The Tigers of Wrath

‘ WE so loved our God that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations.’ Thus spoke the prophet, Ezekiel, in vision to William Blake.

How, indeed, can a human being love without cursing what is unlovely? What power is there within us to segregate love and hatred? They are twin-born. When Pascal entertained a stranger who would oppose reason to his faith, he drew about him an iron belt studded inward with nails, and when the silly reason assailed his faith he tightened his belt of nails. Thus he cursed what was unlovely. The children of wrath, the haters, those who scourge the money changers, who send the Tempter packing, are the tigers of the earth, the unreasonable, the upholders of the ideal, the scions of rapture. Because they love, they hate.

How fortunate there are so few of them! For the world is so happy in its smoothnesses. It slips along in its Y.M.C.A., its Rotarian, its hundred per cent; it is so Volstead and Christian, so immersed in its properties and moralities, that it could not endure frequent haters. And as Providence is always careful that the earth shall remain a good deal as it is, it is slow in sending tigers; for with Providence a moment is as a thousand years, and the upheavals of a day would be immeasurable.

But the tigers of wrath, said Blake, are wiser than the horses of instruction. Who are these horses of instruction? They must be what Ibsen called the compact liberal majority, those foes of truth and freedom who arc never right. They are also those who neither greatly love nor hate; they are the world’s masters. They live, therefore, not by vision but by laws, rules of conduct; they would make the world safe for eternity. And when they note a desire, they restrain it, for a desire might, bring sorrow or joy, and eternity has no place for these — it is merely time plus monotony. They would banish all ecstasy and torments to hell; therefore there is nothing left over for heaven but the drowsy afternoons of ennui.

They are indeed the conquerors; there are so many of them that tlie tigers cannot escape. By the pressure of their weighty nonentity they clear the land, and the trail of their footprints is a desert. They are so unmistaken that they fear eccentricity, yet it is not certain that they fear death; for as life is but a composite of absences, the world beyond will be but a more extended composite, and over it will preside a manner of speaking whom they call Love. In calling him Love they confound the tigers. Yet the tigers experience who Love is, but they combine him with Satan or the terrible Jehovah.

But do the horses of instruction never suffer? Indeed, they wear the garments of humanity; they weep in their thoughtless childhood. But when they reach the fulfillment of age tears are but a memory; they smile. Yet they half cherish these tears, — they are a bit proud of them, — for they would make a slight, ever so slight a difference between eternity and earth. Heaven, therefore, must be a place where tears are wiped away, and there shall be no more sea nor mourning. They would drag along the golden streets in a pale forgetfulness, in an eternal sameness of smiles. Thus heaven and earth are really two places, — this is their dual philosophy,— the one a going toward, the other an attainment of, monotony. Here again they would confound the tigers.

I do not wish to imply that it is easy to explain a horse. Though with him society is a hive, even bees are said to possess individualities, and if you should endow bees with higher sensibilities, and if you could imagine them as being so bold as to name their instincts ’intelligence,’ their hives would turn complex and might become societies; they might even worship. Some horses worship; they worship dead tigers, and decrepit tigers often admire robust horses. Thus it might be said that these two creatures belong to the same general organization — they overlap. I mean, of course, that men, in their high sensibilities and in their notable intelligence, actually compromise; they live and let live in society.

But the tigers of wrath never compromise, and — the irony of it! — they cannot explain. Some of them, to be sure, are great talkers; they even preach. Yet so confused do they become in their telling, so unreasonable, such upholders of some ideal, that they never in their discussions come to terms with the unmistaken world about them. Philosophers, they make light of philosophy; poets, they disparage poetry; mystics, artists, lovers, haters, always great worshipers, first they act, and their life, therefore, is not a reason, but an achievement. No wonder they are misunderstood by the instructors! ‘Are we,’ the latter demand, ‘without our reasonings to be even as worms? What a noble work is man! Life is compartmental; there are feelings and logic and will, but to be herded separately without their knowing it, and the herding must always be a little hushed. The slight difference between heaven and earth is that the former is governed more adequately by the rule of rules, the Moral Code.’ Such are the conclusions of those masters who neither love nor hate.

But the tigers of wrath so love their god that they curse. In explaining them you can hardly become one of them, for if you loved as they love you would not find time to explain: you would act. Therefore the best that you can do is to try to understand them. The love of the tigers is Beauty, and they hate every form of ugliness. Yet, with all their worship and with all their striving they rarely make it quite clear what Beauty is, nor is it often appointed them to win it. Only a horse attains. But Beauty is shy and various, and to a tiger she is always beckoning and he pursuing. Some few have almost caught her; they have seemed to touch her, but straightway they have become delinquent, insane, and the world has arched its brows. ‘We would be normal,’ it says. ‘This is sheer eccentricity; this is not the prudent road to heaven.’ But the tigers maintain that they are normal; the world laughs at them.

The difference between these two groups — the majority and the singular — is a discrepancy in endowment, or, as the former would phrase it, the difference between certainty and sin. Here it must be confessed that the world’s masters have it all their way. There are, of course, things within and things outside; earth, heaven; time, eternity; you, God. This is by no means a comprehensive wording; instead of ‘earth, heaven’ one might say ‘heaven, hell,’ or for ‘you, God’ one might substitute ‘beast, man,’ or better, ‘finite, absolute’; but, whatever terms are employed, the essential is that everything goes into the ark two by two. These dyads, it will be noticed, if they are kept well in hand, always consist of a major and a minor member, and the firm ground of the world’s masters is that they know more of the major than of the minor. This comes through erudition in the rules of conduct, almost akin to revelation, and is fitting so. If, for instance, one has a fuller comprehension of God than of man, the latter may be ignored. This is the mousetrap of worldly wisdom.

It is idle to dispute this doctrine; usage and study have made it exact, and, furthermore, if one is a horse, one is born to believe it; it is the inevitable monotone of those who neither love nor hate. And, strangely enough, the moment a tiger takes it upon him to preach, to come out of his rhapsody, not being able to tell what he lives, he picks up the words that lie about him and struts in the same terminology — with far more emotion, to be sure, he is so fierce; but unless one knew that he could not possibly mean what he says, one would be put to it to distinguish. Fortunately tigers seldom preach; they are weak in theology.

Swaddled in crime and ignorance, worshipers of Beauty, spitters upon ugliness, haters of all dyads, they irreverently but. unconsciously seek God in themselves. This, of course, is the outpost of absurdity. More: to a horse it is damnable — he can but rage, but his rage is not the sheer rage of the tigers. Tigers are best when they renounce dogma and keep to fiction — all forms of pure knowledge and art and prophecy. For to them life is not a rule but an end, and they can only find beauty by realizing who they are, and they can only realize who they are in the joy of forgetting. This has always been the method of tigers. Its irreverence consists in its implications; that is, in the dyad ‘God, man,’ for instance, they drop all concern with the major member — he is a dream in his excellence and to st ir him would be unprofitable; they disdain the eternal gifts of heaven; they would achieve the immortal boon of earth, and though they may never capture the uncapturable,

— for Beauty is a search, — something has whispered to them that she is not outside, but within. Such is the monstrous profanity of tigers.

Yet, as they usually keep to fiction,

— which, with pure knowledge, all symbols, a horse does not understand,

— the world rubs along with them, and it is discreet, if one speaks philosophically or poetically, to talk about them. But here is met a grave difficulty.

For, as tigers never explain, a diagnosis of them must needs follow the language of horses; otherwise there will be no audience—no one to talk to, no one to talk. One is constrained, therefore, if one is not a tiger, to pursue the dyad. What are reality and the ideal but. dyads? Beauty, ugliness? Love, hatred? Even tiger, horse? To the compact liberal majority these words have meanings; to those who crave the earth and life they are just words.

The safest way, perhaps, to avoid this difficulty is to ignore it, to plunge forward in the discriminating language of horses. Might one assume for a moment that even reason itself, in its ultimate unfolding, is a gift, an intuition. Or say that, as you lived in the world as it lies about, you accepted it, not only its fair vistas, but its advertising, its chambers of commerce, its supposed truths and duties, its precepts and aims; and still further that you did not weep over these things or bring cheer, but that you accepted them wholly, were content to be a part, became, as it were, one with them. If you did all this, you would not be a horse. For horses, in their pallid smiles, are forever quarreling, readjusting, harmonizing; in their large approvals they disapprove. They are fond of bickering, of tripping one another, of discovering peccadillos of convention. They take comfort in the opinion that in the world beyond not only will tears be wiped away, but sinners will meet justice, the same machinery of experience will run more softly, and there will be a divine identity of organization. To them it is a soothing thought that there are swift angels of vengeance and a dyad of worlds.

And the tigers? Well, there are, to be sure, very few of them, and the words ‘love’ and ‘ hatred ’ are but terms for the same energy. Sometimes, when they become decrepit, ihey love too feebly or hate too long. This, indeed, is their tragedy, the tragedy of many a saint, an artist and prophet. For these personages, supreme and fortunate in their denials, are often laggard as accepters; in the ordinary parlance, there comes to them a time when their imagination deserts them. Of this, however, there may be no pity, for in their frenzied prime they so love their world that they blaspheme all the vacancies about them, some cursing the correctness of a nation, others excoriating the Moral Law. They blaze the immortal trail of death and sin. And this is the tigers’ folly. Lovers of earth, they would fain destroy it, or rather recreate it in the flame of their desires. Their wisdom and their joy are in being unconsciously what they are; they are unvicariously, burningly themselves; and the union of the thunder of their hatred with the passion of their love is their symmetry.