THE BUILDER DECEMBER 1926

The Background of Masonic History in the 18th Century
By PROF. E. E. BOOTHROYD, Canada

THIS second article by Prof. Boothroyd is even more interesting
than the first one which appeared in the April number of The
Builder. Masonic students are often led to misinterpret the early
historical records of the Craft owing to their neglect of outside
current events of the time. In this article the author gives a
vivid picture of a restless and disturbed transition period.

AS an appreciation of the general aspect of the early eighteenth
century supplies an answer to the questions why Masonry should have
been reorganized at that particular time, and why that
reorganization should have centered at London; so a knowledge of
the conditions of life and thought--the atmosphere of the times--
will account for the nature of that reorganization and the new
direction given to the activities of the institution. The medieval
craft guild was an organization developed in a particular state of
society to supply the needs of, and perform certain functions
necessary in, that particular condition of society. With the change
from medieval to modern life those needs were no longer or were
differently felt, those functions no longer necessary or
transferred to other institutions. The raison d'etre of the
craft-guild had therefore vanished, and the institution was faced
with the alternative of itself vanishing with the conditions which
had given it life, or adapting itself to its changed environment
and remodelling itself to supply needs of, and perform functions
requisite under the new regime.

To the outside observer, the craft-guild of the middle ages would
seem to have had a four-fold function--economic, eleemosynary,
religious and social. It determined the conditions of production,
arranged for the support of the sick, needy and bereaved within its
ranks, played its part in the all pervasive religious activity of
the age by the maintenance of chantries or the care of special
portions of religious edifices, catered to the gregarious instinct
of humanity by its guild banquets and so forth, and, in that
borderland where religious and social activities intermingle and
where today the Women's Auxiliaries and Young Men's Christian
Association play their parts, arranged for the production of
Miracle and Mystery Plays at the great festival of Corpus Christi.
Of most of these functions it had been deprived by the political,
economic and religious changes which transformed medieval into
modern society. The regulation of industrial conditions had been
taken over by Parliament, and the relief of the indigent devolved
upon the parochial system; the Reformation had swept away the
chantries and simplified religious ceremonial; the birth of the
true drama and the consequent rise of professional actors and
permanent theatres had superseded the Miracle and Mystery and the
waggon-stage or "pageant" on which they had been performed by the
guilds. The social instinct, that craving of men to meet and
associate with their fellows, alone remained of all those medieval
needs which had been supplied by the organization of the
craft-guild. This social instinct is not, however, satisfied by the
mere act of assembling together except in such imaginary cases as
the Hum-Drum Club described by Addison "made up of very honest
gentlemen, of peaceable dispositions, that used to sit together,
smoke their pipes and say nothing till midnight." There must be
some definite reason for the assemblage, some common occupation for
those assembled together. Moreover, if the institution is to become
popular and acquire wide influence, this reason and this occupation
must be in harmony with the thoughts and feelings of society as a
whole. Hence the necessity, for a true understanding of the
reorganization of the Masonic Craft in the eighteenth century, of
a familiarity with the character of the age, a knowledge of the
thoughts, feelings, ideals, and longings of the time in conformity
with which the institution must have been reshaped and its
activities redirected.

There is only one way in which such a knowledge and understanding
of eighteenth century atmosphere can be acquired, the way pointed
out by Taine in the well-known passage, "a literary work is not a
mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited
brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the
sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived
from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the
way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago." To steep
oneself in eighteenth century literature, to saturate the mind and
emotions with the Tatler and Spectator essays, the poems of Pope
and the Beggar's Opera, with the letters of Chesterfield, the
sermons of John and the hymns of Charles Wesley, with the satires
of Swift and the novels of Fielding, is the only method of reaching
a sympathetic comprehension of the state of mind and feeling of the
men who founded the Grand Lodge and remodeled the Masonic Craft.

The first impression derived from contact with the writers of the
period is one of a predominant materialism. The men and women of
the time seem wrapped up in the things of this world, dead to all
calls and interests of a higher nature. Drunkenness and sensuality
are rampant. Gin has recently been discovered and the inn-keepers
inform the public that one can "get drunk for a penny, dead-drunk
for two-pence;" while the story that George II's daughter remarked,
when his dapper majesty's immediate fancy appeared to be losing the
royal favour, that she hoped he would soon take another mistress,
so that things would be easier for her mother, throws a glaring
light on the moral sensibility of society. And, work of genius
though it is, there is a strain of coarseness and brutality in Tom
Jones that makes the modern reader feel the need of a moral and
social wash and brush-up after the perusal of Fielding's
masterpiece. Nor does the political life of the day afford a more
edifying spectacle. Walpole has systematized the parliamentary
bribery and corruption begun in the reign of Charles II., and can
say of a noisy group of Opposition members, "Each of those men has
his price;" while the ministers of the Hanoverian sovereign are
corresponding with the Pretender at st. Germains and assuring him
of their devotion to his interests, with a cynical disregard of
their oaths of office and allegiance. In religious affairs the
spectacle of a Dean of St. Patrick's basing his opposition to the
abolition of Christianity on the argument that it "might have a
detrimental effect on the emoluments of the Anglican clergy," is
not suggestive of a high level of religious thought and feeling.
Such a period of materialism and coarse pleasure-seeking is,
however, what the student of history would expect at this stage in
view of the natural reactions of human character and of society.
After a prolonged period of religious and idealistic activity, of
political and ecclesiastical strife, such as that of the
Reformation and the religious and constitutional struggles of the
seventeenth century, it was almost inevitable that men should relax
their moral and emotional tension and abandon themselves to the
business and pleasure of the world. This reaction had begun at the
Restoration, as those familiar with Pepys' Diary will realize as
they recall the passages in which the distinguished Admiralty
official relates how, feeling something hard in an envelope handed
him by one to whom he had done an official favour, he shut his eyes
while he shook out the coins, that he might swear he saw no money
in the letter when he opened it; or how he desisted from his
attempt to hold a strange, but apparently attractive, lady's hand
in church when "I did perceive that she took a pin out of her
pocket to prick me if I did persist." And the materialistic
reaction thus begun continued well into the eighteenth century.

But a wider and deeper acquaintance with the literature of the time
will show that this condition of materialism, sensuality and
disregard of religion and honour is not the only aspect of the age.
Under the stagnant and noisome surface of the water there is
movement and life of a very different character, germinating and
developing, awaiting the time when the natural tendency to reaction
should bring it in its turn to the top, to dissipate the
accumulated scum of moral and emotional sluggishness, and stir the
waters to new life and energy. The degradation into which the
reaction against the narrow Puritan morality of the kingless decade
had plunged society under Charles II. had produced a natural
revulsion of feeling. Even at the height of Caroline license we
find Pepys recording his wish that Charles would leave his
mistresses and devote himself to the business of the nation, and
his disgust at the venality and pleasure-seeking of high officials;
and at the close of the century Jeremy Collier publishes his rebuke
of the grossness of the Restoration drama in the famous "Short view
of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English stage." With the
beginning of the eighteenth century we can note the strengthening
of the moral reaction in the work of nearly every writer of
importance. The satires of Swift may have been, nay, they almost
certainly were, merely the expression of the author's savage scorn
of the pettiness of human nature; but in the pages of Addison and
Steele, of Richardson and Fielding, may be traced a profound belief
in the real soundness of mankind, and a desire to promote the
triumph of morality and common sense over the evil and folly into
which the Caroline reaction had led. Addison, Steele and Richardson
wrote with a purpose, and if Fielding was drawn into novel writing
merely by the desire of a robust human being to mock at the anemic
sensibility of his predecessor Richardson, it is easy to discern
beneath his superficial coarseness a sane healthy view of life and
character. The creator of Parson Adams and Amelia was no Caroline
reprobate or approver of the Rochesters and Sedleys of life. 

The general aspect of the early eighteenth century as revealed in
its literary record is thus of a two-fold character. On the one
hand is a dominant materialism and somewhat cynical immorality; on
the other, a clearly-marked moral and social revulsion against the
evil tendencies of the age. By one or other of these
characteristics the reorganization of Masonry must surely have been
influenced. The Institution must have been regarded by those who
were remodeling its form and reshaping its activities, either as a
means of securing the cakes and ale of life, or of subserving the
higher aims of man. But the general condition of the age could only
affect the general tone of the Craft; the details of the
reorganization must have been influenced by the particular
currents, tendencies and activities of the time.

On these contemporary interests and activities few works of the
period throw a greater light than those daily essays which Addison,
Steele and Budgell published as the reflections of Mr. Spectator
and the real or fictitious letters of his correspondents. Dependent
on their sales to meet the expenses of publication and provide
remuneration for their literary labours, the essayists must have
sought to appeal to the interests of as wide a clientele as
possible, and the immediate and extensive popularity of the paper
testifies to the success which attended their efforts. A leisurely
perusal, then, of the eight volumes into which the daily Spectator
essays were finally collected--"leisurely," for that was the
character of the age--will serve as a substitute for Mr. H. G.
Wells' Time-Machine, transport the reader two centuries back into
the past, and enable him to breathe the atmosphere of the
eighteenth century; while an examination of the topics discussed
and the method in which they are handled will afford a clue to
those public tastes and interests to which the Masonic reformers
must, in their sphere, have conformed.

Perhaps the first characteristic that will attract such a reader's
attention will be the social aspect of the age. It was during this
epoch that "Society" was born in England. Now "Society" is one of
those nebulous words the exact meaning of which it is not easy to
realize, still less easy to express. Included in the content of the
meaning is, however, a centripetal tendency on the part of the
individual members of the community, a tendency to gather together,
especially in the leisure moments of life--which aspect of the
meaning will explain how the term "Society" comes to be applied to
that section of the community which is not under the necessity of
daily toil to secure the means of subsistence; the prominence of
the fair sex in this "Society ;" and, incidentally, why lodge
meetings are generally held in the evening, when "man resteth from
his labours." Further, the idea of "Society" implies the
formulation of rules and regulations for behaviour and even for
costume at these social gatherings, and eventually on all
occasions. This course of action is the proper one, the other thing
"isn't done." It is "correct" to wear a black tie with evening
dress on this occasion, a white tie on that. In the little matter
of expectoration, I have somewhere read that Queen Elizabeth
expressed her annoyance with a certain gentleman in biblical
fashion by spitting upon his richly embroidered costume
(corroboration may be afforded by a well-known passage in
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice). In the reign of Charles II.
Samuel Pepys records in his diary the fact that entering the
playhouse late and sitting in a back and dark seat, a "lady" did
spit upon him over her shoulder, which action, the lady proving
well-favoured, he seems to have taken in good part and made use of
as a sort of introduction. Today Society proclaims the impropriety
of the public performance of this ancient rite in neatly printed
injunctions in street cars and railway carriages. The regulation
and organization of social conduct and social activities in the
eighteenth century is humorously brought out in those Spectator
essays which deal with fashions of dress, coiffure and facial
decoration, with the habit of "staring" and the Masquerade, and the
suggestion that tatting might form a suitable occupation for idle
young "men about town." This rise of "Society," with its regulation
of costumes, behaviour and taste on this, that, and the other
occasion, was an all-pervasive condition of the time which must
have been in the thoughts and influenced the actions of the
gentlemen of the Goose and Gridiron.

Connected with this general development of society and social life,
and the organization of the leisure activities of the individual is
the rise, within society at large, of particular groupings for
particular purposes, the formation of numerous clubs on which
Addison dilates in Number 9 of the Spectator. "Man," says the
essayist, "is said to be a social animal, and, as an instance of
it, we may observe, that we take all occasions and pretenses of
forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies, which are
commonly known by the name of clubs." The evolution of the club at
this time in London from the gathering of men with common interests
at particular taverns and coffeehouses is one of the most
interesting features of the time, and its novelty and importance
are attested, not only by its treatment in this particular essay,
and in countless contemporary references, but also by the fact that
the authors founded a fictitious "Spectator Club" to direct the
publication and discuss the topics to be treated and the method in
which they should be handled.

Originating in London, the institution spread throughout the land,
a fact which bears witness to another prominent feature of the
period, the change in the position of the capital city, and the
growth of the conception of London, not as A town, or even THE
town, but as TOWN; as something distinct from other urban
aggregations not merely in size, but in character. With the
development of organic nationality the need of a brain and heart to
direct national action and pump the blood of life to all parts of
the trunk and limbs of the body national was supplied by this
change in the view of London which was held by Londoner and
provincial alike, and in the relation of the city to the rest of
the country. Society needed a central seat, an arbiter
elegantiai-um or dictator of form and fashion; a critic of life in
all its varied activities; and this London now supplied. What was
worn in "town" was the question in the minds and on the lips
of-all; how the day was spent; what London thought of this or that.
And as one realizes this fact one appreciates how the formation of
a Grand Lodge at London--the center of the national nervous system-
- would be felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, and
the fashions and activities of that central body adopted and copied
by gatherings in provincial centers.

Into the life of this newly-realized "society" had come an interest
which, as a source of social grouping and social activity, a topic
of meal-time and salon conversation, had, perhaps, lain dormant
since the decline of Athenian democracy--the interest of politics.
Political activity, the determination of policy and the conduct of
government, had not, of course, ceased from the fall of the
violet-crowned queen of the Aegean to the times of Anne and George
I; but at Rome and during the middle ages the tendency had been for
government to be left in the hands of a small number of sovereigns,
nobles and officials, and, except when conditions became
intolerable, ignored by the mass of the population as something
outside their sphere and perhaps beyond their comprehension. When
Edward III asked the advice of Parliament on a matter of foreign
politics the Commons humbly begged to be excused from speaking on
"matters too great for their poor wits", and when the Lower House
did presume to offer advice on foreign policy under James I the
king angrily forbade them to "meddle with mysteries of state too
high for them." With the triumph of Parliament over the Crown and
the rise of the party-system in the reign of Charles II, a change
came over the scene and politics, in the modern meaning of the
term, were born. Questions of war, peace and alliance, the actions
of foreign rulers and ministers, and matters of domestic policy
became staples of conversation. The Spectator tells of the
coffee-house Solons who knew and canvassed the minds and aims of
foreign statesmen, and of ladies who showed their party leanings by
the side of the face on which they wore their patches; while the
rise of Addison himself from poverty and obscurity to the position
of Secretary of state through his ability as a party-pamphleteer
bears witness to the rise of that public opinion on matters
political and the importance to the politician of securing its
favor which gave us the daily press. Here was a condition of
affairs which must have entered into the minds and calculations of
the Masonic reformers. Just when those religious differences which
had sharply divided Englishmen in the seventeenth century had been
composed by the Toleration Act, a new element of division had
arisen in politics, as the breach in the lifelong friendship of
Addison and Steel over the Peerage Bill shows. For this new
interest allowance must be made. Politics must be one of the
activities of the Order, or the notice "No Admission for Politics"
must be inscribed over the entrance to the Masonic Lodge.

The earlier part of the seventeenth century had been a period of
emotional activity. Men had felt strongly and deeply, as the
character of contemporary literature shows. The Caroline Age is the
great lyric epoch of English literary history, the time of Herbert
and Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace and Carew, and song is an appeal to
the emotions; while even the prose of the period assumes a
semi-poetic form, appealing to the heart rather than to the brain,
as a hundred ringing phrases from Milton's prose-works in the vein
of the oft-quoted lines from the Areopagitica, "I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue," or "There be delights, there be
recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from
sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream,"
will testify. Cromwell, the heroic character of the age, was a man
of deep feeling, revealed in passionate championship of the poor
and oppressed, the ever-recurring outburst in his letters to the
Speaker, "sir, this was none other than the hand of God," and the
fact that his own death was hastened at the loss of his daughter.
With the reign of Charles II the brain begins to take precedence of
the heart. Men begin to think rather than to feel. And, in spite of
such outbursts of popular passion as those which marked the Popish
Plot and the Sacheverell Trial, the emotional fires die down. The
new age is characterized by great critical and speculative
activity. The founding of the Royal Society in the reign of Charles
II, and the part played therein by men who were not professed or
professional savants, by admiralty officials like Pepys and country
gentlemen like Evelyn, each of whom became its President, reveal
the intellectual curiosity which was one of the dominant notes of
the time, and which is summed up in the life and work of Sir Isaac
Newton. It was at this epoch, as Professor Bury points out in his
"Idea of Progress," that the all-important conception of the onward
and upward movement of mankind was fully grasped; that men began to
think of Paradise, not as in Milton's epic as in the remote past,
but in the remote future; of the changes in human conditions as
development along a line, an undulating line, maybe, leading into
valleys as well as on to heights, but not the round and round a
circle process, from Golden Age to Golden Age and then round once
more, which it had appeared to the ancient Greek. How widely and
strongly this critical and speculative interest was felt is
demonstrated by the nature of those Spectator essays which were
designed as their authors stated, not for the philosopher's closet
and the schools, but to form a part of the tea-equipage of every
well-appointed table. The daily sheets of Addison and Steele
provide for the entertainment of that social hour a critical survey
of life in all its varied aspects and activities; their readers are
invited to reflect upon dress and superstition, upon the character
of the Italian Opera and its suitability to English taste, on
grinning, staring, the use of cosmetics, the construction of an
epic and the character of the ballad. The essays on True and False
Wit, on Chevy Chase and Paradise Lost carry on that English
literary criticism which, in any real sense, was born in the
Prefaces of Dryden. Masons may find something suggestive in the
constant description of their writings by the essayists as
"Speculations". The same phenomenon of the critical and speculative
occupation of social leisure meets us at a little later date in the
pages of Boswell's Johnson, in the constant series of questions
which elicited the sage's dicta on a hundred and one subjects from
the winter habitat of swallows to the credibility of Christian
evidence.

As the subject-matter of contemporary literature reveals the
interests and activities of an age, so do its form and style
reflect its general character and attitude to life. Now it has been
held, and in the main truly held, of the writers of this age, that
the matter of their works was subordinated to the form, that what
was said mattered less than how it was said, and that their creed
was accurately stated in Pope's well-known lines:

True art is nature to advantage dressed, 
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

The inference is that the age of Anne and the early Georges was a
formal age in which attention was directed chiefly to externals,
and the inference is borne out by the very suggestive letters of
Lord Chesterfield to his son, directing the latter's attention to
details of dress and behavior and reminding him that his
dancing-master was the most important personage in the formative
period of his life. Consideration of form and ceremonial, of the
correct way of doing things, must therefore have occupied much of
the thought of the men and women of the eighteenth century. And
this was natural in view of the material and social aspect of the
age. But as in the case of the dominant materialism and
pleasure-seeking of the period allowance had to be made for a
contradictory current of moral feeling, so this view of the
formalism and objectivity of eighteenth century literature requires
some qualification. In his "Beginnings of the English Romantic
Movement" Professor Phelps has drawn attention to the existence
from the earliest years of the century of a sub-current of romantic
thought and writing flowing against the main stream of classical
"Augustan" literature, and revealed in the work of such writers as
Croxall, Lady Winchelsea, Parnell, Ramsay and Thomson. Here, then,
is a minor subjective and mystic phase of life and thought, to some
extent qualifying the dominant externalism and objectivity, and
perhaps revealed in even so classical an artist as Addison in those
Oriental tales and allegories which were so popular with the
readers of the Spectator.

Such, in very brief and imperfect outline, were the character, the
interests and activities of the early eighteenth century as
revealed in the literature of the age. In such an atmosphere of
materialism and sensuality tempered by the rise of a moral feeling,
of social and political life organized in clubs and parties, of
formalism and ceremonial slightly tinctured With mysticism, of
intense intellectual, critical and speculative activity, with their
minds and feelings permeated and their actions predetermined by
some at least of these interests and characteristics, the fathers
of modern Freemasonry met at the Goose and Gridiron in London, that
"town" which had become the center of the national nervous system,
to inaugurate the first Grand Lodge.

