Tales of the Ridings | Page 4

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