POCKET COMPANIONS
Encyclopedia Masonica
A Pocket Companion For Freemasons, by W. Smith; published at London in 1735 by E. Rider in Blackmore Street. A collection of songs which forms one part of this book is dated 1734. The price is not given but from other sources it is known that, unlike Anderson's Book of Constitutions, it was inexpensive, probably one shilling and six pence. The book was small (12 mo) and the author (about whom little is known) states that his design has been to produce "a small Volume easily portable, which will render what was before difficult to come at, and troublesome to carry about, of more extensive use." In it is a brief "History of Masonry" charges; General Regulations; Manner of Constituting a New Lodge; A Short Charge; a collection of 19 songs and a prologue; concluding with a List of Lodges in which the last entry is the Lodge at Duke of Marlborough's Head in Whitechapel, constituted November 5, 1734.
A Dublin edition was issued the same year. It differed little from the London edition except that it carried an approbation by the Grand Master (Lord Kingsland) which the London Edition had not done, doubtless because it was considered to encroach upon the rights of the Anderson Book of Constitutions of 1723; and that it gave "lawful age" as twenty-one instead of twenty-five as in England. In this edition is the oft-discussed entry of an American Lodge dated at 1735: "The Hoop in Wator Street, in Philadelphia, 1st Monday." (A copy of the Dublin Edition is in the vaults of the Iowa Grand Lodge Library, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)
In 1736 another issue of the London edition was published by John Torbuck. In 1738 Smith himself brought out a new and somewhat enlarged edition which included the "Defense of Masonry," believed to have been written by Martin Clare.
A North of England Edition, entitled The Book M, was published at Newcastle, in 1736. A German edition was brought out in Frankfort, 1738. Other German editions followed, and other books of a similar kind were published soon after in Belgium and France.
An edition was published in Edinburgh in 1752, and again in 1754.
A Dublin Edition; 1764. Other London editions in 1754; 1759; 1761; 1764. At this time "pocket companion" became a generic term, and for decades one work after another of a similar kind was produced until the end of the century; they were entitled Vademecum, Principles, Institutes, Repository, Practice, Musical Mason, etc.
Regardless of titles these books went by the general name of pocket companions—"pocket" because they were small, "companions" because they were reference (and song) books; and they satisfied a want felt by Masons everywhere because the Anderson Book of Constitutions was too large and too costly. (To judge by Lodge Minutes the larger number of the Anderson books must have been purchased by Lodges out of their general funds.) Until Hutchinson published his Spirit of Masonry and Preston his Illustrations they were, except for official or semi-official manuals, the only generally available Masonic reading matter, and the fact explains why it was that on both sides of the Atlantic Masons had but a meager understanding of Freemasonry and often were puzzled by its practices; yet the Pocket Books (like Old Catechisms and Engraved Lists), and for all their dryness, are invaluable because they contain essential data not found elsewhere.
NOTE. The attitude of the Grand Lodge toward the two Books of Constitutions to which the name of James Anderson was attached remained ambiguous for decades: The Grand Lodge itself ordered the book to be prepared, George Payne prepared almost half of it, yet the Grand Lodge not only put Anderson's name on the Title Page but left it to him to have the book published- and apparently the Grand Lodge never gave an all-out official endorsement to either the 1723 or the 1738 editions. If it was an official publication by the Grand Lodge why did it permit a private writer to publish it? Why did it leave it to the option of Lodges to purchase it or not? Why did it not give copies to the Lodges without charge as Grand Lodges now give Proceedings? If it was official why did the Grand Lodge permit divergent forms of ceremony to be used? And why did it suffer other, and private, publications to be used in lieu of it? If it was not Official, why did Grand Lodge sponsor it? The data as a whole gives the impression that this ambiguity was a settled policy- and in that formative period of the Grand Lodge system doubtless was a wise one.
POETRY, MASONIC
Where Masonic poetry can be found, and what Masonic poetry is, are questions answerable onlyWafter the phrase is defined. If by Masonic poetry is meant verse written by a Mason about a symbol or about the Lodge or the Ritual, there is little of it, and in Masonic literature is no poem which a literary critic of competence would recognize as a masterpiece. Rob Morris wrote a volume of Masonic verse but had the misfortune not to be a poet; and those who have followed him have had a still larger share of the same misfortune. But there is no reason to limit Masonic verse so narrowly; there are great themes in Freemasonry in addition to its Landmarks and its Rules and Regulations; great themes in its history, its teachings, its spirit. If defined in this more inclusive sense there is much Masonic poetry, and of the very highest quality; much more in fact than Masons themselves can easily believe because it has never been collected in anthologies.
Of the poetry thus more broadly defined Robert Burns is the acknowledged laureate; second after him, and not far removed, is Rudyard Kipling—both were active and earnest Masons, and each held Lodge office; and after Kipling, though at a farther remove, is Edwin Markham, who acknowledged Masonry to have been the inspiration of many of his pages. Goethe, the greatest of poets since Shakespeare, performed the almost impossible feat of writing a poem on the philosophy of the Craft in his "A Mason's Ways." If Knighthood and Crusades are included in the Masonic purview, Scott and the French and Italian epic writers wrote thousands of pages.
But it is not so much among the classics, the standard writers, or in a whole corpus of work by any one writer, that the best and largest number of Masonic poems are found, but rather as a single poem, or only one or two, here and there among hundreds of poems. Longfellow's series of sonnets on Dante are in artistic skill his masterpiece; one of them is the description of a cathedral, and of perfect beauty.
Edna Millay's masterpiece is her sonnet on "Euclid." The theme of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" is brotherhood, a brotherhood so inclusive that it gathers into its embrace animals, plants, "all things both great and small"; and the same theme animates Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a great work with an appeal in it for American Masons that our English Brethren may have difficulty in finding.
Scottish Rite Masons read Tennyson's Idylls of the Ring because in some pages those Vergilian leaves read almost like a gloss on certain of the High Grades; and the verse by Tennyson and a host of other poets on the Legend of the Holy Grail are a commentary of large and moving eloquence on the text of That Which Was Lost. And work, the Masonic theme par excellence, is being sung by a whole generation of Russian poets—and if they continue as they have begun they will yet find a way to bring the Fraternity back into their country because so many of them are Masons in spirit. And it is not to be forgotten that the oldest Masonic document in existence is itself a poem, composed in rhyme. If there were a Francis Palgrave in the Fraternity he could compile a Golden Treasury in many volumes
