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To persons accustomed to Mr. Newman's habit of mind and way of writing, his ease, his frankness, his candour, his impatience of conventionality, his piercing insight into the very centre of questions, his ever-ready recognition of nature and reality, his range of thought, his bright and clear and fearless style of argument, his undisplayed but never unfelt consciousness of the true awfulness of anything connected with religion, any stiff and heavy way of treating questions which he had treated would have seemed unattractive and unpersuasive.
Again, look at the talkers in the streets of Florence, and see how, being essentially unable to talk, they try to make lips of their fingers! How they poke, wave, flourish, point, jerk, shake finger and fist at their antagonists dumb essentially, all the while, if they knew it; unpersuasive and ineffectual, as the shaking of tree branches in the wind.
He was unpersuasive, he irritated and repelled, in spite of his wish to be fair and candid, in spite of having so much to teach, in spite of such vigour of statement and argument, because on the face of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, so incapable of an equitable view, so much a slave to the unreality of extremes. T. Mozley, Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 5.
It was certainly the most unpersuasive voice I ever heard. As I listened to its domineering tones I could hardly refrain from laughing, for they elicited an old story from the depths of memory. An aged pauper lay dying, and in the parson's absence the master officiated at the sinner's exit from this world. "Well, Tom," he began, "you've been a dreadful fellow, and I fear you are going to hell."
Most people, looking back, would probably agree, whatever their general judgment on these matters, and whatever they may think of Mr. Ward's case, that he was, at the time at least, the most unpersuasive of writers.
Her ears had taught themselves to feel that there could be no vitality in speech without it, and that all utterance unsustained by such tone was effeminate, vapid, useless, unpersuasive, unmusical, and English. It was a complaint frequently made by her against her friends Caroline and Olivia that they debased their voices, and taught themselves the puling British mode of speech.
She is destitute of the supreme gift of sensibility that Talma considers essential, and Diderot maintains is detrimental to the highest acting. Diderot may be right, and Talma may be wrong, but we are convinced that the art Miss Anderson has practiced is, on the whole, barren and unpersuasive.
"I wish he'd be more conciliatory," whispered Dimock to Danvers; "he's plucky and firm, but so very dictatorial and unpersuasive. Besides, he's forgotten to thank Power." "Yes," said Danvers, "his tone spoils all. Somers," he said, "you've omitted to mention Power, and the fellows will be gone in a minute." "I've been talking so much, you say it." "Not I; I'm no speaker. Here, Dimock will."
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