Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed easily, subject to the brute forces of nature. Our saving grace, however, is our power of perception: Perception helps us to develop critical and imaginative faculties. These turn into thinking, which can transform the raw materials of the world into dispassionate theories.
And yet, a blessing though it is, thought is also finite. The world is tamed temporarily only; theories fall out of use or are superseded by the strange and unexpected. This permanent precariousness can be faced in many ways, yet surely the most admirable combines good manners, a healthy dose of stoicism, and a probing intelligence.
This, in a nutshell, is the central argument of William Lubenow’s study of the 19th-century British learned elite. From the outset and throughout ‘Only Connect,‘ one senses its author’s admiration for a certain kind of Britishness: plain-speaking yet reserved; intellectually curious yet socially courteous. Lubenow ranges over personalities such as Arthur Balfour, Henry Sidgwick, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, Sir Francis Younghusband—and hundreds of lesser-known names, focusing on the ways these statesmen, philosophers, scientists, authors, and army officers formed learned societies. The full list of these clubs and coteries would overtake my space here, but the better-known include the British Academy, the Cambridge Apostles, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Historical Society.
To Lubenow, social interaction serves as the primary way through which we acquire and refine knowledge. He takes his title from E. M. Forster’s famous phrase, which is “not only advice for satisfactory personal lives, it is also a motto that can serve as a clue to the understanding of cognition.” It is not enough, Lubenow argues, to have talent and a propensity for learning: Instead, one grows and becomes a better, more rounded, person through active intellectual relationships.
One of this book’s many delights is its serious appraisal of friendship. Lubenow gives short shrift to the idea of antagonistic “connections.” He much prefers empathetic understanding to heated debates. British learned societies in the 19th century were enclaves where like-minded intellectuals could discuss natural sciences, religion, literature, exotic cultures, or any other subject they wished. And though these discussions tended to be earnest, they were rarely indecorous. More than a century on, there remains much to be said for this style—typically if not exclusively British—and Lubenow is an expert and charming guide to it.
As ‘Only Connect’ explains, learned societies formed because the universities trained men—and it was mainly men, of course—for a life of public duty. Societies were more intellectually rewarding and open-minded. They organized reading groups, long conversations about truth, ethics, and God, excursions to domestic and foreign places of interest, and formal lunches and dinners. Their members took pride in being financially self-dependent, tied neither to the landed aristocracy nor the professional classes but constituting a distinct learned elite, answerable to itself alone.
Of course, there were disagreements, but these were mostly restrained; you learned you were disliked by a lack of invitations, correspondence, or encouragement. Alternatively, being treated with utmost courtesy was a sure sign that you had transgressed the society’s (mostly unwritten) rules. Still, there were times when good behavior was in short supply:
Ultimately, Gosse paid for his mercurial temperament: Though a member of the Academical Committee of the Royal Society of Literature, Grillions, the Savile, the Marlborough, and the National clubs, he was blackballed at the Athenaeum. Lubenow quotes the chairman of the Incorporated Society of Authors:
Lubenow has a good eye for the colorful personality or anecdote. Another example is the great Coffee Room revolt at the Athenaeum (1854).
Though it might seem petty, even beneath the dignity of a group of learned men to concern themselves with meat-carving rights, there is a valid point here: By and large, freeborn Britons do not like to be told what to do, even (or perhaps especially) about things that hardly seem worth bothering about.
Readers expecting to learn what these men and societies produced, in terms of substantive output, are likely to find disappointment. Lubenow inserts an introductory warning that he will not investigate the intellectual work itself but, rather, the ways in which it was produced through formal friendships. His focus, he asserts, is on the “social history of cognition.” There is nothing wrong with such an approach, but Lubenow’s motivation is less academic than he admits.
André van Loon is a writer in London.
