17 Here,
fever warms and warns, and the rejection of Seneca is explicit: anger is
not a disease but a cure for Stoic torpor. More frequently, however,
âinflammationâ is used in the loyalist press as an adjective of warning
and condemnation, applied to the speeches and publications of the
radicals from the 1790s through the postwar era. In this regard, anger
spreads like contagious fever and like wildď¬re, thanks to the windy,
infectious, incendiary words of Paine, Thelwall, Eaton, and Spence.
Both metaphors imply an unnatural and destructive state of emergency,
requiring immediate repression and control.
Yet as the radicals continually struggled to assert, revealed abuses often
make people mad without resulting in violence and destruction. For
Eaton and Perry in the 1790s, and later for Wooler and Sherwin, anger
was necessary to rouse a public whose ancient rights were being usurped
while it slept. As Perry writes in his Argus, published from prison in
1796, âAn inflammatory writing under despotism, is a virtuous writing.â18
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
72
Similarly, in the post-Waterloo period, W.T. Sherwin writes in 1817 in the
inaugural issue of his weekly Political Register,
By inflammatory harrangues, you mean the endeavors of such a man, to convince
his countrymen of the true causes of their distress; and because he takes truth for
his guide, you charge him with an attempt to inflame the minds of the people. I
will tell you what inflames, or irritates the minds of the people, ⓠ. . . the want of
a representation in Parliament . . . and a thousand other things, which all
emanate from this source.19
In the same week, William Hone employed a self-consciously inflam-
matory rhetoric in his Reformist Register. Responding to an article in the
Times wherein the people have been spoken of as objects to be dealt with,
a bit like surplus potatoes, Hone turns up the heat:
Read, for instance, the following extract from the Times of to-day; and if before
you get to the end of it, you do not feel the blood from your heart rushing up
into your cheeks, and scorching your very skin, if you do not feel as if you were
nearly choking, before you have got half through, you have not the feelings
which I had . . . â20
Precisely as the loyalists feared, Hone attempts to spread angry infl-
ammation widely via a kind of sympathetic, contagious writing. He
would be arrested and jailed for blasphemous libel within a monthâ™s time.
Clearly, the Revolution debates of the 1790s had produced conceptual
and rhetorical ď¬gures that set the tone for discussions of domestic reform
through the Napoleonic era. As Southey laments in an 1812 review,
The most inflammatory harangues . . . are published like dying-speeches and
sold through the manufacturing districts at a halfpenny or penny each. The
effusions of hot city orators, and the most incendiary paragraphs of the anarchist
journals are circulated in the same manner . . . The incendiaries have succeeded
in kindling a flame; it is in the power of the laws to prevent them from extending
it, and adding fuel to the conflagration . . . The ď¬rst duty of the government is to
stop this contagion . . . While the poor continue what they are . . . the materials
for explosion will always be under our feet.21
The language of both âcontagionâ and âconflagrationâ that Southey
uses here indicates the permeability of the metaphor, and thus its flex-
ibility for loyalist writers. âRageâ becomes the pivot term in such writing,
associating the revolutionaries with ď¬re, fever, and ferocious beasts. Im-
plicit in these ascriptions is the irrationality and indeed the pathology of
popular anger: the mob is headless, blind, and ultimately passive, serving
as flammable material set alight for destructive purposes by the âincendi-
ary paragraphsâ of the radicals. In other words, their anger is a âpassionâ
Inflammatory reactions 73
in the root sense of the word, a visitation upon them (like a disease, like a
house-ď¬re) that brings suffering. Thus âinflammatoryâ (rather than âinfl-
amed) often becomes the accusation of choice, aimed at the radical leaders
and authors, and implying that the peopleâ™s outrage has been forced upon
them by opportunistic villains, rather than provoked by material or
political causes.
Southeyâ™s article takes this line exactly, blaming âharangues,â âorators,â
âparagraphs,â and âjournalsâ as the source of discontent, particularly as
they are circulated cheaply among the working poor. He elaborates on
this theme, looking back to Burkeâ™s âswinish multitudeâ:
The weekly epistles of the apostles of sedition are read aloud in tap-rooms and
pot-houses to believing auditors, listening greedily when they are told that their
rulers fatten upon the gains extracted from their blood and sinews . . . The
lessons are repeated day after day, and week after week. If madder be distributed
to a pig only for a few days his bones are reddened with its die [sic]; and can we
believe that that bloody colouring of such âpigâ™s-meatâ as this will not ď¬nd its
way into the system of those who take it for their daily food? (345)
The extraordinary metaphor developed here â“ with its reference to the
radical journal Pigâ™s Meat â“ is imperfect (pigs would not be particularly
greedy for madder), but it vividly depicts the passive transference of anger-
as-inflammation (here, the reddening associated with madder) from the
radical press to the manufacturer in the ale-house, a passive pig swallowing
everything whole, and being changed â“ made âmadderâ â“ thereby.
Southey may have been remembering a similar passage, written by his
compatriot Coleridge during their period of Jacobinism in the 1790s. In
the âIntroductory Addressâ to his 1795 Conciones ad Populum, Coleridge
repeats the language of his ď¬rst political lecture at Bristol (originally
published as A Moral and Political Lecture in 1795), and also incorporates
passages from letters sent previously to Southey himself.22 Here Coleridge
calls for reform without violence, and closes with a series of signiď¬cant
metaphors regarding anger, the ď¬nal one particularly related to Southeyâ™s
comparison of an enraged public to maddened, reddened pigs:
We should be cautious how we indulge the feelings even of virtuous indignation.
Indignation is the handsome brother of Anger and Hatred. The Temple of
Despotism, like that of Tescalipoca, the Mexican Deity, is built of human skulls,
and cemented with human blood; â“ let us beware that we be not transported
into revenge while we are leveling the loathsome Pile; lest when we erect the
ediď¬ce of Freedom we vary the stile of architecture, not change the materials . . .
The energies of the mind are wasted in these intemperate effusions. These
materials of projectile force, which now carelessly explode with an offensive and
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
74
useless noise, directed by wisdom and union might heave Rocks from their base,
â“ or perhaps (dismissing the metaphor) might produce the desired effect without
the convulsion . . . That vice is the effect of error and the offspring of
surrounding circumstances, the object therefore of condolence not of anger, is a
proposition easily understood . . . but . . . it is not enough that we have once
swallowed these Truths â“ we must feed on them, as insects on a leaf, till the
whole heart be coloured by their qualities, and shew its food in every the
minutest ď¬bre.23
Like Marvellâ™s quiet mind with its âgreen thought in a green shade,â
Coleridgeâ™s insect here becomes an emblem for the power of natural
benevolence and Truth (ď¬gured by nature itself ) to fortify the self against
tumultuous passions like anger. In this, the metaphor precisely reverses
Southeyâ™s, in which pigs who feed on the madder plant grow red,
signifying the anger inculcated by the inflammatory falsehoods of the
radicals. For Coleridge, the truth of benevolence is an anti-phlogistic leaf;
for Southey, the falsity of discontent is an histaminic stalk. Both pithy
metaphors suggest that when it comes to anger, you are what you eat:
emotions are a function of habits of intake, which should be controlled.
Coleridgeâ™s other primary metaphor in this passage involves the demo-
lition of a temple, and its progress demonstrates his ambivalence about his
subject. Recognizing that the âTemple of Despotismâ must be leveled to
make room for the âediď¬ce of Freedom,â Coleridge turns to angerâ™s
incendiary power: âintemperate effusionsâ become âmaterials of projectile
forceâ which may âheave Rocks from their baseâ if properly âdirected by
wisdom and union.â Yet he has just warned his audience against the
dangers of anger, hatred, and revenge, which would involve replicating
the skulls and blood of the original structure. Ultimately he is forced to
dismiss the metaphor (and with it, anger as such), hoping that the
âdesired effectâ of demolition may be produced âwithout the convulsion.â
Behind this conflicted passage is the destruction of the Bastille, which was
literally accomplished without explosives but whose capture required the
inflamed anger of the citizens of Paris. Can we tear down a âloathsome
Pileâ without âintemperate effusions?â The question particularly haunted
middle-class English reformers and sympathizers with revolution, who
deplored scenes of popular violence and yet continually â“ if unconsciously
â“ wooed the anger of oppressed members of the nation. Wordsworthâ™s
Convention of Cintra (1809) evinces similar anxieties as he attempts to
ď¬gure the regulation of outrage, here on the part of the Spanish revolu-
tionaries: âThe difď¬culty lies â“ not in kindling, feeding, or fanning the
flame; but in continuing so to regulate the relations of things ⓠthat the
Inflammatory reactions 75
fanning breeze and the feeding fuel shall come from no unworthy quarter,
and shall neither of them be wanting in appropriate consecration.â24 Like
Coleridge who wants incendiary public anger to be âdirected by wisdom
and union,â Wordsworth hopes to âregulate the relations of thingsâ
so that patriotic inflammation remains worthy of the name, and conse-
crated to its purpose. Both writers fear political anger as wildď¬re, and
both produce metaphors that represent this anxiety: Coleridge wants a
demolition without a convulsion, and Wordsworth imagines a holy flame
to which the âfanning breeze and the feeding fuelâ impart a consistent
moral charge.25
The point of this brief survey has been to demonstrate the two ruling
paradigms of inflammation in the Revolutionary period ⓠas disease or as
symptom â“ and to show the function of those paradigms in the contem-
porary discourse of political anger. It becomes clear that the debates over
inflammation were fundamentally concerned with the causes and conse-
quences of popular anger. Thus they conform to a larger pattern of
concern over anger in the period, centered on deď¬ning the basic trajectory
or plot of that emotion. Narratives of the French Revolution and com-
mentaries on British reform offer various versions of this plot, as do
Romantic-era works of literature, from âA Poison Treeâ and Caleb
Williams to Prometheus Unbound and Marino Faliero. To identify a plot
of anger is to validate some particular way of handling that emotion. As
we have seen with regard to inflammation, oneâ™s response could be to
support or repress the work of anger, depending on how one reads its
causes and consequences. The larger cultural and political fabric provided
many more opportunities to analyze angerâ™s function, particularly in the
midst of the passionate debates over revolution and reform, which in
many cases were expressly about anger itself. In the case of William Blake,
to whose work the remainder of this chapter is devoted, the revolution
question was always subsumed within the emotional register of its articu-
lation. Put another way, Blakeâ™s work embraces revolution as a correlative
(perhaps even a consequence) of an allegiance to particular passions and
emotional trajectories.
As a way into Blakeâ™s imaginative representations of anger, we might
ď¬rst consider Blakeâ™s personal negotiations with that emotion, memorably
enacted in his arrest for treason after cursing the soldier Scoď¬eld whom he
found trespassing in his garden at Felpham in August of 1803. Blakeâ™s
altercation with Scoď¬eld (like Achillesâ™ with Agamemnon) demonstrates
how, in wartime, the division between private and public anger is almost
impossible to maintain. Anger aims to have consequences, and it tends to
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
76
expand to include all apparent targets, rapidly crossing lines towards
public concerns. Achillesâ™ private quarrel with his king has immediate
political and martial repercussions; Blakeâ™s personal indignation at
Scoď¬eldâ™s invasion of his garden grows to an assertion that all soldiers
are slaves, and then to a damning of the king. Whether Blake actually said
these things matters less than their insertion (either by Blake or Scoď¬eld)
into a private conflict between strangers, indicating the tendency of
citizensâ™ anger to implicate or involve the state in times of crisis. Further-
more, private experiences of indignation and outrage establish the pat-
terns by which the citizen will behave towards indignities threatened by
and/or at the political status quo. And ď¬nally, Scoď¬eldâ™s appearance in
Jerusalem as a target of Losâ™s rage indicates the permeability of Blakeâ™s
work to his personal emotional narratives.
In one of the verses recorded in his notebook, Blake struggles to
comprehend his anger:
Was I angry with Hayley who used me so ill
Or can I be angry with Felphams old Mill
Or angry with Flaxman or Cromek or Stothard
Or poor Schiavonetti whom they to death botherd
Or angry with Macklin or Boydell or Bowyer
Because they did not say O what a Beau ye are
At a Friends Errors Anger shew
Mirth at the Errors of a Foe (E, 504)
Blake, it would seem, was not an easy man to befriend. As in âA Poison
Tree,â anger is an emotion best reserved for friends â“ a paradox here, since
in offending Blake and raising his ire, friends are transformed into foes. In
this alienating economy of emotion, anger dissipates not by forgiveness of
offenders but by their demotion. Such a strategy indicates a fundamental
aversion to the imposition of anger; Blake would rather write off everyone
as enemies than submit to angerâ™s reactive dynamics. In an extreme (and
paranoid) assertion of the imaginative will, he transforms his anger into
âMirthâ by recasting friends as foes.
Yet Blake must imagine this resulting mirth as an equivocal emotion, one
similar to what Milton calls âgrim laughterâ in a prose passage on satire:
. . . the veine of laughing (as I could produce out of grave Authors) hath oft-
times a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting; nor can there be a
more proper object of indignation than a false Prophet . . . in the disclosure
whereof if it be harmfull to be angry, and withall to cast a lowring smile . . . it
will be long enough ere any be able to say why those two most rationall faculties
of humane intellect anger and laughter were ď¬rst seated in the brest of man.26
Inflammatory reactions 77
For Milton, the most effective mode of satire involves a dialectical play of
anger and laughter. By pairing these two traditionally irrational and un-
controllable emotional reactions as the âtwo most rationall faculties of
humane intellect,â Milton privileges the wrath that is their synthesis, and
that can melt away the words of the false prophet to reveal the true text they
obscured. For Blake, the grim laughter of the wrathful satirist, because it
indicates imaginative triumph, is preferable to the painful, reactive anger of
personal experience, which indicates victimization and belatedness.
âA Poison Tree,â Blakeâ™s best-known depiction of personal angerâ™s
destructive effects, begins where the satiric âWas I angry . . . â notebook
verse ends, transforming the triumphant aphoristic conclusion of that
work into a program for ruin. âWas I angryâ closes with the recommen-
dation, âAt a Friends Errors Anger Shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe.â
Later in the notebook, âChristian forbearance,â the poem later renamed
âA Poison Tree,â appears:
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles. (E, 28)
Anger can be shown in response to the offenses of a friend, not a foe; the
two notebook poems have that much in common. However, the poems
diverge, as if âChristian forbearanceâ misread the concluding line of âWas
I angry.â The speaker does show mirth (âsmilesâ and âsoft . . . wilesâ) in
response to the errors of a foe, but here that mirth serves to disguise and
indeed to compound his anger rather than transform it, aided by the
âfearsâ and âtearsâ indicating dissimulation. The speakerâ™s is not the
âlowring smileâ of Miltonâ™s wrathful satirist but the falsely sunny smile
of the angry reactionary caught up in a secret cycle of revenge.
Hiding his anger, the speaker nurtures a tree of poison, preparing a
bitter harvest:
And it grew by day & night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine. (E, 28)
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
78
This poison tree, cultivated in secret, produces an âapple bright,â infl-
amed with undischarged anger. The foe desires this fruit because he wants
to deprive the speaker of it. In this sense, the apple comes to represent
revenge itself; to pursue it is to bring destruction on oneâ™s own head. The
speaker tells that his foe
. . . into my garden stole,
When night had veiled the pole;
In the morning Glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. (E, 28)
Blakeâ™s speaker â“ here resembling the Jehovah who insists that both fruit
and vengeance are âmineâ â“ knows that revenge is a dish best served cold.
Out of his obsessive anger, a plot slowly emerges, by ânight & morning,â
by âday & nightâ â“ a plot that will implicate the foe in his own downfall.
At the poemâ™s conclusion, the speaker has been made âGladâ by observing
the fruit of his vengeance: the corpse of his victim beneath the lowering
tree of anger. The âapple bright,â a swollen boil of contained anger that
itches for revenge, proves toxic, devouring its own devourer by means of
the secret ministry of poison.
In De Ira, Seneca writes contra Blake, âThe best corrective of anger lies
in delayâ (2.29.1), urging his reader,
Fight against yourself! . . . If [anger] is kept out of sight, if it is given no outlet,
you begin to conquer. Let us conceal its signs, and so far as it is possible
let us keep it hidden and secret . . . It should be kept hidden in the deepest
depths of the heart and it should not drive but be driven; and more, all
symptoms of it let us change into just the opposite. Let the countenance be
unruffled, let the voice be gentle, the step very slow; gradually the inner man
conforms to the outer (3.13.1â“3)
Such recommendations directly contradict the dynamics of anger
shown in âA Poison Tree,â where âsoft deceitful wilesâ inflame anger
instead of gradually dousing it. For Seneca, secrecy is the path to trans-
formation, but Blake blames secrecy for the perpetuation of error. Yet
both authors believe that anger âshould not drive but be drivenâ; both
want to eliminate personal anger and revenge in order to free men from
uncontrolled emotional reaction that promotes violence towards mind
and body. Like the Stoic sage whose ideal is immunity to the worldâ™s
promptings to emotional reaction, Blake scorns the loss of imagination
attendant upon reactive emotions. Both see anger as capitulation, the
result of a misguided attachment to the mundane or to the narrow
selfhood; both recommend more acute perception as the cure. Blake turns
Inflammatory reactions 79
to art to effect this refocusing, while the Stoics turn to reason. In De Ira,
angerâ™s irrational torsions threaten Stoic constantia; in Blake, angerâ™s
predictable constancy thwarts the transformation of self and world.
Writing on forgiveness in Blake, Jeanne Moskal has occasion to quote
Hannah Arendt: âIn contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic
reaction to transgression, forgiveness can never be predicted . . . Forgive-
ness, in other words, is the only reaction which does not react but acts
anew and unexpectedly.â27 While Blakeâ™s opinion of forgiveness is more
ambivalent, as Moskal has shown, he shares Arendtâ™s view of revenge as
reaction, and disapproves whole-heartedly of it;28 for above all else, Blake
favors emotional priority, which is another name for imaginative self-
creation. Reactive emotions, or passions as passive responses, are inevit-
ably part of a cycle of opacity, a mill of death with complicated wheels.
Just as he emphasizes freedom and the horrors of restraint, Blake evinces
an equivalent disapproval of reaction, the automatic passions that subject
the imagination to the actions of another. As he writes in âAuguries of
Innocence,â âTo be in a Passion you Good may do / But no Good if a
Passion is in youâ (E, 492): To possess emotional energy is positive, to be
possessed by it is not.
Blakeâ™s conception of fallen anger as a reactionary and therefore un-
desirable emotion emerges in part from the historical nexus of the late
eighteenth century. The events of the Ninth of Thermidor and the
subsequent execution of Robespierre in July of 1794 signaled the end of
the French Revolution and beginning of the reaction. Indeed, the French
´
term âreactionnaireâ emerged during this period as a designation for the
growing counterrevolutionary sentiment, exempliď¬ed by the White
Terror of 1795.29 As George Lefebvre writes of that period, âThe reaction-
aries . . . hoped to take vengeance on the Jacobins and Sans-Culottes by
turning the Terror against them,â vengeance that Isnard would neologis-
´
tically label âcrimes reactionnairesâ in 1796.30 Thus the representatives of
the Revolutionary government seized semantic priority by relegating the
maneuvers of their enemies to âreaction,â or belated response. Recogniz-
ing the importance of such designations, the party of reaction banned the
´
use of the word revolutionnaire in June of 1795.31 Two decades later, the
word âreactionâ in its political sense began to appear in English writings.
In Old Mortality, Scott writes of âthat perpetuating of factious quarrels,
which is called in modern times Reactionâ; and in the same year (1815) the
Edinburgh Review, in praising the early days of Napoleonâ™s leadership,
stated that âall men dreaded what the French call a reaction.â32 In both
cases, usage indicates that the political meaning of the word was a
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
80
relatively new addition to the language, retaining overtones of angry
retaliation and cycles of revenge, which Blake deplored.
In fact, Blake uses the word âreactionâ only once in his works: in
Jerusalem, as the voice of âDivine Visionâ says in condemnation,
The Reactor hath hid himself thro envy. I behold him.
But you cannot behold him till he be reveald in his System
Albions Reactor must have a Place prepard: Albion must Sleep
The Sleep of Death, till the Man of Sin & Repentance be reveald.
Hidden in Albions Forests he lurks; he admits of no Reply
From Albion: but hath founded his Reaction into a Law
Of Action, for Obedience to destroy the Contraries of Man[.]
He hath compelld Albion to become a Punisher . . . (E, 191)
Northrop Frye writes of this passage, âSatan, Blake says, is a â˜Reactorâ™;
he never acts, he only reacts; he never sees, he always has to be shown; and
if our attitude to what we see is â˜reactionaryâ™ we are done forâ â“ that is,
doomed because another does (or acts) for us.33 According to Erdman,
the âReactorâ also resembles the vengeful Jehovah, whose eye-for-an-eye
example has led England to reactionary and retributive policies towards
France (Prophet, 470). Here, reaction is explicitly associated with ven-
geance and punishment, with a state of anger founded upon a defen-
sive and watchful pacing of boundaries and characterized by an inherently
belated responsiveness. Blake wants instead an anger that is an assistant to
his imaginative will, an emotion that is active and revolutionary, that
privileges the trope, the metaphorical turning that escapes the dull
round of history and the single vision of Newton, whose third law of
motion in the Principia makes âreactionâ a primary structuring force of
the universe.
Blakeâ™s attitude towards action and reaction is further informed by
his reading of Swedenborg. In a copy of The Wisdom of Angels concern-
ing Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788), Blake noted the following
passage:
There is from God in every created Thing a Reaction, Life alone hath Action,
and Reaction is excited by the Action of Life: This Reaction appears as if it
appertained to the created Being, because it exists when the Being is acted upon;
thus in Man it appears as if it was his own, because he does not perceive any
otherwise than that Life is his own, when nevertheless Man is only a Recipient of
Life. From this Cause it is, that Man, from his own hereditary Evil, reacts against
God; but so far as he believes that all his Life is from God, and every Good of
Life from the Action of God, and every Evil of Life from the Reaction of Man,
Reaction thus becomes correspondent with Action, and Man acts with God as
Inflammatory reactions 81
from himself. The Equilibrium of all Things is from Action and joint Reaction,
and every Thing must be in Equilibrium.34
According to Swedenborg, God alone acts and man merely reacts;
manâ™s âhereditary Evilâ leads him to react against God, while believing
he is acting originally. To overcome this state of affairs, Swedenborg
suggests, man must accept his own reactive nature, subordinating himself
to Godâ™s action, which then flows through man in such a way that reactive
man may paradoxically act âwith God as from himself.â For Swedenborg,
this âEquilibriumâ is true freedom. In the margin of his copy of The
Wisdom of Angels, next to this passage, Blake writes, âGood & Evil are
here both Good & the two contraries Marriedâ (E, 604). He recognizes
that the marriage or equilibrium presented by Swedenborg transforms
reaction into a species of action â“ precisely Blakeâ™s project in regard to
anger and wrath, as we have seen. Yet Blake seems to have come to
recognize in Swedenborg an afď¬nity with Newton, and soon rejects a
system requiring reaction to explain existence: what looks like incarnation
of the divine act reveals itself as mere ventriloquism. Blake sees that the
claim, âMan acts with God as from himself,â means not âas well as from
himself,â but âas if from himself.â The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
enacts Blakeâ™s rejection of this system and its sponsor.
Ultimately, the distinction between reactive anger and active wrath
determines much of Blakeâ™s work, particularly the prophetic books. The
crowning example occurs at the conclusion of Jerusalem, where he envi-
sions the awakening of Albion from his sleep of imaginative and spiritual
torpor, a moment heralding apocalyptic transformation. On plate 94,
we ď¬nd Albion âon his Rock: storms & snows beat round himâ and
âThe weeds of Death inwrap his hands & feetâ (E, 254). All seems
lost, until Brittaniaâ™s lament enters âAlbionâ™s clay cold ear; he moved
upon the Rockâ (E, 254); and as âthe Breath Divine went forth upon the
morning hills,â
. . . Albion rose
In anger: the wrath of God breaking bright flaming on all sides around
His awful limbs: into the Heavens he walked clothed in flames
Loud thundring, with broad flashes of flaming lightning & pillars
Of ď¬re, speaking the Words of Eternity in Human Forms, in direful
Revolutions of Action & Passion . . . (E, 255)
Albion literally rouses himself to anger here, partaking of the wrath of
God and taking his place at the end of a line of prophets who spoke their
own wrathful âWords of Eternity.â As in Biblical eschatology, history
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
82
ends on a dies irae, with an angry roar, not a whimper.35 Yet, as Erdman
has noted, âthe motif of Jerusalem is peace without vengeanceâ (Prophet,
462). Albionâ™s apocalyptic wrath must be something other than the
emotional reaction Los fears when he exclaims, âO Albion, if thou takest
vengeance; if thou revengest thy wrongs / Thou art forever lost!â (E, 194).
His rising anger must be distinct from both the unspoken wrath of
âA Poison Tree,â which grows to produce deadly fruit, and the vicious
curses of Tiriel against his children. Here, at the conclusion to Jerusalem,
Blake offers an anger that is redeemed from fallen cycles of vengeance and
frustration, a wrath untainted by Urizenic (and Homeric) retribution.
Blake is fundamentally concerned with creating a structure for, while
working within, this âbright flamingâ wrath that produces âWords of
Eternityâ and âdireful / Revolutions of Action & Passion.â
The conclusion of Jerusalem thus illuminates the differences between
this redeemed anger that ends historical strife and the fallen anger that
precipitates it. Speciď¬cally, Blakeâ™s rendering of apocalypse in the last ď¬ve
plates of Jerusalem presents the culmination of a symbolic theme that runs
through Blakeâ™s prophetic writings: the bow and arrows of flaming gold â“
the weapons of the prophet and vehicles of divine wrath. Albion rises like
the sun, âbright flaming,â âupon the morning hills,â and the wrath of
God is seen âbreakingâ with the day; Blake makes the identiď¬cation
explicit:
. . . Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds
Struggling to rise above the Mountains; in his burning hand
He takes his Bow, then chooses out his arrows of flaming gold
Murmuring the Bowstring breathes with ardor! clouds roll round the
Horns of the wide Bow, loud sounding winds sport on the mountain brows.
(E, 255)
Albion has become a wrathful Apollo; but for Blake, Apollo is one of the
âdetestable gods of Priamâ (Milton, E, 108), equivalent to Apollyon, the
Destroyer in the Book of Revelation. Blake knew that the history and
literary history of the West begins with a fall into anger, enacted by Apollo
and related in Homerâ™s Iliad. Although we hear of Achillesâ™ wrath ď¬rst,
Apollo and his priest introduce the angry cycle of vengeance that occupies
both the epic and the fallen history of mankind. In Book One of the Iliad,
Apollo, hearing the prayer of his priest for revenge,
. . . strode down along the pinnacles of Olympos, angered
in his heart, carrying across his shoulders the bow and the hooded
quiver; and the shafts clashed on the shoulders of the god walking
Inflammatory reactions 83
angrily. He came as night comes down and knelt then
apart and opposite the ships and let go an arrow.
Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.36
Albion rises like the sun and Apollo descends like night, both bringing
stormy weather with them.37 The murmuring thunder of each bow
becomes a prophetic ď¬at, Apolloâ™s heralding a fall into one kind of anger
and Albionâ™s indicating redemption by means of another. Apolloâ™s arrows
literally carry plague to the Greek camp; they also bring vengeful anger in
a trajectory of contagious reaction. In Jerusalem, Blake asserts Albionâ™s
wrathful bowshot as the cure.
Plates 97 and 98 of Jerusalem present Albionâ™s apocalyptic archery most
thoroughly:
. . . Then Albion stretchd his hand into Inď¬nitude
And took his Bow. Fourfold the Vision for bright beaming Urizen
Layd his hand on the South & took a breathing Bow of carved Gold
Luvah his hand stretchâ™d to the East & bore a Silver Bow bright shining:
Tharmas Westward a Bow of Brass pure flaming richly wrought:
Urthona Northward in thick storms a Bow of Iron terrible thundering.
And a Bow is a Male & Female & the Quiver of the Arrows of Love,
Are the Children of this Bow: a Bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness: laying
Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence Wars of Love
And the Hand of Man grasps ď¬rm between the Male & Female Loves
And he Clothed himself in Bow & Arrows in awful state Fourfold
In the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities, each with his Bow breathing
Then each an Arrow flaming from his Quiver ď¬tted carefully
They drew fourfold the unreprovable String, bending thro the wide Heavens
The horned Bow Fourfold, loud sounding flew the flaming Arrow fourfold.
Murmuring the Bow-string breathes with ardor. Clouds roll round the horns
Of the wide Bow, loud sounding Winds sport on the Mountains brows:
The Druid Spectre was Annihilate loud thundring rejoicing terriď¬c vanishing
Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect
The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven
And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & Chaucer
A Sun of blood red wrath surrounding heaven on all sides around,
Glorious incompreh[en]sible by Mortal Man . . . (E, 256â“7)
Uniquely here, the four Zoas (or states of Albion) â“ Urizen, Luvah,
Tharmas, and Urthona â“ act in one accord, indicating Albionâ™s âFourfold
visionâ as a function of political unity; out of many, one. Thus, this weapon
is âunreprovableâ: undeserving of blame and free from cycles of retali-
ation. The âflaming Arrow fourfoldâ that Albion lets fly is one of âLove,â
or redeemed desire, and âIntellect,â or redeemed reason, uniting even
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
84
Locke and Milton. These forces will transform the destructive strife of
mankind, exempliď¬ed by the Trojan War in Homer and the warring Zoas
in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas, into âWars of mutual benevolence, Wars
of Loveâ conducted within a glorious âSun of blood red wrath.â Epic
anger gives place to apocalyptic wrath.
As we have seen, the Blakean hero is necessarily inflamed
(think of Rintrah shaking his ď¬res in The Marriage, for example) and
transgressive, always breaking chains, circles, and horizons in outbursts
of self-created rage. As such, he enacts a particularly anti-classical, post-
Christian variety of the sublime. As an analogue, we might consider
´
how Chateaubriand, in his monumental and influential Genie du Chris-
tianisme (1802; English trans., 1815), praises the sublime of the Bible over
that of Homer in Longinian (and Blakean) terms: âthe sublime in Homer
commonly arises from the general combination of the parts, and
arrives by degrees at its acme. In the Bible it is always unexpected; it
bursts upon you like lightning, and you are left wounded by the thunder-
bolt before you know how you were struck by it.â38 Homer is indeed
âvanquishedâ by the Bible, âin such a manner as to leave criticism no
possible subterfugeâ (362). Milton too defeats Homer in Chateaubriandâ™s
account of the sublime, for Homerâ™s âmarvellous and all his grandeur
are nevertheless eclipsed by the marvellous of Christianityâ (330), a judg-
ment Chateaubriand supports by citing Satanâ™s transgressive journey
from Hell to Earth in Paradise Lost, 2â“3. âSatan speeding his course from
the depths of Chaos up to the frontiers of natureâ is âa sublime species
of the marvellousâ (333), precisely because of Satanâ™s mighty extroversion.
In the midst of the passage Chateaubriand abstracts, Miltonâ™s God
observes Satanâ™s movements:
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversary, whom no bounds
Prescribed, no bars of hell, nor all the chains
Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desperate revenge, that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way39
For both Chateaubriand and Blake, transporting rage that bursts bound-
aries constitutes the style of the prophetic sublime, which surpasses the
heroic sublime of Homeric epic. Like Blakeâ™s Albion, who ârose / In
anger: the wrath of God breaking bright flaming on all sides around / His
Inflammatory reactions 85
awful limbs . . . / Loud thundring with flashes of flaming lightningâ
(E, 255), the sublime of the Bible and Milton âbursts upon you like
lightningâ in a wrathful moment of explosion. Blake, however, wants to
replace Miltonâ™s ď¬guration of the sublime in Satan, here a misplaced epic
hero seeking âdesperate revenge,â with a divine wrath, transgressive rather
than vengeful or regulatory, that will enact apocalypse as a ď¬gure for his
own sublime style.
William Blakeâ™s prophetic moment consists in an escape from angerâ™s
bonds by way of wrathâ™s energies. As Morton Paley has written of wrath in
Blakeâ™s conception, âthe poet aspiring towards prophecy perceives and
ď¬xes its terrible energies as sublimeâ; the anger of the prophet enables this
transgressive discourse of sublimity.40 Vincent A. De Luca ď¬nds that
Blake views the sublime âas a turbulent, subversive, indecorous force, a
surpassing of conventions and reasonable limitsâ™,â a deď¬nition all but
indistinguishable from Blakeâ™s view of prophetic wrath.41 Reactive anger
amounts to âSingle vision & Newtons sleepâ (E, 722), while prophetic
wrath suggests a fourfold vision at once satiric, apocalyptic, transgressive,
and sublime. Further, the sublime is not merely energy, but rather a
dialectical structure involving both containment and eruption. The turn
from bondage to liberation, and from anger to wrath, constitutes the
Blakean sublime, which resides in that continually reď¬gured trope. As
Blake states in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, âReason is the bound or
outward circumference of Energyâ (E, 34). Under a similar assumption,
Longinus asserts, âThere is no tone so lofty as that of genuine passion, in
its right place, when it bursts out in a wild gust of mad enthusiasm.â42
Blake and Longinus both approve of outbursts in the right places. In an
oscillation between the centripetal binding agent (usually reason) and the
centrifugal force of transgression (passion or imagination), the sublime
moment and the scene of anger ď¬nd a common dynamic structure.
At the end of A Song of Liberty, the epilogue to The Marriage, a ď¬ery
revolutionary ď¬gure confronts a âjealous kingâ, and cursing gives
way to energetic eruption (E, 44). As the poem concludes, the wrathful
ď¬gure, âSpurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to
dustâ while âloosing the eternal horses from the dens of night crying, /
Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall ceaseâ (E, 45).
Directly underneath these lines, as Erdman has pointed out, âthe text is
illuminated with dashing and prancing horsesâ (Prophet, 195). These are
Blakeâ™s horses of wrath, analogues of the four horses of Revelation that are
released on the dies irae. Erdman sees these horses from A Song of Liberty
as products of the marriage of Reason and Energy, or a synthesis of the
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
86
âtygers of wrathâ and âthe horses of instruction,â cited in Blakeâ™s The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (E, 37), with the result that âThe era of the
beasts of prey gives way to the era of the untethered horses of the intellectâ
(Prophet, 195). The âson of ď¬reâ probably speaks the prophetic concluding
line, again involving the discourse of inflammation with revolutionary
rage; but the syntax allows us to attribute it to the âeternal horsesâ
themselves, who prophesy the end of history as they shake off their fetters,
representing the transgressive, anti-reactionary energies of Blakean anger.
Ultimately, the virtually constant pairing of wrath and ď¬re in Blakeâ™s
work has a basis in both classical and Biblical models, even as such
imagery is shaped by a discourse of anger and inflammation in the public
sphere of the 1790s. For Blake, questions of history and eschatology linked
these influences: how can vengeful, circular anger be transformed into
creative, forward-looking wrath? Can inflammation be both a reactive
symptom and a self-originating agent of change? What vision of anger
will bring us closer to the world we desire? The Romantic period con-
fronted such concerns at an unprecedented level of urgency, as revolution
and its media continually demonstrated and asserted the power of anger
(as a human phenomenon, as a conceptual category, as a rhetorical device)
to reshape society and the lives of men. In Blakeâ™s work, the transď¬gura-
tion of epic anger by means of apocalyptic wrath produced a kind of
prophetic blaze, a shaking of ď¬res in an air burdened with assumptions
about anger that threatened art, the spirit of revolution, and, thus for
Blake, the human form divine.
chapter 4
Provocation and the plot of anger
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
â“ Blake, âA Poison Treeâ
William Blakeâ™s âA Poison Treeâ suggests that acting upon anger puts an
end to plot; whether we tell or wreak our wrath, its expression is antithet-
ical to calculated narratives. As Philip Fisher says, anger is a fundamentally
rash emotion precisely at odds with the âworld of plots.â1 On the other
hand, the same poem presents the cultivation of angry passions as de-
pendent upon the secret plotting of the speaker, whose hunger for
vengeance grows in proportion to the narrativeâ™s deferral of satisfaction.
In other words, in Blakeâ™s poem, anger both requires plots and disables
them. This double vision is symptomatic of a broader, historically speciď¬c
oscillation in British conceptions of anger during the 1790s, due primarily
to the influence of the French Revolution and the ways it was discussed.
In English political, medical, and legal discourse of the period, we ď¬nd a
remarkable alignment of changing attitudes towards rage in the wake of
the Revolution, as a fear of popular anger permeated the culture. As
revolutionary anger was being demonized as irrational, destructive rage
in conservative political discourse, inflammation (of the body and body
politic) was being reconceptualized as a dangerous disease in metaphorical
and medical terms.2 To this extent, the plot of anger was being written as
a blind and rash trajectory â“ the arc of shrapnel in the explosion. On the
other hand, a parallel discourse depicted the radical leaders as pursuing a
conscious, calculating program of wrath against the state, a plot of anger
as sharply directed as a knife in the back. Furthermore, it remained a
question of some importance to the Revolution debates whether British
subjects were discontented (i.e., angry) because of rational causes, such as
87
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
88
their lack of representation in Parliament, or because they had been
inflamed by radical rhetoric that blinded them to their best interests.
Was their anger a rational exercise of the will to advance the nation
towards reform, or a mindless response to demagoguery, one that
followed only a trajectory of destruction?
These questions underlie much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of
reform in England during this period, and answers to them overspill the
bounds of political debate into other disciplinary arenas. More speciď¬-
cally, and for my purposes here, changes in the way English courts judged
cases of provocation follow the contours of the debate, suggesting a large-
scale shift in national consciousness. As Jeremy Horder has shown, a new
legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century had its basis in a
changing conception of anger:
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the law ceased to describe anger in
terms of outrage, the conception of anger in which reason plays the dominant
role in guiding action. The law instead described it in terms of a loss of self-
control . . . according to which passions overwhelm the power of reason, leaving
people at the mercy of their desires for retaliatory suffering.3
As a result, defendants who could establish that they killed in anger
were assumed to have been out of control and thus not fully culpable for
their actions. Just as medical doctors were redeď¬ning inflammation from
curative symptom to irrational disease, lawyers and judges were rethinking
outbursts of anger as ď¬ts of madness rather than exercises of the will. In
this account, angerâ™s narrative logic â“ a perceived injury followed by a
desire for retaliation and an expression of that desire â“ becomes an
automatic reaction that usually thwarts oneâ™s larger interests, rather than
a rationally pursued path in keeping with the self and its desires: the angry
man kills his best friend; the British worker pulls down the political
structures that have sustained him. Of course, the paradox of this new
legal dispensation is that as it reduces the defendantâ™s culpability, it
ampliď¬es his error: the angry murderer is less guilty (because he is out
of control), but also less human, more pathetic, more self-destructive.
The work of William Godwin nicely reflects these developments in the
history of anger, politics, the law, and narrative. Following the publica-
tion of Caleb Williams in 1794, Godwin imagined that two of his next
projects would be âObservations on the Revolution in Franceâ and a âLife
of Alexander the Great.â4 Neither was actually completed, but both were
clearly prepared for in his novel. Much has been made of its revolutionary
(or in any case, politically radical) themes,5 and I suggest that the ď¬gure of
Provocation and the plot of anger 89
Alexander as he appears in Caleb Williams provides a key to Godwinâ™s
attitudes towards anger and provocation, revolution and reform â“ ones
quite in keeping with the new Stoicism of the 1790s. This is true particu-
larly with regard to the legend in which Alexander rashly kills his good
friend Clitus after being provoked by his invective during a drunken
banquet.6 By Godwinâ™s era, the legend was already well-worn as an
illustrative example. Looking back, in the Biographia Literaria, on his
boyhood education in the classics at Christâ™s Hospital, Coleridge remem-
bers âthe example of Alexander and Clytusâ being forbidden as a simile by
his schoolmaster James Bowyer, since it âwas equally good and apt,
whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!â“
Flattery? Alexander and Clytus! â“ Anger? Drunkenness? Pride? Friend-
ship? Ingratitude? Late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus!â7
Bowyerâ™s objection lies in the various applicability of this ancient anec-
dote which plays an important role in Godwinâ™s Caleb Williams (1794),
where its applicability â“ that is, the recognition of it as an apt allusion â“ is
precisely at issue. Pace Bowyer, I want to unfold the Alexanderâ“Clitus
story as a ď¬gure indicating Godwinâ™s thoughts on anger, particularly in
relation to the intemperate political climate of the 1790s and current
conceptions of anger and provocation. Furthermore, Mary Shelleyâ™s
Frankenstein provides a useful post-Revolutionary counterpoint to the
questions of provocation involved in her fatherâ™s work, a topic explored
at chapterâ™s end. In Godwinâ™s novel, Caleb alludes to the story of
Alexander and Clitus and thus points to a plot of anger that structures
both the novel-as-narrative and revolutionary politics as Godwin saw
them. Ultimately, like so much of the writing of this period, Caleb
Williams is concerned with the tyrannous consequences of uncontroll-
ed rage: for leaders, for rebels, and for political communities. In
Godwinâ™s hands, a biography of Alexander and observations on the
French Revolution would have had this same set of concerns at heart.
In Caleb Williams, during his early residence with Falkland, Caleb
claims that he often found himself in the midst of conversations with his
master that touched upon Falklandâ™s âsecret woundâ: his guilt over
the murder of Tyrrel.8 As the most memorable example, he tells of a
discussion on the merits of Alexander the Great, one that reveals much
about the two interlocutors. Citing Prideaux 9 and Fielding10 as prece-
dents, Caleb disparages Alexander as a âGreat Cut-throat,â âwho has spread
destruction and ruin over the face of nationsâ (Caleb Williams, 111).
Falkland, on the other hand, offers a spirited defense of the conqueror
as âgallant, generous, and free,â a âmodel of honour, generosity, and
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
90
disinterestednessâ who âset out in a great undertaking to civilise mankindâ
(111). The conversation proceeds amiably enough until Caleb makes the
following all-too-applicable remarks:
what is worse, sir, this Alexander in the paroxysm of his headlong rage
spared neither friend nor foe. You will not pretend to justify the excesses
of his ungovernable passion. It is impossible sure that a word can be said for
a man whom a momentary provocation can hurry into the commission of
murders . . . (112; my emphasis)
Hearing in this an allusion to his own vengeful murder of Tyrrel,
Falkland is stricken: âThe blood forsook at once the transparent com-
plexion of Mr. Falkland, and then rushed back again with rapidity and
ď¬ercenessâ (112). He attempts a stammering defense of Alexander, and
seems eager to dismiss the topic, but Caleb cannot resist probing the
wound with a more pointed allusion: âClitus, said I, was man of very
coarse and provoking manners, was he not?â (113). Again, Falklandâ™s
reaction is immediate and physical; he glares at Caleb, is âseized with a
convulsive shuddering,â and then âstrode about the room in anger, his
visage gradually assumed an expression as of supernatural barbarity, he
quitted the apartment abruptly, and flung the door with a violence that
seemed to shake the houseâ (113). The episode marks Calebâ™s âadvancing
to the brink of the precipice,â as his curiosity dooms him to Falklandâ™s
wrathful persecution (113).
Calebâ™s negative view of Alexander initially seems to be an echo of
Godwinâ™s own. In Political Justice, Godwin writes of him as a monarch
who had employed âbloodshed, violence and murderâ for the purpose âof
enslaving mankind,â and notes that âThe conquests of Alexander cost
innumerable lives.â11 Yet evidence suggests a more ambiguous opinion,
one that moderates this view with that of Falkland. Later in Political
Justice, Godwin paraphrases a âcommon opinionâ of the âschool of
adversity,â which is that âthe mixed, and, upon the whole, the vicious,
yet accomplishedâ character of Alexander was formed in his struggles
with âinjustice and persecutionâ (i i :7). Godwin goes on to refute the
necessity of adversity for the creation of virtue, but does not challenge this
âmixedâ characterization. In addition, in Godwinâ™s History of Greece:
From the Earliest Records of that Country to the Time in which it was
reduced into a Roman Province (published in 1822 under the pseudonym
Edward Baldwin), he writes sympathetically, âThe reign of Alexander
could not be omitted in the history of Greece: he was one of the
most extraordinary persons which that memorable portion of the earth
Provocation and the plot of anger 91
produced, and his character must be considered as the offspring of
the institutions and achievements of the Greeksâ (quoted in Mace,
âHercules and Alexander,â 42). Finally, in the language of Falklandâ™s
defense of Alexander, we hear sentiments of which Godwin would have
approved. When Falkland says, âIt is mind, Williams, the generation of
knowledge and virtue that we ought to love,â and praises Alexander as âa
true and judicious lover of mankindâ (Caleb Williams, 111â“12), he recalls
Godwinâ™s Political Justice, in which âmindâ plays a central role in Godwinâ™s
scheme of a just society (e.g., i :25â“26). As he puts it in that work, glowingly,
âto raise those who are abased; to communicate to every man all true
wisdom, and to make all men participators of a liberal and comprehensive
benevolence. This is the path in which the reformers of mankind ought to
travel. This is the prize they should pursueâ (i :448). Calebâ™s perennial
sympathy for and devotion for Falkland throughout the novel perhaps
ď¬gures Godwinâ™s own conflicted attitude towards Alexander, and towards
elitism generally.12
Yet beyond noting the basic association of Falkland with Alexander,
critics have paid little attention to the contours of this conversation, and
particularly to the implications of Calebâ™s allusion to Clitus. Mace only
states that âFalklandâ™s identiď¬cation with Alexander is most apparent
when he reacts violently to Calebâ™s mention of Clitusâ (âHercules and
Alexander,â 41). Given Falklandâ™s preoccupation with his own guilt, one
assumes that this is so because Clitus reminds him of Tyrrel, another
provoking victim. But actually the Tyrrelâ“Clitus comparison is not a
particularly apt one. After all, Clitus was Alexanderâ™s intimate friend of
long standing, who had saved his life in the past, thus making the murder
all the more egregious. In contrast, Tyrrel and Falkland were decided
enemies at the time of Tyrrelâ™s death. Falkland does not regret the loss of
Tyrrel, but of his own chivalric image of himself â“ whereas Alexander
sincerely mourns Clitus.13 Thus there is something curious in Falklandâ™s
instant recognition of the Clitus allusion as applicable to his own situation
with Tyrrel. In fact, it reveals a more appropriate analogy that Falkland
may glimpse simultaneously: Caleb as Clitus.
After all, both Caleb and Clitus are devoted assistants who unadvisedly
provoke their powerful masters to ď¬ts of destructive rage. Further, both
accomplish this by means of allusion. The substance of Clitusâ™ reproaches
and taunts varies with the historian, but all agree he disparaged
Alexanderâ™s egotism and his refusal to share credit appropriately with
those under his command. Plutarch and Quintus Curtius Rufus are two
of the primary classical sources of the tale, both of which Godwin knew.14
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
92
According to them, Clitusâ™ remarks involved his alluding to a passage
from Euripidesâ™ Andromache beginning, âOh, how perverse customs are in
Greece!â and which continues,
When the army sets up trophies over an enemy, people do not regard this as the
deed of those who have done the work. Instead the general receives the honor.
He brandished his spear as one man among countless others and did no more
than a single warrior, yet he gets more credit. And sitting arrogantly in ofď¬ce in
the city they think grander thoughts than the common people, though they are
worthless. The people would be far superior to them in wisdom if they acquired
daring and will.15
Plutarch reports that Clitus sang out only the ď¬rst line, which so
enraged Alexander that he slew him with a spear. Similarly, Curtius Rufus
(in the edition owned by Godwin) notes that before being killed, Clytus
was ârehearsyng verses of Euripides . . . The effect of them was, that the
Greekes dyd evyll, whiche in the monumentes of their victoryes, did
subscribe onely the names of theyr kynges, whiche usurped the glorye to
them selves that other menne dyd winne by sheadyng of theyr bloudeâ
(Actes of the Great Alexander, 151). Just as Alexander hears a maddening
accusation in the quotation, Falkland hears one in Calebâ™s allusion to this
ancient scene of provocation and wrath. In such a mirrored echo chamber,
Caleb becomes Clitus in the moment of alluding to him.
The burden of the Euripides passage is a challenge to aristocratic
elitism, precisely what Caleb challenges in Alexander, and thus implicitly
in Falkland, during their conversation. Caleb asks Falkland, for example,
âBut shall I forget what a vast expence was bestowed in erecting the
monument of his fame? . . . How many hundred thousands of lives did
he sacriď¬ce in his career?â â“ to which Falkland answers, âwhat in reality
are a hundred thousand such men more than a hundred thousand sheep?â
(Caleb Williams, 111). In a sense, therefore, both Clitus and Caleb can
claim a revolutionary consciousness, objecting to an unfair distribution of
goods and evils in the service of tyrannical desires. As is immediately
evident when Caleb raises the topic, Alexanderâ™s reputation is close to
Falklandâ™s heart, Clitus or no; the Macedonian ruler represents everything
â“ the rule of âhonor, generosity, and disinterestedness,â âlearning, sens-
ibility, and taste,â a âcultivated liberality of mind,â a commitment to
âknowledge and virtueâ â“ that Falkland hugs so dearly (110â“11). Yet all of
these attributes are based in Falklandâ™s commitment to aristocratic chiv-
alry and noblesse oblige, both of which involve a view of common men as
âsheep.â So for Falkland, Calebâ™s invocation of Clitus brings forth not
only the specter of Tyrrel, but also of revolutionary dissent (in the person
Provocation and the plot of anger 93
of Caleb himself ), predicated on the âungovernable passionsâ indulged by
the aristocracy.
In this confrontation with Caleb, Falkland reveals himself as trapped in
a recurrent cycle of provocation and reaction, again playing Alexander to
anotherâ™s Clitus. His angry pacing, his âexpression of supernatural bar-
barity,â and his violent door-slamming in response to Calebâ™s words are
the prelude to his destructive persecution of his devoted secretary. As
Caleb himself puts it after being told the truth, âHe killed Mr. Tyrrel, for
he could not control his resentment and anger . . . how can I expect that a
man thus passionate and unrelenting will not sooner or later make me his
victim?â (137). In conď¬rmation of this, we soon ď¬nd Falkland informing
Caleb, âI shall crush you in the end with the same indifference that I
would any other little insect that disturbed my serenity . . . miscreant!
reptile! . . . cease to contend with insurmountable power!â (153â“54). Along
with Tyrrelâ™s similar failing, Falklandâ™s inability to defuse his rage be-
comes the prime mover of the tragedy that ensues. And like Alexander,
Falkland learns to lament his wrath.
In fact, Godwinâ™s novel, and particularly volume i , might fairly be read
as a primer on the wages of anger. Initially Falkland appears as the soul of
restraint, placating Count Malvesi, who is âdrunk with cholerâ upon
suspecting Lucretiaâ™s inď¬delity. Yet even here he warns Malvesi, âMy
temper is not less impetuous and ď¬ery than your own, and it is not at
all times that I should have been thus able to subdue itâ (15). These are
prophetic words, put to the test by means of Barnabas Tyrrel, whose envy
and aversion regarding Falkland produce torments of anger for both men.
Tyrrel himself does little besides nurse resentment and indulge in angry
outbursts. We see him as he âbrooded . . . in the recesses of a malignant
mindâ (23), and âseemed ready to burst with gall and indignationâ (26);
he says of Falkland, âI should be glad to see him torn with tenter-hooks,
and to grind his heart-strings with my teethâ (37); he curses Emily for
defying him, and âhis despotic and unforgiving propensities stimulated
him to a degree little short of madnessâ (57); âfoaming with rage,â he
curses Hawkins, claiming âI will suffer nobody to stop the stream of my
resentmentâ (77). Godwin informs us that âvengeance was his nightly
dream, and the uppermost in his waking thoughtsâ (78), and that he âwas
under the dominion of an uncontrollable furyâ (85). Even after Emilyâ™s
death, âhis rage was unbounded and raving. He repelled every attack with
the ď¬ercest indignationâ (93), and ultimately gives Falkland a beating in a
ď¬t of drunken rage. This last detail â“ Tyrrelâ™s intoxication â“ connects
again to the Alexanderâ“Clitus story, in which anger and alcohol both
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
94
ď¬gure to produce a dangerous loss of self-control. Under the influence of
these two inflammatory agents, Tyrrel acts to demonstrate Godwinâ™s Stoic
horror at their destructive power. Falklandâ™s forbearance gives way, and he
murders Tyrrel in the street.
Or does he? In fact a strong case could have been made at the time for
mitigating Falklandâ™s offence to manslaughter, rather than murder. Be-
cause of the legal changes that Horder has traced, provocation to anger
was a viable defense against charges of premeditation, and had been so
since the latter half of the eighteenth century. This alteration was thus less
a reaction to conceptual changes introduced by the French Revolution
and the ensuing debate, than a parallel development that helped conď¬rm
(and was itself strengthened by) the widespread reimagining of anger as
irrational rage in the Revolutionary era â“ what Karen Weisman calls in her
article on provocation and Romanticism the ânewly emergent conceptual-
izations of the angry agent.â16 For example, in successfully defending âthe
Wicked Lordâ Byron (the poetâ™s great-uncle) against a murder charge,
Solicitor General William de Grey argued in 1765: âan ungovernable
transport of passion will so far alleviate the crime, as to make that, which
would otherwise have been murder, and a capital offence, manslaughter
only . . . This is a condescension the law shews to the frailties of the
human mind, which upon great and sudden provocations cannot com-
mand itself, nor maintain its reason.â17 By the 1790s, virtually all crimes
committed in anger could be defended as having been performed in âan
ungovernable transport of passion,â since that was what âangerâ had
increasingly come to mean. In these terms, Falkland killed Tyrrel in a
passionate ď¬t of rage brought on by the overwhelming provocation of
Tyrrelâ™s beating him in public. In fact, Tyrrel had doubly offended by
affronting Falklandâ™s honor and initiating a physical assault, each of
which alone was held by legal authorities to be sufď¬cient to induce an
angry loss of self control (Horder, Provocation and Responsibility, 92â“94).
Making his admission to Caleb, Falkland says, âInsulted, disgraced, pol-
luted in the face of hundreds, I was capable of any act of desperationâ
(Caleb Williams, 135), and Caleb concludes to himself, âHe killed
Mr. Tyrrel, for he could not control his resentment and angerâ (136â“67).
Furthermore, Falklandâ™s attack followed close on the heels of the beating,
one of the requisite points for establishing an angry loss of self-control. He
âfollowed Mr. Tyrrel from the rooms,â implying that there was no time for
his blood to have cooled in the interim; and Tyrrel, after all, âwas found
by some of the company dead in the street, having been murdered at the
distance of a few yards from the assembly houseâ (95; my emphasis). The
Provocation and the plot of anger 95
immediacy of Falklandâ™s retaliation would have served him well in miti-
gating the charge of murder in an eighteenth-century court of law.18
However, for Falkland, reputation is the only consideration, and guilt
for manslaughter is as insupportable as guilt for murder: both in this case
imply a cowardly and dishonorable (although perhaps excusable) action.
He covers up his crime not because he fears the gallows, but because he
wants to protect his famed honor â“ honor which has in fact been vitiated
by his vengeful wrath. As a man of chivalry in the Italian mode, Falkland
has two options to settle the affair with Tyrrel: call him into the ď¬eld or, if
he is unworthy of such gentlemanly treatment, hire âbravoesâ to assassin-
ate him (11). In his anger, Falkland falls between these two stools,
attacking the unprepared Tyrrel from behind like any hired killer. Para-
doxically, his anger over the loss of public honor entailed in the beating
causes him to commit a deeply dishonorable act.
As a critique of chivalric passions, Godwinâ™s novel proceeds to reveal the
dangerous connections between honor and anger. Earlier, Falkland had
admitted the personality trait he shares with Tyrrel: a hot temper. In an
initial attempt to disable their growing animosity, Falkland says to him,
We are on the brink of a whirlpool which, if it once get hold of us, will render all
further deliberation impotent . . . We are both of us nice of temper; we are both apt
to kindle, and warm of resentment . . . A strife between persons with our peculiarities
and our weaknesses, includes consequences that I shudder to think of. (28â“29).
It becomes clear that the âpeculiaritiesâ and âweaknessesâ of the two
men amount to a pathological defensiveness regarding their public repu-
tations. Falklandâ™s warning almost convinces Tyrrel only when the former
suggests that their rivalry âshall merely present a comedy for the amuse-
ment of our acquaintanceâ (29). Tyrrelâ™s response â“ âDamn me, if I
consent to be the jest of any man livingâ (29) â“ is in keeping with his
resentment at Falklandâ™s social victories over him, and with his ď¬nal
physical attack on Falkland after being cursed publicly by him, and
hooted from the assembly hall. Falkland obviously shares this sensitivity
to othersâ™ perceptions. From the ď¬rst, he admits to Malvesi that if the
Countâ™s âchallenge had been public,â things would not have ended so
happily (15). Falkland calls himself the âfool of fameâ (135) and acknow-
ledges, âMy life has been spent in the keenest and most unintermitted
sensibility to reputationâ (101), a sensibility that becomes the driving force
of the plot as it is expressed via acts of vengeance.
Such anxious self-regard had long been recognized as one of the leading
causes of frequent anger, or susceptibility to provocation. In âConcerning
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
96
the Cure of Anger,â Plutarch states, âOf all men there are none so
exceedingly disposed to be angry as those who are ambitious of honorâ;
this would serve well as an epigraph to Caleb Williams, as well as to
Plutarchâ™s own history of Alexander and Clitus.19 Similarly, in The
Rambler, Samuel Johnson judges that âPride is undoubtedly the original
of anger.â20 He notes that men who fear their own insigniď¬cance will
often âendeavour, by their fury, to fright away contempt from before
them, when they know it must follow them behind,â using anger to
procure âsome kind of supplemental dignityâ (âThe Folly of Anger,â
68â“69). Writing in his notebook some ď¬fty years later, Coleridge expresses
a similar point: âGenuine anger, which is made up of Fear & animal
Courage, will be found in those most, who most hang upon the opinions
of others, & to whom those opinions are of the most importance.â
Coleridge, who believed that âRage and Fear are one disease,â21 ď¬nds
the root of anger in oneâ™s sense of vulnerability, particularly in regard to
âthe opinions of others.â
Yet as both Johnson and Coleridge suggest, and as other authors
conď¬rm, such prideful rage only serves to excite further contempt rather
than admiration. Authors who condemn anger typically present that
emotion as eminently self-defeating, producing a tendency towards dra-
matic irony: it causes one to do precisely that which one is striving to
avoid. This conception of anger, common in the eighteenth century from
Young through Johnson to Godwin, is plainly indebted to classical and
roughly Stoical sources, most notably Seneca, but also Plutarch. In De Ira,
Seneca calls anger the âmaximum malumâ; it âbrings to a father curses, to
a husband divorce, to a magistrate hatred, to a candidate defeat.â22 He
also writes that anger âblocks its own progress to the goal toward which it
hastensâ (1.12.5). Like Seneca, Plutarch presents anger as worse than
useless, always adversely affecting the situation it aims to address, even
when it is turned on itself: âWe do in our anger reprove others for being
angry . . . therein . . . rather increasing and exasperating the disease which
we pretend to cureâ (âConcerning the Cure of Anger,â i :58). In the words
of Edward Young, who also found that âthe principal Cause of Anger is
Disrespect,â âAnger therefore is not only an Evil itself, proceeding
from and leading to Evil, but, often, to the very Evil it would most avoid.
It falls on its own Sword.â23 Godwinâ™s narrative reflects this Stoical
sense of angerâ™s plot: ultimately, both Tyrrel and Falkland lose their
reputations as a result of their anger: Tyrrel is execrated for causing
Emilyâ™s death by his willful wrath, and Falkland is exposed as the
dishonorable murderer of Tyrrel.
Provocation and the plot of anger 97
Humphrey Prideaux calls the murder of Clitus âa very vile action, and
the greatest blotâ on the life of Alexander (The Old and New Testaments,
i : 722), who was also extremely protective of his reputation; and like
Tyrrel with Emily, Alexander was responsible for the death of a close
friend.24 The Alexanderâ“Clitus allusion thus helps conď¬rm that through-
out Godwinâ™s novel, anger functions ironically, counteracting oneâ™s gen-
eral will or purpose even while it appears to be a radical indulgence of the
will. Godwin also sees anger as leading to further injury rather than
reparation or defense; the best the angry man can hope for is mutually
assured destruction, in a vicious circle of fury and contempt. Tyrrel and
Falkland aptly illustrate such conclusions, as their anger destroys the lives
they have constructed for themselves. Calebâ™s ď¬nal verdict on Falkland
makes this point explicitly:
From that moment [of the murder] thou only continuedst to live to the
phantom of departed honour . . . thy benevolence was in a great part turned into
rankling jealousy and inexorable precaution. Year after year didst thou spend in
this miserable project of imposture; and only at last continuedst to live long
enough to see . . . thy closing hope disappointed, and thy death accompanied
with the foulest disgrace! (Caleb Williams, 326)
Such a characterization of anger is in keeping with Godwinâ™s long-
standing denigration of the passions. In Political Justice, he makes clear
that anger reproduces the very political problems that it means to remedy.
Considering âthe nature of revolution,â he writes,
Revolution is engendered by an indignation against tyranny, yet is itself
evermore pregnant with tyranny. The tyranny which excites its indignation, can
scarcely be without its partisans; and, the greater is the indignation excited, and
the more sudden and vast the fall of the oppressors, the deeper will be the
resentment which forms in the minds of the losing party. (i :267).
For Godwin, indignation and resentment themselves are the tyrannies to
be resisted, structuring as they do the struggle of revolutionary and
oppressor in a cycle of reaction. Anger gives birth to revolution, which
therefore retains that emotionâ™s tyrannous character: the apple doesnâ™t fall
far from the Blakean poison tree.
Godwinâ™s special emphasis on âindignationâ here in Political Justice
reveals a connection to Tyrrel and Falkland, both particularly jealous of
their own dignity or sense of worth. To feel indignation, one must ď¬rst
have a place of dignity in which to stand, from which one can look on the
actions of others as shameful and unworthy. We have seen in chapter 1
that this particular variety or name of anger is heavily favored by writers
Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
98
on both sides of the Revolution question during the 1790s: republicans
and loyalists want to claim indignation, while ascribing mad fury and
animal rage to their equally angry opponents. Here, and in Caleb
Williams, Godwin intervenes to say that cherishing indignation is, well,
undigniď¬ed â“ and dangerous to the cause, whatever it may be. Coleridge
makes the same point in a 1794 letter to Robert Southey, warning his
friend, âYour sensibilities are tempestuous â“ you feel Indignation at
Weakness â“ Now Indignation is the handsome Brother of Anger &
Hatred â“ his looks are â˜lovely in terrorâ™ â“ yet still remember, who are his
Relations.â25 Like Godwinâ™s genealogy, in which revolution is engendered
by indignation and pregnant with tyranny, Coleridgeâ™s family tree of
indignation bears sinister crests. In Caleb Williams, Tyrrel and Falkland
demonstrate that the angry defense of oneâ™s dignity concludes in a
shameful ď¬t of rage.
Later in Political Justice, Godwin reď¬nes his view of political anger:
âThe men who grow angry with corruption, and impatient at injustice,
and through these sentiments favour the abettors of revolution, have an
ńňđ. 3 |