Frederic Moorman came of a stock which, on both sides, had struck deep roots in the soil of Devon. His father's family, which is believed to have sprung ultimately from "either Cornwall or Scotland"—a sufficiently wide choice, it may be thought—had for many generations been settled in the county.(1) His mother's—her maiden name was Mary Honywill—had for centuries held land at Widdicombe and the neighbourhood, in the heart of Dartmoor. He was born on 8th September 1872, at Ashburton, where his father, the Rev. A. C. Moorman, was Congregational minister; and for the first ten years of his life he was brought up on the skirts of the moor to which his mother's family belonged: drinking in from the very first that love of country sights and sounds which clove to him through life, and laying the foundation of that close knowledge of birds and flowers which was an endless source of delight to him in after years, and which made him so welcome a companion in a country walk with any friend who shared his love of such things but who, ten to one, could make no pretence whatever to his knowledge.

In 1882, his father was appointed to the ministry of the Congregational Church at Stonehouse, in Gloucestershire; and Frederic began his formal schooling at the Wyclif Preparatory School in that place. The country round Stonehouse—a country of barish slopes and richly wooded valleys—is perhaps hardly so beautiful as that which he had left and whose memory he never ceased to cherish. But it has a charm all its own, and the child of Dartmoor had no great reason to lament his removal to the grey uplands and "golden valleys" of the Cotswolds.

His next change must have seemed one greatly for the worse. In 1884 he was sent to the school for the sons of Congregational ministers at Caterham; and the Cotswolds, with their wide outlook over the Severn estuary to May Hill and the wooded heights beyond, were exchanged for the bald sweep and the white chalk-pits of the North Downs. These too have their unique beauty; but I never remember to have heard Moorman say anything which showed that he felt it as those who have known such scenery from boyhood might have expected him to do.

After some five years at Caterham, he began his academical studies at University College, London; but, on the strength of a scholarship, soon removed to University College, Aberystwyth (1890), where the scenery—sea, heron-haunted estuaries, wooded down to the very shore, and hills here and there rising almost into mountains—offered surroundings far more congenial to him than the streets and squares of Bloomsbury.

In these new surroundings, he seems to have been exceptionally happy, throwing himself into all the interests of the place, athletic as well as intellectual, and endearing himself both to his teachers and his fellow-students. His friendship with Professor Herford, then Professor of English at Aberystwyth, was one of the chief pleasures of his student days as well as of his after life. Following his natural bent, he decided to study for Honours in English Language and Literature, and at the end of his course (1893) was placed in the Second Class by the examiners for the University of London, to which the Aberystwyth College was at that time affiliated. Those who believe in the virtue of infant prodigies—and, in the country which invented Triposes and Class Lists, it is hard to fix any limit to their number—will be distressed to learn that, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge of such matters, he was not at that time reckoned to be of "exceptionally scholarly calibre." Perhaps this was an omen all the better for his future prospects as a scholar.

It is a wholesome practice that, when the cares of examinations are once safely behind him, a student should widen his experience by a taste of foreign travel. Accordingly, in September, 1893, Moorman betook himself to Strasbourg, primarily for the sake of continuing his studies under the skilful guidance of Ten Brinck. The latter, however, was almost at once called to Berlin and succeeded by Brandl, now himself of the University of Berlin, who actually presided over Moorman's studies for the next two years, and who thought, and never ceased to think, very highly both of his abilities and his acquirements. It was only natural that Moorman should make a pretty complete surrender to German ideals and German methods of study. It was equally natural that, in the light of subsequent experience, his enthusiasms in that line should suffer a considerable diminution. He was not of the stuff to accept for ever the somewhat bloodless and barren spirit which has commonly dominated the pursuit of literature in German universities.

Into the social life of his new surroundings he threw himself with all the zest that might have been expected from his essentially sociable nature: making many friendships—that of Brandl was the one he most valued—and joining—in some respects, leading—his fellow-students in their sports and other amusements. His first published work, in fact, was a translation of the Rules of Association Football into German; and he may fairly be regarded as the godfather of that game on German soil. Nor was this the end of his activities. During the two years he spent at Strasbourg he acted as Lektor in English to the University, so gaining—and gaining, it is said, with much success—his first experience in what was to be his life's work as a teacher.

On the completion of his course at Strasbourg, where he obtained the degree of Ph.D. in June 1895,(2) he returned to Aberystwyth, now no longer as student but as Lecturer in the English Language and Literature under his friend and former teacher, Professor Herford. There he remained for a little over two years (September, 1895, to January, 1898), gradually increasing his stores of knowledge and strengthening the foundations of the skill which was afterwards to serve him in good stead as a teacher. During that time he also became engaged to the sister of one of his colleagues, Miss Frances Humpidge, whom he had known for some years and whose love was to be the chief joy and support of his after life.

As a matter of prudence, the marriage was postponed until his prospects should be better assured. The opportunity came sooner than could have been expected. In January, 1898, he was appointed to the lectureship in his subject—a subject, such is our respect for literature, then first handed over to an independent department—in the Yorkshire College at Leeds; and in August of the same year he was married. Four children, three of whom survived and the youngest of whom was twelve at the time of his death, were born during the earlier years of the marriage.

The life of a teacher offers little excitement to the onlooker; and all that can be done here is to give a slight sketch of the various directions in which Moorman's energies went out. The first task that lay before him was to organise the new department which had been put into his hands, to make English studies a reality in the college to which he had been called, to give them the place which they deserve to hold in the life of any institution devoted to higher education. Into this task he threw himself with a zeal which can seldom, if ever, have been surpassed. Within six years he had not only put the teaching of his subject to Pass Students upon a satisfactory basis; he had also laid the foundations of an Honours School able to compete on equal terms with those of the other colleges which were federated in the then Victoria University of the north. It was a really surprising feat for so young a man—he was little over twenty-five when appointed—to have accomplished in so short a time; the more so as he was working single-handed: in other words, was doing unaided the work, both literary and linguistic, which in other colleges was commonly distributed between two or three. And I speak with intimate knowledge when I say that the Leeds students who presented themselves for their Honours Degree at the end of that time bore every mark of having been most thoroughly and efficiently prepared.

In 1904, six years after Moorman's appointment to the lectureship, the Yorkshire College was reconstituted as a separate and independent university, the University of Leeds; and in the rearrangement which followed, an older man was invited to come in as official chief of the department for which Moorman had hitherto been solely responsible. This invitation was not accepted until Moorman had generously made it clear that the proposed appointment would not be personally unwelcome to him. Nevertheless, it was clearly an invidious position for the new-comer: and a position which, but for the exceptional generosity and loyalty of the former chief of the department, would manifestly have been untenable. In fact, no proof of Moorman's unselfishness could be more conclusive than that, for the nine years during which the two men worked together, the harmony between them remained unbroken, untroubled by even the most passing cloud. Near the close of this time, in recognition of his distinction as a scholar and of his great services to the University, a separate post, as Professor of the English Language, was created for him.

During the whole of his time at Leeds, his knowledge of his subject, both on its literary and linguistic side, was constantly deepening and his efficiency, as teacher of it, constantly increasing. With so keen a mind as his, this was only to be expected. It was equally natural that, as his knowledge expanded and his advice came to be more and more sought by those engaged in the study of such matters, he should make the results of his researches known to a wider public. After several smaller enterprises of this kind,(3) he broke entirely fresh ground with two books, which at once established his right to be heard in both the fields for which he was professionally responsible: Yorkshire Place Names, published for and by the Thoresby Society in 1911; and a study of the life and poetry of Robert Herrick, two years later. The former, if here and there perhaps not quite rigorous enough in the tests applied to the slippery evidence available, is in all essentials a most solid piece of work: based on a wide and sound knowledge of the linguistic principles which, though often grossly neglected, form the corner-stone, and something more, of all such inquiries; and lit up with a keen eye for the historical issues—issues reaching far back into national origins which, often in the most unexpected places, they may be made to open out. The latter, to which he turned with the more zest because it led him back to the familiar setting of his native county—to its moors and rills and flowers, and the fairy figures that haunted them—is a delightful study of one of the most unique of English poets(4); a study, however, which could only have been written by one who, among many other things, was a thorough-paced scholar. Many qualities—knowledge, scholarship, love of nature, a discerning eye for poetic beauty—go to the making of such a book. Their union in this Study serves to show that, great as was Moorman's authority in the field of language, it was always to literature, above all to poetry, that his heart went naturally out. The closing years of his life were to set this beyond doubt.

It would be absurd to close this sketch of Moorman's professional activities without a reference, however slight, to what was, after all, one of the most significant things about them. No man can, in the full sense, be a teacher unless, in some way or other, he throws himself into the life and interests of his students. And it was among the secrets—perhaps the chief secret—of Moorman's influence as a teacher that, so far from being mere names in a register, his students were to him always young people of flesh and blood, in whose interests he could share, whose companion he delighted to be, and who felt that they could turn to him for advice and sympathy as often as they were in need. No doubt his own youthfulness of temper, the almost boyish spirits which seldom or never flagged in him, helped greatly to this result; but the true fountain of it all lay in his ingrained unselfishness. The same power was to make itself felt among the classes for older students which he held in the last years of his life.

To fulfil all these academical duties in the liberal spirit, which was the only spirit possible to Moorman, might well have been expected to exhaust the energies of any man. Yet, amidst them all, he found time to take part, both as lecturer and as trusted adviser, in the activities of the Workers' Educational Association, attending summer meetings and, during the last five or six winters of his life, delivering weekly lectures and taking part in the ensuing discussions, at Crossgates, one of the outlying suburbs of Leeds. To the students who there, year by year, gathered round him he greatly endeared himself by his power of understanding their difficulties and of presenting great poetry in a way that came home to their experience and imagination. His growing sympathy with the life of homestead and cottage made this a work increasingly congenial to him; and, as a lecturer, he was perhaps never so happy, in all senses of the word, as when, released from the "idols of the lecture-room," he was seeking to awake, or keep alive, in others that love of imaginative beauty which counted for so much in his own life and in his discharge of the daily tasks that fell upon him: speaking freely and from his heart to men and women more or less of his own age and his own aspirations; "mingling leadership and camaraderie in the happy union so characteristic of him," and "drawing out the best endeavours of his pupils by his modest, quietly effective methods of teaching and, above all, by his great, quiet, human love for each and all."(5)

It is clear that such work, however delightful to him, meant a considerable call upon his time and strength: the more so as it went hand in hand with constant labours on behalf of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, for which he was the most indefatigable of travellers—cycling his way into dale after dale in search of "records"—and of which, on the death of his friend, Mr Philip Unwin, he eventually became president. Nor was this all. During the last seven years or so of his life the creative impulse, the need of embodying his own life and the lives of those around him in imaginative form was constantly growing upon him, and a wholly new horizon was opening before him.

At first he may have thought of nothing more than to produce plays suitable for performance either by the students of the University or by young people in those Yorkshire dales with which his affections were becoming year by year increasingly bound up. But, whatever the occasion, it soon proved to be no more than an occasion. He swiftly found that imaginative expression not only came naturally to him, but was a deep necessity of his nature; that it gave a needed outlet to powers and promptings which had hitherto lain dormant and whose very existence was unsuspected by his friends, perhaps even by himself. The May King, Potter Thompson, the adaptation of the Second Shepherds' Play from the fifteenth-century Towneley Mysteries followed each other in swift succession; and the two first have, or will shortly have, been performed either by University students or by school children of "the Ridings."(6) This is not the place to attempt any critical account of them. But there are few readers who will not have been struck by the simplicity with which the themes—now pathetic, now humorous, now romantic—are handled, and by the easy unconsciousness with which the Professor wears his "singing robes."

The same qualities, perhaps in a yet higher degree, appear in the dialect poems, written during the last three years of his life: Songs of the Ridings. The inspiration of these was less literary; they sprang straight from the soil and from his own heart. It was, no doubt, a scholarly instinct which first turned his mind in this direction: the desire of one who had studied the principles of the language and knew every winding of its historical origins to trace their working in the daily speech of the present. He has told us so himself, and we may readily believe it. But, if he first came to the dales as learner and scholar, he soon found his way back as welcome visitor and friend. The more he saw of the dalesmen, the more his heart went out to them: the more readily, as if by an inborn instinct, did he enter into their manner of life, their mood and temper, their way of meeting the joys and sorrows brought by each day as it passed. And so it was that the scholar's curiosity, which had first carried him thither, rapidly gave way to a feeling far deeper and more human. His interest in forms of speech and fine shades of vowelling fell into the background; a simple craving for friendly intercourse, inspired by a deep sense of human brotherhood, took its place. And Songs of the Ridings(7) is the spontaneous outgrowth of the fresh experience and the ever-widening sympathies which had come to him as a man. The same is true of Tales of the Ridings, published for the first time in the following pages.

The last five years of his life (1914-1919) had, to him as to others, been years of unusual stress. Disqualified for active service, he had readily undertaken the extra work entailed by the departure of his younger colleagues for the war. He had also discharged the semi-military duties, such as acting on guard against enemy aircraft, which fell within his powers; and, both on the outskirts of Leeds and round his Lytton Dale cottage, he had devoted all the time he could spare to allotment work, so as to take his share—it was, in truth, much more than his share—in increasing the yield of the soil. All this, with a host of miscellaneous duties which he voluntarily shouldered, had put an undue strain upon his strength. Yet, with his usual buoyancy, he had seemed to stand it all without flagging; and even when warned by the army medical authorities that his heart showed some weakness, he had paid little heed to the warning, had certainly in no way allowed it either to interfere with his various undertakings or to prey upon his spirits.

The Armistice naturally brought some relief. Among other things, it opened the prospect of the return of his colleagues and a considerable lightening both of his professional and of his manifold civic duties. He was, moreover, much encouraged—as a man of his modest, almost diffident, nature was bound to be—by the recognition which Songs of the Ridings had brought from every side: not least from the dalesmen, for whom and under whose inspiration they were written. And all his friends rejoiced to think that a new and brighter horizon seemed opening before him. Those who saw him during these last months thought that he had never been so buoyant. They felt that a new hope and a new confidence had entered into his life.

These hopes were suddenly cut off. He had passed most of August and the first week of September (1919) at his cottage in Lytton Dale, keeping the morning of his birthday (8th September), as he always delighted to do, with his wife and children. In the afternoon he went down to bathe in the river, being himself an excellent swimmer, and wishing to teach his two younger children an art in which he had always found health and keen enjoyment. He swam across the pool and called on his daughter to follow him. Noticing that she was in some difficulty, he jumped in again to help her, but suddenly sank to the bottom, and was never seen alive again. An angler ran up to help from a lower reach of the stream, and brought the girl safely to land. Then, for the first time learning that her father had sunk, he dived and dived again in the hope of finding him before it was too late. But the intense cold of the water baffled all his efforts, and the body was not recovered until some hours later. It is probable that the chill of the pool had caused a sudden failure of Moorman's heart—a heart already weakened by the excessive strain of the last few years—and it is little likely that, after he had once sunk, he could ever have been saved.

The death of Moorman called forth expressions of grief and of grateful affection, so strong and so manifestly sincere as to bring something of surprise even to his closest friends. Much more surprising would they have been to himself. They came from every side, from lettered and unlettered, from loom and dale, from school and university. Nothing could prove more clearly how strong was the hold he had won upon all who knew him, how large the place he filled in the heart of his colleagues and the county of his adoption. It was a fitting tribute to a literary achievement of very distinctive originality. It was also, and above all, a tribute, heartfelt and irrepressible, to the charm of a singularly bright and winning spirit: to a life which had spent itself, without stint and without one thought of self, in the service of others.

Endnotes (were footnotes):

(1) To this family is believed to have belonged John Moreman, Canon and eventually Dean of Exeter (though he died, October, 1554, "before he was presented to the Deanery"), of whom an account will be found in Prince's Worthies of Devon (ed. 1701, pp. 452-453), as well as in Wood's Athenoe and Fasti Oxonienses and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. He was "the first in those days to teach his parishioners to say the Lord's Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments in the English tongue" (whether the contrast is with Latin or Cornish, for he was then Vicar of Menynhed, in East Cornwall, does not appear). He was imprisoned, as a determined Catholic, in Edward VI.'s reign, but "enlarged under Queen Mary, with whom he grew into very great favour," and was chosen to defend the doctrine of Transubstantiation before the Convocation of 1553.

(2) His thesis for this degree, on The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare, was published in 1905.

(3) He published editions of The Faithful Shepherdess, The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1897, and an elaborately critical edition of Herrick's Poems, in completion of his Study, in 1915. He also contributed the chapter on "Shakespeare's Apocrypha" to the Cambridge History of English Literature; and for many years acted as English editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch.

(4) Dean Bourne, the parish to which Herrick was not very willingly wedded, is within five miles of Ashburton, Moorman's birthplace.

(5) The words in inverted commas are quoted from the records of the Class, kindly communicated by the secretary, Mr Hind. It is difficult to imagine anything stronger than the expressions of affectionate respect which recur again and again in them. I add one more, from the pen which wrote the second quotation: "So quiet, yet so pervading, was his love that each felt the individual tie; and our class, so diverse in spirit, thought and training, has never heard or uttered an angry word. We felt it would be acting disloyally to hurt anyone whom he loved."

(6) The May King, written in 1913, has been twice acted by school children, once in the open air, once in the large hall of the University. Potter Thompson, written in 1911-1912, was acted by students of the University in 1913 and is at present in rehearsal for acting by pupils of the Secondary School of Halifax. The Towneley Shepherds' Play was acted with slight modifications by University students, under Moorman's guidance, in 1907. His adaptation of it, written in 1919, has not yet been acted, but was written in the hope that some day it might be. It may be added that he was largely responsible for a very successful performance of Fletcher's Elder Brother by the University students in 1908.

(7) First published serially in The Yorkshire Weekly Post of 1917-1918.