John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

184 ADDRESSING THE FEELINGS. 1849-1872.
able polemical aptitude. But I shall speak now of his persua
sive power, which I conceive to be very great on the whole,
and susceptible of being precisely denned.
The power of persuasion was with him not much a matter
of mere style ;
it lay more in his command of thoughts, and in
his tact in discerning what would suit the persons addressed.
When he set himself to argue a point, his information and
command of principles usually enabled him to exhaust his case.
His political writing is enough to show this.
It was seldom that he was deficient in knowledge of his
audience. If he ever failed here, it was in matters of religion,
where he was necessarily little informed, and on the women
question, where his feelings carried him too far.
Not only could he shape arguments to the reason, properly
so called, he could also address the feelings. The Liberty and
the Subjection of Women, as well as his political writing generally,
exemplify what might be called impassioned oratory ; they
leave nothing unsaid that could enlist the strongest feelings of
the readers. His best Parliamentary speeches appealed to the
understanding and to the feelings alike, and he seldom, so far
as I can judge, lost ground for want of suiting himself to a most
difficult assembly. Although he could not clothe his feelings
with the richness of poetry, he could warm with his subject, and
work by the force of sympathy.
All this, as I have already observed, had to do with know
ledge and thinking power, more than with style. In the
oratory of rhetoric, he was entirely wanting. He could appeal
to men s feelings by suitable circumstances plainly and even
forcibly stated ; but that luxuriance of verbal display, whereby
the emotions can be roused with a hurricane s might, was not
a part of his equipment. He could not be an orator in the
same sense as the two Pitts, Burke, Canning, Brougham,
Macaulay, D Israeli, or any of our rhetorical writers ; although
I am not sure that he might not often have rivalled such men
in actual effect, by the gifts that were peculiarly his own.