Tales of the RidingsMoorman, F. W. (Frederic William)
General
Tales of the Ridings
Moorman, F. W. (Frederic William)
Yorkshire (England) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
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)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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