CHAPTER III PERSUASION I. THE SCOPE OF PERSUASION 81. Persuasion is that kind of composition which seeks to win assent. It is trying to make you believe, or even act, as I wish. It is an appeal from person to person. Thus it is of all kinds the most direct. Exposition is properly impersonal, dispassionate; persuasion may be passionate and is always personal. The image of persuasion is Peter the Hermit preaching the first Crusade. 82. Persuasion includes all that the ancients meant by rhetoric (§§ 1, 2). As the fine art of composition reached its height for them in the drama and was expounded in Aristotle's Poetic, so the useful art of composition was summed up in the orator and had its system of rhetoric. Rhetoric is literally the art of the orator, the art of public speaking. That the word is applied to-day more commonly to writing shows a change in the way of the world; that many principles of the ancient rhetoric, and these the most important, are still current, shows the change to be merely in the accidents, not in the substance of the art. The practical end of composition is still persuasion. That we persuade now largely by print is an important change; but it only modifies, not abrogates, the ancient rhetoric. 83. Persuasion, then, is the field of rhetoric in its original signification and, in a wide sense, its final signification. For the common concern with words is to win assent and action. That is the concern of the orator and of the commercial traveller. In this sense rhetoric can never cease to be practical. Oratory may be decaying, as we often hear; but though we may be dubious concerning legislatures, there are no signs of decay in pleading at the bar, nor in that pure form of oratory, the sermon. As for the supplanting newspaper, whatever else it may be, it is essentially persuasion. The difference between speech and print is largely a difference of force, a difference of degree rather than of kind. The living voice of Macaulay was much greater than the printed words of his speeches, and the living voice is usually stronger; but Burke was far stronger in print, and Stevenson's Father Damien, which is a printed letter, moved men. wherever it went. Small modifications in detail have. not disturbed the tradition of rhetoric. 84. The appeal for assent, which is persuasion, is to feeling or to reason. About the feelings and appeals to them tradition speaks in general terms and by maxims; and the modern science of psychology has not yet brought much that is more specific. As in general the best equipment for the business of persuasion is knowledge of human nature, so on each particular occasion the force of appeal depends on the gauging of the audience. That is, persuasion is partly the winning of sympathy. But there is no art. of human nature, nor any science. The guides to knowledge of the feelings take us but a little way. Skill in these matters is quite simply sagacity, coming only by experience. It must never be forgotten, however, that the engaging of the feelings, at least to the extent of keeping the interest of the whole audience, is a practical necessity. For the strongest evidence remains inoperative without a man's pushing of it home. Since the mere enunciation of truths is not persuasion, a speaker to his fellow-men must not permit himself to be listless. What is popularly called magnetism, though it proceeds sometimes always, perhaps, when it is at its strongest-from inborn gift, yet seems to some degree attainable by deliberate effort. At least it may be roughly analyzed into two elements. The first, the prerequisite, is wishing people to listen. Without that no speaker should expect any result. The audience will most certainly care no more than you care yourself. The second - and this is more properly what is meant by magnetism-is forcing people to listen. It consists (a) in watching individuals, in speaking, not to the mass, but to the man in the sixth row and the woman by the pillar, in looking at them, making them look at you. If you have the inborn gift of the Ancient Mariner, they cannot choose but hear; if not, you must take measures to recall anybody's wandering at once. Thus (6) a broken current of attention may often be reëstablished by a change of tone; either (1) a physical change of voice, as by inflection to break monotony, or (2) a change of intellectual tone, as by illustration, question, or dialogue. If some people still remain apathetic, you may as a last resort (c) make direct appeal, sometimes even to these particular people. Obviously this must be a last resort, for it is implicitly a confession of weakness. But by all means people must listen. Obviously also no one can command an audience if he is not already in command of his matter and order. First, then, grasp your speech entirely; then devote yourself entirely to the individuals of your audience. Given something worth saying, failures to secure attention are due not so often to lack of natural eloquence as to indolence. Most intelligent men can gain power in persuasion if, both before they speak and while they speak, they will work hard enough. 85. Another obvious means of persuasion lies not only beyond art but above speech, the persuasion of personality. This stands first in Aristotle's scientific division, and rightly. What made men renounce the world to seek misery with that young Sicilian who was afterwards called St. Francis of Assisi? Daniel Webster once stood in Faneuil Hall and said: "Gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Constitutional Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig; and, if you break up the Whig party, where am I to go?" 'But," says Wendell Phillips, "if he had been five feet, three” That cry of Agrippa, "With but little persuasion thou wouldst fain make me a Christian," suggests an amazing influence of the speaker's personality, as St. Paul implies in his famous rejoinder. But all this amounts practically to the truism that much depends. on what is called the speaker's presence. A man whose presence is an impediment had better confine his persuasion to writing; and, on the other hand, no writing can transmit the power of a great speech by a great speaker. 86. But that division into appeal to feeling and appeal to reason is somewhat misleading. We are not so crudely twofold that it is easy to find feeling without reason, or reason without feeling. Pure reason is rather a notion than a fact of human nature; and all great orators have acted accordingly. Feeling, again, hardly ever has way among civilized people without at least some show of reason. Even Mark Antony's speech to the mob is at least in form argumentative. At any rate, the distinction between address to the feelings (in which the imagination is usually included by implication) and address to the reason, is impracticable; for in most persuasion the two have always been inextricably commingled. 87. It is sometimes said that the object of persuasion is action; the object of argument, conviction. But conviction is not sought for itself, except in exercises purely academic; it is sought only as a means of persuasion. Outside of pure science, how many pieces are there of pure conviction without intent to persuade? Certainly the aim of argument is to convince; but it is not an ultimate aim, nor gained by a process sharply distinct in practice from that other, the appeal to feeling. Feeling and reason are appealed to, not separately, but together; and all the means of appeal are included in the idea of persuasion. Thus argument is not something distinct from persuasion; it is a part of persuasion. 88. Still, whereas the appeal to feeling seems to reject analysis, or at any rate analysis that can be made a useful basis for practice, appeal to reason, argument, has been analyzed fully. Thus almost all the doctrine of persuasion is concerned with the methods and processes of argument. II. ARGUMENT a. The Tabulation of Proof 89. Argument is the giving of reasons in support of a proposition. The word is both general and particular; that is, it may mean either one reason for a proposition or a whole body of reasons taken together. Its |