On Writing Persuasively
JOSEPH ADDISON’S METHOD FOR UNDERMINING HIS OPPONENTS
This contrast between Addison and the Tories comes out with special clarity in their treatment of enemies. For the Tories, every enemy—whether it be the Duchess of Marlborough or only a Shakespearian editor found guilty of some real English scholarship—becomes a grotesque. All who have, in whatever fashion, incurred their ill will are knaves, scarecrows, whores, bugs, toads, bedlamites, yahoos; Addison himself a smooth Mephistopheles. It is good fun, but it is certainly not good sense; we laugh, and disbelieve. Now mark Addison’s procedure . . . . With the help of Steele, he invents Sir Roger de Coverley. The measure of his success is that we can now think of Sir Roger for a long time without remembering his Toryism; when we do remember it, it is only as a lovable whimsy . . . . The enemy, far from being vilified, is being turned into a dear old man. The thought that he could ever be dangerous has been erased from our minds; but so also the thought that anything he said could ever be taken seriously.
“Addison,” Selected Literary Essays
A DISAGREEMENT SHOULD NOT BECOME A QUARREL
What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.
Letter to the editors of Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine, February 1961 (CL 3)