E iONG the contents of the May number of the Cornhill
is an engaging paper by Dr. W. H. D. Rouse entitled "A Plea for the Useless." Dr. Rouse writes in a vein of pleasant irony, and rallies with a capital humour the advocates of that utilitarianism which measures everything by its capacity to be exchanged, "on the nail," for hard cash. He begins by asking the question whether he is not himself a hopelessly useless person. He is a schoolmaster, and does not, or at least we gather he does not, teach shorthand and typewriting ; and since there is a fair demand in the world of business for shorthand clerks, and hardly any demand for scholars whatever, he conceives himself likely to be asked shortly by the spirit of the age to "move on." In order, however, to decide whether or not he can justify his existence, he begins by examining the cases of a certain number of persons who led what would be judged by modern standards to be useful lives. Ought we not, perhaps, to pay more attention to the work of the men in the past ages who led practical, prosperous, cash-earning lives, rather than study what has been left behind by people who mooned through the world writing poetry, and carving statues, and examining philosophies, and all the rest of a poor business which never put a penny in their pockets ?
There were the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, for instance, who led admirably useful lives, sailing about from port to port with great bales of merchandise, and earning good money wherever they went. But is it not strange, Dr. Rouse asks, puzzled by the apparent contradictoriness of things, that they have left so little behind them ? "The two persons whom we alone remember out of this great race are Dido, who actually died for love—a most useless thing to do, when she might have married Tarbes; and that slave of an idea, that inspired visionary, Hannibal, to whom it must have been small consolation in failure to know that he was the greatest captain of all time." Then, again, there was Virgil, who wrote Dido's story in verse, "a most impractical scion of a practical race, who actually spent eleven years in com- posing a poem, and then wanted to burn it because it was so useless. He was dying at the time, and since he could not burn it himself, his friends thought it would be useless to take the trouble ; hence his work has survived down to our own day, and is the cause of much useless labour and still more useless imitation on the classical side of schools." The point is, of course, that if the Carthaginians had only seen that the right thing to do was to be consistently practical, Dido would never have been so foolish as to die in the way she did, and Virgil would have been spared the useless trouble of writing about it, and the schoolboys of to-day, of course, also, would have been able, instead of reading Virgil, to learn shorthand or double-entry, or something useful of that kind. But if Virgil was a useless person, the people to whom he belonged were practical and businesslike on the whole. Their bridges and roads were excellent, and "they also made laws, which are useful when we win our case." Can so much praise be given to the Jews and the Greeks P The Jews had hardly any sense at all of wh,at was the proper thing to do. "They never knew when they were well off. Plant them in Goshen, amid peace and plenty, with only a few humble necessary tasks to do, such as building pyramids and city walls—a most useful thing for trade—and they will not rest until they go off bag and baggage for a forty years' march through the wilderness." The Greeks were even worse fellows at seeing what was good business. There were Aeschylus and Sophocles priding themselves "on composing plays in a style of language that no one ever spoke, about persons who never existed." There is some use, Dr. Rouse points out with obvious conviction, in a play like Charley's Aunt, which not only fills the author's pocket, but also gives honest employment to worthy per- sonages who otherwise might be in the workhouse. Whereas it does not appear to be an established fact that Aeschylus and Sophocles, out of all the dramas they wrote, ever gained so much as a single obol.
It is satisfactory—we were almost going to write that it is useful—to meet with papers like Dr. Rouse's, at a time when there is a ceaseless buzz of distrust of the older methods of education, and when the clamour is loudest for methods of teaching which will enable a young Englishman to earn money sooner and more quickly than a young German or American,—for that is what the gist of the clamour comes to in the end. "Let us get rid of all this study of useless things ; let us rattle ahead with some- thing that is going to pay quickly,"—that is the insistent note of the clamorous hum of protest againet any system which has any sort of humanity to recommend it. The point is, what can you earn with what you know ? not, that is, in fame or reputation alone, for mere reputation will not buy bread; but what can you ask, and get at once, in hard cash ? But that question leads inevitably to another, which is, put as shortly as possible,—Is cash the great thing which we should all try to get ? That sounds rather crudely, and perhaps up to a certain point the question is not worth asking, since bread is paid for in pence. But it is a question which is possibly worth asking more than once, and in different forms; for we doubt if it is even yet thoroughly realised how large a part the question of cash has, perhaps unconsciously, come to play in the minds of some of those who declaim most loudly against the " inefficiency " of the older methods of education. It is quite possible to discern faults in the systems of civilisation which produced such intellects as Shelley and Tennyson and Ruskin, and yet to be thoroughly impressed with the greatness of Greece and Greek ideals. But it is, on the other hand, easy enough to design an education which looks no further into the future than the creation of a nation of persons who are not so much shopkeepers as shopwalkers ; whose business it is to extract cash from customers, rather than to see that what is offered for sale is the best article possible.
One may look round at the enormous number of existences and activities which, judged by certain standards, are apparently useless, and yet which, for whatever reason, have obtained and retain their place in the scheme in which, as part of our own activity, we ask money down for services rendered. There is, for instance, the life of the working bee. Possibly the bees work out their lives merely to provide intelligent people who eat breakfast with a pleasing sugary form of food. But that can hardly be an aspect of the business of life which interests the bee. She, careless of the pleasures of eating so far as we can see, and careless oertainly of other pleasures which are part of other creatures' lives, drudges through a single summer, carrying and making honey merely in order to make it possible for other working bees next year to do the same thing. With what reward? The drones of the hive have their fill of lazy luxury; the queen bee has the cares of queenhood; but all that the working bee has to do or look forward to is work. From a selfish human being's point of view, could any form of existence be more useless ? If so, it would be found possibly in the part played in the world by something inanimate,—by a flower, perhaps. Imagine in an island on which no man has yet placed his foot a mountainside covered year after year in April with a sheet of extremely rare daffodils ; some such jocund company of flowers as Wordsworth suddenly lighted on when he "wandered lonely as a cloud," and found "a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils" "fluttering and dancing in the breeze." Suppose that sheet of daffodils to be suddenly seen by a discoverer, and suppose him to dig them all up and sell each bulb for a guinea. Then, in each year before they were discovered by man, were those bulbs absolutely " useless " ? They were just as beautiful, even though nobody saw them. Did the word " use " come to have meaning, in regard to their existence, as soon as it became possible to exchange them for cash ? Or was not the truer usefulness of them the idea that they should flower year by year, seen only by their Creator,—an idea which should strike a spark, perhaps, in the mind of a poet, to light a lamp to help man in the dark places of his "labours and peregrinations" ?
If that is the truer way to look at things, it is still true, we fear, that the meaning of "usefulness," so far as the ordinary coin of speech is concerned, has changed. "Useful" means "cashful," and when people talk about the "uselessness" of this or that form of education, what they mean is its incapacity to earn cash. "The beauty of this particular mathematical proposition," said the witty Oxford Pro- fessor, "is that it opens out a field of research which is absolutely of no use to anybody." Of course, you may twist words about, and argue that such a field of research would be ipso facto useful, because it amused and gave pleasure to an Oxford Professor, and therefore to other minds like his. But we doubt whether, on the whole, there is not a growing tendency, especially in matters of education, towards a utilitarianism which declares first for the power of earning cash down, rather than for the power to command credit. If there is justification for taking that view, the more need to insist, as Dr. Rouse insists, on the " uselessness " of some of the ideals which we seem likely to discard.
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