John Mullan

In March 1815, Madame d’Arblay, the woman we know better as Fanny Burney, was forced by the arrival of Napoleon from Elba to flee Paris and to leave behind almost all her possessions. ‘Books – Cloaths Trinkets – Linnen – argenterie Goods – MSS!!! All!’ When she reached Brussels, she wrote to her brother Charles: ‘Unless some speedy happy turn...

David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even,...

Denis Diderot, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, has one niche in the English language with ‘esprit de l’escalier’, his only entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room’. It is given, here and in the OED, as coming from Paradoxe sur le comédien, Diderot’s account of why the greatest actor must be a person of zero sensibility, ‘un spectateur froid et tranquille’ of human nature. The phrase seems untranslatable because it belongs so clearly to its milieu: we imagine the Philosophes in their salons, not afraid of any ideas, valuing only each other’s intellect, fencing with words. And we think of the mortifications involved in belonging to this milieu. An occupational hazard of Enlightenment man, who lives for clever talk, has been fixed in a phrase as a universal experience. If you want to live by your conversational wits, you are condemned to keep realising how clever you failed to be.‘

Marginalia can sometimes seem the best way into a writer’s head. Those, like Blake and Coleridge, who could not help scribbling in the margins of what they were reading let us imagine their thoughts just as they spring into life. Inspiration and irritation can appear equally raw. If you want to catch sight of Alexander Pope in the hatching of his satire, and you have a British Library reader’s card, you can call up item C.116.b.1-4, unpromisingly described by the electronic catalogue as ‘A Collection of 24 works, lettered “Libels on Pope”, being attacks on Pope and Swift’. Although the catalogue gives no indication that this is so, the four volumes in fact contain Pope’s own collection of attacks on himself. He has written at the front of the first volume a slightly amended quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Behold it is my desire, that mine Adversary had written a Book. Surely I would take it on my Shoulder, and bind it as a crown unto me.’ Grist to my mill, he might as well be saying. Many of the pamphlets are annotated in his own hand, leaving us the traces of both original irritation and original inspiration.‘

What is the opposite of Reason? To some writing in the late 17th and early 18th century the answer was Enthusiasm. ‘Enthusiasm’ meant knowing the truth by direct inspiration – being in direct communication with God. ‘Enthusiasm’, Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, takes ‘the ungrounded Fancies of a Man’s own Brain, and assumes them for a Foundation both of Opinion and Conduct’. Enthusiasts are ‘raised into an Opinion of a greater familiarity with GOD, and a nearer admittance to his Favour than is afforded to others’. They know that they are doing what God wants. Enthusiasm intrigued Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers because it appeared an exemplary case of unreason. More than dogmatism, superstition or intolerance, it represented the human inclination to ‘get above’ rational thought.’‘