4.  Arguments and the Audience.  In argument, therefore, far more than in other kinds of writing, one must keep the audience definitely in mind.  “Persuade” and “convince” for our purposes are active verbs, and in most cases their objects have an important effect on their significance.  An argument on a given subject that will have a cogent force with one set of people, will not touch, and may even repel, another.  To take a simple example:  an argument in defense of the present game of football would change considerably in proportions and in tone according as it was addressed to undergraduates, to a faculty, or to a ministers’ conference.  Huxley’s argument on evolution (p. 233), which was delivered to a popular audience, has more illustrations and is less compressed in reasoning than if it had been delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Not only theoretically, but in practice, arguments must vary in both form and substance with the audiences to which they are addressed.  An argument shot into the void is not likely to bring down much game.

5.  Profitable Subjects for Arguments.  To get the best results from practice in writing arguments, you must choose your subjects with care and sagacity.  Some classes of subjects are of small value.  Questions which rest on differences of taste or temperament from their very nature can never be brought to a decision.  The question whether one game is better than another—­football better than baseball, for example—­is not arguable, for in the end one side settles down to saying, “But I like baseball best,” and you stick there.  Closely akin is such a question as, Was Alexander Pope a poet; for in the word “poet” one includes many purely emotional factors which touch one person and not another.  Matthew Arnold made a brave attempt to prove that Wordsworth stood third in excellence in the long line of English poets, and his essay is a notable piece of argument; but the very statement of his thesis, that Wordsworth “left a body of poetical work superior in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness, to that which any of the others has left,” shows the vanity of the attempt.  To take a single word—­“interest”—­from his proposition:  what is the use of arguing with me, if Wordsworth happened to bore me, as he does not, that I ought to find him interesting.  All I could do would be humbly to admit my deficiency, and go as cheerfully as might be to Burns or Coleridge or Byron.  Almost all questions of criticism labor under this difficulty, that in the end they are questions of taste.  You or I were so made in the beginning that the so-called romantic school or the so-called classical school seems to us to have reached the pinnacle of art; and all the argument in the world cannot make us over again in this respect.  Every question which in the end involves questions of aesthetic taste is as futile to argue as questions of the palate.