A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects

by Arthur E. Bostwick

In selecting elements from both despotism and democracy we are displeasing the adherents of both. There is too much despotism in the plan for one side and too much democracy for the other. We constantly hear the complaint that concentrated responsibility with popular control is too despotic, and at the same time the criticism that it is too democratic. To put your city in the hands of a small commission, perhaps of a city manager, seems to some to be a return to monarchy; and so perhaps it is. To give Tom, Dick and Harry the power to unseat these monarchs at will is said to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is. Only it is possible that by combining these two poisons—this acid and this alkali—in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities. At any rate this would seem to be the idea on which we are now proceeding.

We may now examine the effects of this tendency toward eclecticism in quite a different field—that of morals. Among the settlers of our country were both Puritans and Cavaliers—representatives in England of two moral standards that have contended there for centuries and still exist there side by side. We in America are attempting to mix them with some measure of success. This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tells in his “American Commonwealth,” who said that American women were ”furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm“—frightfully free and frightfully pious! In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritan standards. Of course those who do not understand what is going on think that we are either too free or too pious. We are neither; we are trying to give and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiency and restraint where restraint is indicated. We have not arrived at a final standard. We may not do so. This effort at mixture, like all our others, may fail; but there appears to be no doubt that we are making it. To take an obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, to combine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity of marriage. We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble, there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than if there are legal ways of dissolving it.

Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinary conversation to infractions of the moral code that they treat as trivial. They on the other hand are shocked when we talk of divorce for what they consider insufficient causes. In the former case we seem to them “frightfully pious”; in the latter, “frightfully free.” They are right; we are both; it is only another instance of our tendency towards eclecticism, this time in moral standards.

In some directions we find that this tendency to eclecticism is working toward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundred different ones. Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in our architecture. A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico, has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any more than he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird’s nest for a woodchuck hole.

But in an American city, especially where we have enough money to let our architects do their utmost, we find streets where France, England, Italy, Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to his nerve-specialist. It seems all right to us, and it is all right from the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism. And our other art—painting, sculpture, music—it is all similarly mixed. Good of its kind, often; but we have not yet settled down to the kind that we like best—the kind in which we are best fitted to do something that will live through the ages.

We used to think for instance that in music the ordinary diatonic major scale, with its variant minor, was a fact of nature. We knew vaguely that the ancient Greeks had other scales, and we knew also that the Chinese and the Arabs had scales so different that their music was generally displeasing to us. But we explained this by saying that our scale was natural and right and that the others were antiquated, barbaric and wrong. Now we are opening our arms to the exotic scales and devising a few of our own. We have the tonal and the semi-tonal scales and we are trying to make use of the Chinese, Arabic and Hindu modes. We are producing results that sound very odd to ears that are attuned to the old-fashioned music, but our eclecticism here as elsewhere is cracking the shell of prejudice and will doubtless lead to some good end, though perhaps we can not see it yet.

How about education? In the first place there are, as I read the history of education, two main methods of training youth—the individual method and the class method. No two boys or girls are alike; no two have like reactions to the same stimulus. Each ought to have a separate teacher, for the methods to be employed must be adapted especially to the material on which we have to work. This means a separate tutor for every child.

On the other hand, the training that we give must be social—must prepare for life with and among one’s fellow beings, otherwise it is worthless. This means training in class, with and among other students, where each mind responds not to the teacher’s alone but to those of its fellow pupils.

Here are two irreconcilable requirements. In our modern systems of education we are trying to respond to them as best we may, teaching in class and at the same time giving each pupil as much personal attention as we can. The tutorial system, now employed in Princeton University, is an interesting example of our efforts as applied to the higher education.

At the same time, eclecticism in our choice of subjects is very manifest, and at times our success here seems as doubtful as our mixture of architectural styles. In the old college days, not so very long ago, Latin, Greek, and mathematics made up the curriculum. Now our boys choose from a thousand subjects grouped in a hundred courses. In our common schools we have introduced so many new subjects as to crowd the curriculum. Signs of a reaction are evident. I am alluding to the matter here only as another example of our modern passion for wide selection and for the combination of things that apparently defy amalgamation.