Does Persuasion Occur?

The question whether persuasion occurs is surprisingly hard to answer. J. L. Austin provided specimens of verbal formulae that perform actions in the course of being said or by virtue of having been said, and illustrations of this kind may be found in poetry as well as in ordinary speech. But impassioned speech itself may yield effects it could never have anticipated. We can be fairly sure they will happen, but we cannot accurately predict what they will be. Examples include the complex political influence traceable to Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary pamphlet A Letter to a Noble Lord, and the difficulty of knowing how to judge the characters in certain novels and stories by Henry James. The ascribed intention seems to depend on the personal experience or the aesthetic refinement of the reader, and often some combination of the two.

What Are We Allowed to Say?

Liberty of thought and discussion, as it came to be understood in Europe and North America, arose from the schismatic energies of the Protestant reformation and the political idealisms of the Enlightenment. The uncertain future of the principle can be estimated by the spread of demands for codified speech and the widening context of recent proposals for censorship—proposals that are often advanced in the cause of cultural identity and sensitivity. Libertarian writings by Milton and Mill are pertinent for their emphasis on the connection between free speech and “moral courage,” and for their warning against the supposition that the future course of moral progress is already known to some people. The distinction between words and actions is worth preserving, as much as the distinction between persuasion and force. Censorship presumes an innocence in the censor that can never be humanly tenable.

Persuasion and Responsibility

Modernist poetry was defined partly by its renunciation of didactic purpose. Yet the most renowned of twentieth-century British poets, W. B. Yeats—a leading exponent of modernist doctrine—wrote often in a vein that directly implicates a political purpose. This contradiction was the main subject of an essay by George Orwell; it was also a motive for the rich meditation on art and morality in W. H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats. The latter went so far as to acquit Yeats of any ultimate blame for his opinions, on the ground that a true poet’s language belongs to every “free man” and therefore is emancipatory. Auden’s argument is stirring, but dubious. An apology for the language of poetry cannot wash out the impurity or the proneness to misunderstanding that poetry shares with rhetoric and with language generally.

Pledging Emotion for Conviction

A usual idea of persuasion involves the spread of contagious emotion from speaker to listener. We know that this happens, from introspection and third-person reports. A less obvious feature of persuasion may be the speaker’s identification of himself or herself as the bearer of a conviction adequate to impassioned words. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a definition of judicious sympathy at a distance, appropriate to our social nature, but this ought to be modified in view of Walter Bagehot’s insight regarding “the emotion of conviction.” Examples from Lincoln and Burke show that the repression of emotion in the speaker, dramatically exhibited, may have an effect greater than a deliberate appeal to named emotions such as anger, fear, and grief.

Speakers Who Convince Themselves

It is a common occurrence, too little remarked on, that speakers (with or without an audience) work with words in order to convince themselves. Characters in fiction may not consciously trace a path of persuasion, but great writers are adroit at doing so. Shakespeare, for example, in the soliloquies by Brutus in Julius Caesar and Angelo in Measure for Measure; Milton in the speeches of Satan in Books I and V of Paradise Lost; and Henry James in the recognition scene in the mind of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. The train of thought of a speaker may afford a clue—by means of language that inseparably mixes motives with reasons—to the definiteness and the elusiveness of personal character.